Authors: Maren Smith
“Marshall Leaf,” he’d finally managed. “My name. It’s Marshall Leaf.” Slowly, he’d touched her passion-swollen lips, caressed the curve of them. Even more slowly, he’d let her go—
This isn’t a love match.
—and then he’d just…walked away.
At least now she could leave knowing the name of the man who had touched her so deeply.
The room began to swim behind a sheen of fast-rising tears. Kaylee blinked them back, catching the one that managed to escape on the backs of her fingers before it got halfway down her cheek. The Castle had delivered exactly what it promised: the vacation of a lifetime. Nothing more, nothing less. She was determined to have no regrets.
It was time to go.
Kaylee gathered her bag and bid the empty room and all it represented a silent goodbye. She met up with other departing guests in the hall and fell into step with them, gradually absorbing others and forming a small departing army as they made their way across the courtyard toward two waiting buses.
“This was the best trip ever!” a familiar voice squealed, and before Kaylee could turn around, Selena came bouncing up behind her. Grabbing her arm, she gave Kaylee a happy hug. “I’m so glad we’re going home at the same time. Oh my God, my ass is so sore. I need the commiseration!” Selena pulled back far enough to grin at her and then did a slight double-take, her smile beginning to fade. “Wow. No offense, but you look…really sad.”
Kaylee tried to smile, but that felt like such an understatement. She wished she could have spent the rest of the day curled up on Marshall’s lap, not talking, just…humming and tingling until all the rest of the world simply fell away.
“I’m okay,” she said, and did her best to sound as if she weren’t on the verge of tears while she did it. And she wasn’t, at least not yet. But she knew the first chance she got to be alone, it was all going to come pouring right out of her.
This wasn’t a love match, as he’d so often said. She was the stupid one for disregarding his cautions and her better judgment—what kind of fool fell in love in only three days?—and for letting herself feel things for him that she knew better than to feel. He was only doing his job. He was giving her the vacation she had paid for. When she was gone, he would continue to do his job for the next little, lost submissive who came skipping off the bus without a clue as to what she wanted or needed.
Maybe even that bus there—the one she could see trekking up the road in a cloud of pale dust.
Her eyes stung.
He wasn’t her love match, but he had shown her something she hadn’t known existed. But now she did. And now, she wanted it. Desperately. In every nuance of her heart and soul, and not just while she was on vacation, but permanently. She wanted it every day of her life. She wanted to kneel at the feet of a man who made her body quiver at a Look, or a Tone, or a touch. She wanted to feel his collar on her neck and his ownership seared upon her ass and her soul. She wanted to be wanton, but right now, she wanted to be wanton for entirely the wrong man. Master Marshall was good at what he did, but he didn’t want her. Because if he did, he’d have said so.
Instead, he’d touched her, he’d kissed her, slipped the collar he’d given her into her coat pocket and then he’d said goodbye, and walked away.
The first slow sting of tears began to build and Kaylee blinked hard to stem the tide before it could become just that: an uncontrollable tide, rolling down her face for everyone to see. She bit the inside of her cheeks. By the time the threat had receded, she noticed Selena looking at her, her pixie face without its usual smile.
“Was it that bad?” she asked, wrapping her arm around Kaylee’s shoulders.
“No,” Kaylee said honestly. “It was good. It was really, really good.”
She meant that, too. Because of all the things Master Marshall had done for her, the best had perhaps been to show her who she really was. He had found a tiny piece of herself that no amount of fantasizing could ever have exposed.
“And now you don’t want to leave,” Selena guessed, nodding as if she understood. And by that softening in her eyes, maybe she did understand.
Heaving a soft sigh, Selena hugged Kaylee briefly closer and then let go to clasp her hand instead. The threat of tears she thought she’d conquered came rushing back with a vengeance.
“Yeah.” Kaylee swiped at the single drop that escaped her, knuckling all trace of it away before anyone other than Selena could see it.
Giving her hand a squeeze, Selena said, “My first time here, I met the greatest man. He was everything I ever wanted in a Dom. We hit it off so well, like peas in a little black S&M pod, complete with paddles and handcuffs. But you know what the brochure says, anonymity is king and this is not eHarmony. So when my time was up, I went home. He slipped me his email though.” Selena tucked a finger up to her lips and mimed for secrecy, her eyes sparkling with that familiar indomitable cheerfulness. “It took us three years to realize it, but…look…” She flashed her right hand under Kaylee’s nose, showing off the engagement ring on her finger. “We’re getting married! I’m going home but only to pack, give my notice at work, find another job out here. Not at the Castle, sad to say. One of us needs to have our foot firmly planted in the real world. But it just goes to show you, sometimes in spite of everything, you really can find your love match in the darnedest of places. Sometimes, it’s even while he’s doing things that would land a real teacher on the national sex offender registry for the rest of his life.”
“Mr. Emerson?” When she giggled, Kaylee tried to as well. “I’m happy for you. I really am.”
“Thanks.” Selena beamed at her, first happy, then sympathetic. She looped their arms again. “I promise, you’ll find your someone too. If not here, then somewhere else.”
Yeah, sure. Somewhere else.
The line they were in began to move, loading up into the bus for home. While waiting her turn, Kaylee felt a slight tickle at the back of her head. She turned and looked back. The longing to stay surged even harder when a flicker of movement from a second story window caught her eye. Was that his shadow parting the drapes, watching while she left, or was he simply waiting while the next busload arrived? She wasn’t sure. All she did know was, she didn’t
want
anyone else. She wanted the Master of the Castle.
If only he wanted her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Two weeks after she left the Castle, the last of the marks Master Marshall had given her finally disappeared. It was his bite mark on her shoulder that was the last to go.
Kaylee stood in front of the bathroom mirror fresh from her shower, dressed only in the collar she couldn’t yet make herself take off, and cried.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Kaylee laid two newly-completed appraisals on her boss’s desk and quietly retreated from his office. He’d barely glanced up from his phone conversation. Walking across the hall, she emptied the dregs from the coffee pot, washed it in the sink and set it in the strainer to dry. She switched off the breakroom light when she left and headed back to her desk to collect her things. She punched out and then she drove home in the rain.
Just another day; she didn’t know how she got through them, but she knew how she survived her nights. The minute she got home, she stripped out of her office clothes and put on her collar. Of the handful of souvenirs she’d been allowed to bring home with her from the Castle—her harness, the vibrating harness phallus and the jeweled anal plug—this was the only one she’d bothered really to unpack. Certainly, it was the only one she wore, every night just as soon as she got home, and all day long on the weekends. She liked the feel of it. She liked the memory of it, and even knowing she would never again have what this collar signified—Master Marshall, the sensual devil with those angel-blue eyes—sometimes this thin collar was the only thing that kept her from curling up in a useless heap on the floor and bawling like a lost child.
Switching on the television for a little background noise, Kaylee fired up her computer to check her emails. She deleted the spam, sent a quick answer off to Selena—Yes, of course, she planned to come to the wedding. She’d even wear one of those hideous orange-sherbet bridesmaid dresses. Frankly, she was thrilled just to have been asked—and then she read again the email she’d received from the Castle, the one that had been waiting for her even before she’d arrived home a full month before.
Dear Ms. Waters,
It was a pleasure to have you with us. Though the beginning was rocky, I hope your stay was all you’d hoped it would be. I have enclosed a copy of your amended receipt. I hope to see you again soon.
Sincerely,
M.M.
He had refunded her money. Every last penny, not including the airfare. He didn’t have to do that, but it always put a little spark of…gratitude, or was it longing?…in her when she read the note.
Then she observed the rest of her nightly routine, clicking over to the Castle’s online website so she could scroll through the gallery pictures in the hopes that she might find one with Master Marshall standing in the background. She never did. The closest she got was a broad-view photo submitted by a past client, where a sideways shot of his office window could be seen way up and to the right of the picture. There was a blur behind the glass that might have been him, but which could just as easily have been a fluttering curtain too. She liked to believe the former. It made her feel close to him.
It also made her feel like a closet loony (at best) and stalker (at worst) for sitting here night after night, mooning over a blur in a picture on the Internet. Especially since she had already decided, she was not going back to the Castle. She didn’t think she could handle it if Master Marshall assigned her to another Dom. That would be the final nail in the ‘This is not a love match’ coffin. But worse, what if he kept her to himself again? She might be a masochist, but she didn’t think she could bear the hurt of having to leave him a second time.
A roll of dark thunder cut her mooning short. Just as well. This wasn’t doing her any good.
She shut her computer down before the storm got bad, unplugging both the Internet and the power cable and then went into the kitchen to scrounge something for dinner. She grilled up a tuna sandwich and ate it standing at the sink. She had the last sour dill spear from the jar in the refrigerator door and then, because there was only one sweet pickle left in that jar too, had that for dessert.
After wiping down her mostly spotless kitchen, she retired to the couch, where she curled up with her head pillowed on one arm and the remote in her hand. After endless channel surfing—300 stations, but nothing good was
ever
on—she tried to tell herself she wasn’t sad, just tired.
The phone rang. Kaylee sat up far enough to check the caller ID. Not recognizing the number, she lay back down again and continued clicking through channels. Whoever it was listened to her answering machine spiel—
The answering machine is on vacation, this is the refrigerator speaking. If you’ll speak slowly and clearly, I’ll write your message down and stick it to myself. Someone will call you back when they get home…
—and then hung up without leaving a message.
She was getting a lot of those lately.
She curled into a smaller ball and continued clicking through channels. She ended up on Discovery, watching something about whales while her thoughts churned restlessly, locked on what may or may not be happening in an old Scottish castle surrounded by Ohio grassland.
A knock at the front door—three short taps, briskly delivered—startled her and she sat up again. She leaned over, trying to see over the windowsill. There was a dark luxury car parked at the curb near her driveway. Unfortunately, the owner was standing under her front porch eave and all she could see of him was the back of his very non-descript jacket.
She looked at the car again, then peeled herself up out of the couch and headed down the hallway to the half-flight of stairs that separated the upper portion of her house from the entryway landing and the basement. She really ought to get a peephole for this door. Bracing her foot against the bottom corner—just in case whoever tried to barge his way in—she unlatched the deadbolt and chain and cracked the door a scant two inches.
Languid heat burst through her womb and spilled out through the rest of her on molten waves. Every small hair on her body prickled into instant awareness. Every nerve became suddenly attuned, shivering her like dozens of tiny orgasms, and before she knew it, she had the door fully open. “M-Master Marshall?”
He stood on her welcome mat, dripping, obviously unprepared to experience Seattle weather at its finest—sunny all day long, except when, at times just like this one, it rained instead—and yet just as obviously could not have cared any less that his hair was plastered to his head or that he had water dripping off the end of his nose. He loomed over her, gripping both sides of the door frame, devouring her with the intensity of his stare.
“Master,” she said again, much softer, but no less shocked. She should have said his name. Master all by itself seemed so intimate considering they barely knew one another, but her throat closed and she couldn’t make herself say more. What was he doing here? How had he even found her?
Her application, of course—the one in which she’d listed not only her home address, but her phone number too.
All those calls she hadn’t bothered to answer.
“Oh.” She stared up at him, her eyes huge. “You’ve been calling me.”
His gaze wandered down her face, stopping just south of her mouth when the hunger flared so hot in his eyes that she felt burned by it. He was looking at the collar—his collar, the one she couldn’t make herself take off.