Free Saving Sara (Masters of the Castle) by Maren Smith Page B

was enough there now to run his fingers through and fist while he fucked her. Pulling hair and slapping ass—they were two of his favorite pastimes, and he happened to know for a fact that she enjoyed them both every bit as much as he did. He liked that, too, almost as much as he liked the way the limp cloth of her tunic followed the lines of her slim body, giving him the barest shadowy glimpse of the vee of her sex along the lower skirted edge. Waxed, not shaven. Baby smooth. That, he loved.
    What he didn’t like, or love, or feel any particular inclination to tolerate, was the way she kept trying to stretch the cloth to hide her damaged side. She was blushing, not from the titillating embarrassment of being made to stand vulnerable before her master, but because she was ashamed.
    A woman like Sara should never be ashamed of anything, particularly not the way she looked.
    Jackson came back to her. As soon as he was close enough, he took the tunic away, tossing it to the floor behind him and leaving her nothing but her hands to hide behind. She tried as best she could though, clamping one arm tight to her side and cupping her bad shoulder with one hand. When Jackson touched her, she tried to evade him, but she just didn’t have enough arms to cover all the parts she wanted so badly to conceal, and his fingers slipped in past her shield to stroke feather-light down the curve of her scarred hip.
    She flinched, stopping just shy of pushing his hand away. Her chest was rising and falling fast and shallow. She didn’t look at him but stared fixedly at the ground, blinking to keep the watery sheen in her eyes from building into tears. He waited until she settled and stood frozen once again, then he caressed a measured path up her waist, over the scars along her ribs, and finally stopped when his fingers came parallel to her breast. She squeezed her arm in tight, trying to stop him from caressing the marred skin he found there just behind the fleshy curve.
    “Does this hurt?” he asked, letting his fingers move over her, showing without words that he just didn’t care. She was still beautiful to him and always would be, but she still flinched even as she shook her head. No matter how he touched her, she kept trying to twist away, as if she couldn’t bear to have the bad parts of her touched.
    “Be still, Sara.” He caught her chin when she tried to turn all the way around. With gentle force, he brought her eyes back to his, refusing to let her look away. “No, I want you to look at me. Look at your master.”
    A flash of what might have been anger moved through her eyes, but she swallowed it back. She didn’t say, “You’re not my master” again, but it was lurking there, right behind the painstakingly neutral mask she was struggling to assume. He didn’t know what annoyed him more—this defiance of modesty that did not become her or the lie of her neutrality.
    He was standing directly in front of her now, with barely two feet of empty space between them. He waited until she raised her eyes to his before he robbed her of that space, taking a purposeful step forward. If she hadn’t fallen back a startled step, he’d have bumped chests with her, but it worked. The unexpected closeness robbed her of both her defiance and her mask. She stared at him now, her reluctance and uncertainty all that he could read.
    He took another step forward and she promptly retreated, saying nothing, her eyes growing silently wider as, step after step, he walked her across the room. Her retreat ended when she bumped up against the edge of his dining table. With no place left to go, she had to stop.
    “Put your hands on your head.”
    She hesitated so long he thought he might have to force her compliance, but after only a second more, she raised her arms and laced her fingers behind her neck.
    “You can do better than this,” he told her softly. “You’d better start trying, because I don’t think your little bottom can take all the