Free At His Whim by Erika Masten

AT HIS WHIM: HIS #1
    (A BILLIONAIRE DOMINATION SERIAL)
     
    by
    Erika Masten
     
    KINDLE EDITION
    Copyright © 2012 Erika Masten
    ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
     
    Erika Masten
    [email protected]
    http://erikamasten.com
     
    Published by Sticky Sweet Books. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored on, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
     
    This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to actual persons or events are purely coincidental.
     
    Warning: Explicit content. Intended for mature readers only. All characters depicted herein are 18 years or older, and all sexual activities are of a consensual nature.
     
    This is a work of erotic fantasy. In real life, please protect yourself and your lover by always practicing safe sex.
     
    TABLE OF CONTENTS
     
    At His Whim: His #1
     
    Excerpt From
    Weekend Submissive
     
    Excerpt From
    Sweet Resistance: The Dom Next Door #2
     
    AT HIS WHIM: HIS #1
     
    When I was a little girl, I spent countless hours sitting with my narrow back pressed to the side of the battered upright piano against the living room wall while my mother played. She coaxed thunderously emotional and sometimes heartrending music out of an instrument of such inferior quality that it never should have withstood the demand—yet it had.
    Years later, when I was old enough to understand how improbable it was to have that music pouring out of that piano, I asked my mother about it.
    “Ah, Chloeblossom,” she would say, always ending her sigh with a warm smile from behind wayward strands of mahogany hair, adding a hug or at least a squeeze of my shoulder.  It was her pet name for me, a play on my full name, Chloe Bloom.  “Never worry about how things should work.  Go with your heart.  It’s a force of nature, too.”
    That was the philosophy that had guided her life, and ruined it.  I asked my question—and she answered it the same way—many more times.  While the words never changed, the underlying meaning did.  Sometimes I wasn’t asking about an old piano so much as why I didn’t have the things my friends had, the toys and clothes and a father at their birthday parties.  Sometimes I was asking why we lived in a shabby, dark apartment when the photographs of my mother as a child had sweeping marble staircases and landmarks like Big Ben and The Eiffel Tower in the background.  Sometimes I was asking why she stayed married to a man who came and went, loved her then didn’t, on his whim.
    As an adult, I was not a woman of flights and fancies, and I had the money, success, and seventy-hour work week at an environmental law firm to prove it.  I didn’t “go with my gut” or make decisions based on the intangibles of intuition.  Booking a last-minute cruise from Buenos Aires up along the Atlantic Coast of South America to the mouth of the Amazon was uncharacteristically spontaneous of me but not romantic or carefree in the least.  I needed to get out of the city, away from the gossip columns and especially from Penn Ellison.  The measure was extreme but still practical at its heart.
    So I stood now among well-heeled tourists at the palatial entrance of the resort on Ilha de Flor off the coast of northeastern Brazil, the lulling roar of the ocean at my back and blessedly cool trade winds playing at the loose brown waves of my hair and the hem of my pink floral silk sundress, and struggled with another question that beggared logic.
    How did I know that a certain Mr. Adrian Knight, presenting himself to us as the manager of the resort, was not what he appeared?