Mastered: Ten Tales of Sensual Surrender (73 page)

“Explosive love scenes will curl your toes and leave you fanning. Readers who love a flare for the dramatic with paranormal elements will certainly become fans of TJ Michaels.” ~Romance Junkies

Jaguar’s Rule

“The plot is flawlessly executed and the characters remain true.” ~The Romance Studio

“T.J. MICHAELS knows how to write plot and passion in a most memorable way!” ~Fallen Angels Reviews

Dedication

To my family by blood, sisters from another mister, and brothers from another mother. Tam, Mike, Mindy and CVD, you guys have no idea how much your love and support meant to me while penning this book. Thinking back on all the conversations that led up to the idea for this series, both funny and not-so-funny, be assured there’s a little bit of all of you in this novel! Strap in, it’s time for takeoff!

To Softrock and Burton, you are fantastic for simply being wonderful friends for so many years. Your unwavering kindness and willingness to see your friends through thick and thin is immeasurable. Couldn’t help but show a bit of you in the fictional Burt!

Wynde, thank you so much for exercising great patience while I asked you a bazillion questions (((SMILE))). Oh, and thank you for volunteering your husband to paint my motorcycle *wink*!

To Mr. Austin, without you this book would not have been possible. At all.

And to my readers, especially the ones who catch me on social networking sites—you are all so supportive, funny and lively. This writing thing wouldn’t be nearly as much of a blast without you. I am so grateful.

Chapter One

Solie Shaw had been so deep in thought that the playful ‘ding-da-ding-dong’ of her phone startled her. She looked around her desk. It was covered with sticky notes of so many colors it was a fair representation of the rainbow. But where was her phone?

“Ah, there it is.” It was partially hidden under the newest project plan she’d printed out. Her current tasks outnumbered her brain cells for sure. She had so much to do that there was no way she’d make all the deadlines. But she was totally grateful for the distraction of work given the recent drama that had engulfed her life.

Her life had been tossed upside down by Hurricane Marcais—a wickedly handsome man who’d crashed into her world, burned it down around her, then rained so much
crazy
into the charred remains, she’d been totally swept out to sea and left to drown. The bastard.

Oh, yeah. Phone. She dug it from under the pile of papers and stared at the screen. Her head tilted a hard right as her gut did a freefall.

The caller id read
Marcais Dupree
.

“Damn. Speak of the devil.”

The phone continued to play the special tune associated with his contact. All she could do was stare at the danged screen while commanding her stomach to stop running around underneath her skin.

Solie had learned from a friend that her now ex-dude had been trying to hook up with her, behind Solie’s back. She’d been the third woman in a three-week span. So after calling him several times, Solie had left a very polite, though tear-filled voice message; ending what was left of their crumbling relationship. Part of her had hoped he would deny the other woman’s claims. Again. Yet another part of her was glad to be done with it.

Marcais hadn’t answered her very nice “fuck off” message, nor had he bothered to reply to the e-mail she’d sent a week later, wishing him well. She’d even included a special prayer written just for him. Even though she’d been nothing but an expendable replacement for his ex-wife, Solie had experienced a strange mix of pain and relief when he hadn’t bothered to respond.

But all of that was weeks ago. It felt like an eon considering they’d lived together and seen each other every day for a year. He’d even talked of taking her with him overseas once he’d learned that the Army was reassigning him.

Finally the ringing stopped.

She took a deep breath and leaned over to scratch her shepherd, Mims, behind the ears. In that moment, Solie accepted a few things as fact.

First, if just seeing the man’s name on the caller id could make her want to run and hide in a lockable closet, then she wasn’t quite over the hell he’d brought into her life. A line from the famous movie, Tombstone, came to mind. Solie could even picture the snarl on Kurt Russell’s face as he played a rather convincing Wyatt Earp. He’d promised a reckoning to a bad guy as he’d bellowed, “And hell’s coming with me! You hear?!” Well, Marcais Dupree had been an expert at ushering in emotional infernos.

Second, sheer determination to process the hurt in a healthy manner burst forward and brought her ‘mad’ along with it. She refused to be defeated, emotionally or otherwise. A few seconds later her phone dinged again—a text message. From
him
. And the damn phone wouldn’t let her delete it without opening it first.

She clicked on the message and braced herself.

“Say what?” she asked to her empty office. Solie looked up to the ceiling wondering if she’d just read what she thought she had. Looking at the phone again had her shaking her head. Nope, the message hadn’t morphed into something that actually made sense. It simply read, “Thank you for your e-mail. Hope to talk to you soon.”

Really? Why now? What did he
really
want from her?

Instead of replying to the text message, Solie decided to do a little investigating. Maybe he’d decided to behave after all? She had no interest whatsoever in getting back together with Marcais, but a part of her still hoped that he’d meant at least one word of all of those declarations of love and care.

“So he couldn’t respond to me telling him that I didn’t want to see him again because a third woman told me he was chasing her; but he responds to an e-mail with a prayer in it? And a week or two
after
I sent it? Go figure.” The words were half-snarled-half-mumbled to herself as her fingertips flew over the keyboard.

She logged into her private Kinkfest profile and skipped over to his page. Perhaps there was something there that would give her a clue as to why he was contacting her now.

There. There it was. His profile.

Solie’s hand flew to her mouth on a gasp.

“Oh. My. God. Why do I always have to look? Why?”

Good question, because now she couldn’t
unsee
it either. It was the greatest mind fuck of all and she’d walked right into it. She felt like one of the hobbits from the Lord of the Rings. Yep, she was a nosy chick from The Shire who’d looked at something she had no business. Now she was getting smacked by a damn orc for being nosey.

“Son of a bitch,” she breathed. Her chest was heavy, as if someone had hit her in the middle of the sternum with Thor’s hammer. Her heart beat a mile a minute and adrenaline pumped furiously.

“Fight or flight, Solie. Fight or flight?”

Three times she started to respond to what she saw posted on
his
wall for the world to see. And three times she stopped herself. Instead, she read it again…and again.

“I want to feel everything. I want to see you squirm in anticipation of what I will do to you. I want tease you with my fingers and feel you get wet. I want to feel you grip me as I push in and pull out. I want to see your pretty pussy hold me. When I pull out it looks like it wants to come with me. I want to wrap you in the rope that I bought just for you, to restrict your movements and leave my hands free to massage and tease other parts of your body.

I want to push deep, then deeper so I can watch your eyes widen because no one has ever been to that spot before. I want you to wear the fuck-me pumps I gave you because I can grab the heels and manipulate your legs to open you up. I love to watch your eyes roll back in your head, to hear you take that deep gasp of air as you reach and stretch for things that are not there.

I want you to beg me to fuck you, want to hear the words because you say it just the way I like. I want to flip you over and take you from behind as I spank your perfect ass so I can see the slight redness of my hand print on your skin. I like that I can manhandle you and yet kiss you softly. I want to manipulate you anywhere at any time. I want to hear you scream as your toes curl when you come. I want to gently wipe your tears when you begin to cry from orgasm after orgasm.

And I can do all these things because you trust that I will never hurt you and that I have your best interests at heart. There is only you. I have no need of other toys. We are fluid-bonded and I wear you when we are done just as you wear me. Your scent is on me and mine is entwined with yours. Yes, I wear you. And you drip of me. I want to hold you afterward as you drift in a space that you have only found with me. I want to kiss you on your forehead, wrap my arms around you as I feed you chocolate while we lay on top of the sweat-soaked sheets. Because you are my submissive. And I love you.”

She sat there for long moments with her hand over her mouth, eyes wide with disbelief. When emotions were finally a smidge under control, she slammed the laptop closed, stormed out of her office and down the hall. The leash was snatched off the hook near the front door as she headed to the truck with her dog on her heels.

The half-mile to the trails were a forgotten blur as she pulled into the parking area. The sky was as cloudy as her mood as she slipped the leash around her shepherd’s thick neck and took off down the nearest path.

Then Solie did what she should have done the moment Marcais’ text message had arrived—she hit the speed dial and called one of her very best friends.

Burton picked up on the second ring.

Oh thank God!

“Burton!”

“Solie? You okay?”

“Hell no I’m not okay! Oh my God, I just can’t believe he did that. It’s just so low and—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, what the hell happened?”

“I’m such an idiot, Burt. I just…I just I can’t believe I did it.”

“Woman, what did you do?”

While Burton and Solie had never had a Dominant/submissive relationship—sexual or otherwise—there’d always been an undercurrent of tension in his presence that made her belly feel as if someone tugged on her insides. She still considered both him and Mac as her private play partners though they seldom ever played. Burton always took care of her…including punishing her if she needed it.

“He sent me a text message.”

“He? You mean
that guy
? Solie tell me you didn’t call him.”

“I didn’t, I swear. What I did was worse.”

“Huh?”

“Instead of answering his call or responding to his text, I went and perved his Kinkfest profile. And he’d written a poem-like thing. Only it wasn’t a poem. It was a story. About me.”

“What?”

“You heard me. He started it off by saying, ‘I want to…’ but then everything after that was a recital of what happened between us in the bedroom.”

“Are you shitting me?”

“No! I wish I was.” Her eyes stung with tears, but she’d never get through the story if she started to cry now. After what Marcais had written she had every right to bawl her brains out, but that would have to come later. Right now, she had a confession to make. Solie picked up the pace, though she was practically running already.

“Look, Burt, he wrote a journal entry as if it was something that he wanted to happen between him and someone else. He didn’t use my name of course—”

“Of course.”

“But the facial expressions that he says he wants to see during this act of supposed love were
my
facial expressions.
My
body language.
My
words. He practically described the way I orgasm, the cheap bastard.”

“Oh man. That sounds brutal.”

“Yeah, but that’s not the worst part. He put at the end of it that this person should know that he has her best interest at heart because, and I quote, ‘You are my submissive and I love you.”

Burt’s low whistle filled the line. Yeah. She knew exactly what he was thinking.

“And the women he’s been collecting like fucking baseball cards had filled his profile with all kinds of sappy shit. They were all like, ‘oh, that’s so sweet,’ and ‘oh I wish it were me’ and ‘oh she’s so lucky’ and all of this royal bullshit. I stood in my office and screamed.”

“You mean kind of like you’re screaming now?” Burton asked. And he was right. She was screaming at the top of her lungs. Hadn’t even flinched when a terrified flock of birds burst into flight as she’d stormed past the tree they were roosting in. Must have scared them with her banshee impersonation. Even her dog looked at her as if she’d left her brains back at home in her office.

So much for control.

“Sorry,” she mumbled.

“No worries. You have every right to yell to the rafters. He’s basically taken something that was special and intimate between you two and turned it into bait for some other woman.”

That pretty much summed it up.

“I wanted to call him up and tell him off. I wanted to send him a private message or reply to his text in all caps telling him what a mind-fuck it was, the bastard. I wanted to scream, ‘Hey asshole, I did that. I gave that. I fucking earned that! But you never loved me. You just came home to me late at night while you spent your afternoons and evenings sticking your dick into anything with a hole!”

She really was losing it now, but she just couldn’t help it. A guy riding past her on a bike must surely think she was crazy. Solie didn’t give a rat’s rear end. Not at all.

“Well you know you shouldn’t have looked, right Solie?”

Aw man. Burt had turned on his Dom-ly voice, which meant she was actually in trouble. And if she’d been thinking clearly she would have seen this coming. Must be Solie-The-Idiot Day or something. First, she’d walked right into a mind fuck of epic proportions with her ex-dude, and now she’d told all her business to one of the few people that could actually make her sorry—one her best friends and protectors, Burton Khrys.