Free Mastered: Ten Tales of Sensual Surrender by Kate Pearce, Portia Da Costa, Opal Carew, Marie Harte, Jennifer Leeland, Madelynne Ellis, Emily Ryan-Davis, Carrie Ann Ryan, Joey Hill, T. J. Michaels, Sasha White Page A

stake, when a pin prick would have been sufficient?
    On certain issues, a scientist had to factor bias into his calculations. He’d worked so hard at appearing mature and in control, perhaps he’d made a horrible misstep by ignoring the fact he was immature in some ways. Particularly about relationships. And Debra had paid the price.
    Vampires didn’t have relationships, he told himself. They had bonds forged from power hierarchies. Yet servants were their closest intimate bond, impossible to describe to anyone who hadn’t experienced it. Perhaps vampires avoided the irony of that by fanatically insisting it was a functional, master-slave relationship, and not what it truly was: Their only chance to establish a soul-deep trust with another being, meet that craving for love and connection that the human species accepted as a worthy goal. But unlike vampires, the human species—for the most part—had learned how to sit down at dinner without killing one another.
    Our structure, our rules, are the only things that keep us from one another’s throats, Brian. His father’s voice, a lecture he’d heard over and over. I was part of the Territory Wars. You don’t understand what we become without structure. These rules have a purpose.
    The dawn lassitude was pulling him down, making it hard to think. He fought it. He couldn’t leave her feeling like this. Damn it…
    Debra.
    She lifted her head, wiping away her tears. My lord?
    I want you to come sleep with me. When you get here, I may already be asleep, but you will stay with me until I wake. Lie down with me and sleep as well.
    But I have to finish the—
    It will wait. Your Master gave you an order, Debra.
    She froze at that. The sensual threat went through her like an ocean cavitation. In a drowsy haze, he watched her wrap up what she was doing, but only the minimum necessary so the results weren’t ruined. Then she locked up the lab and was moving through the corridors. Coming to him.
    Debra.
    Yes...Master?
    He smiled. Take off your clothes before you come to bed with me. I expect my servant to be available to me in all ways when I wake.
    He stayed conscious long enough to feel the ripple of reaction through her again, know that he’d elevated her pulse and made her heart beat faster. Then the dawn reached out to claim him.
     
    She wasn’t sure what was going on, but his tone of voice, the purring promise of it, scattered her concentration. If he had wanted her to finish what she was doing before coming to him, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have trusted her results.
    His chambers on the underground level of the estate always smelled of the cool earth that surrounded it, a soothing scent. She paused at his door, unsure if he’d changed his mind. But as he’d said, he was likely asleep by now. His words had been slurred when he spoke in her mind. She wouldn’t second guess him.
    Slipping in the room, she saw she was right. He was motionless on the bed, a tempting silhouette. Though his inability to stay awake past a certain time frustrated him, it gave her an opportunity to observe him now. He rarely invited her into his bedchamber after he was fully asleep.
    First she obeyed his orders, taking off all her clothes and folding them neatly on the dresser. He had a mirror in here, which he used for looking at objects from different directions, since he didn’t show up in the reflection. She caught a glimpse of herself in it, a pale, owl-eyed ghost floating across the room.
    He had towers of files on most of the flat surfaces. His smaller lab, sitting room and spacious bathroom was through another door, but he tended to stack things in there as well. Every once in a while she helped him scan and load hard copies onto his computers, keeping the data in an organized fashion. But Brian had far more diverse interests than just the active projects.
    Stacked up against the legs of one table were old science journals and sci-fi novels he collected from a variety of