Free In His Service by Erika Masten Page A

cheating with him on a wife but of being his dirty little secret, a woman he supported materially and owned completely. For how long he didn’t say. As long as I amused him, I supposed.
    He didn’t know staying with him would have meant abandoning a demanding but well-paid career as a successful environmental lawyer back on the East Coast. He didn’t ask what my friends or family would think. I doubted he would have cared. Adrian Knight was old money; I saw that clearly now. From a family just like Penn’s, probably. Wealth and power ran in the blood and sank into the bone. It colored their every thought in ways the average person—the kind of person I had started out—couldn’t understand. What didn’t concern him—my career, my friends, my life beyond Ilha de Flor—shouldn’t have concerned me.
    I caught myself knitting my brow in deep concentration, gnawing my lips. Silently reminding myself in my mother’s voice to stop brooding and breathe , I filled my lungs and shook the tousled waves of my long brown hair out of my face as a morning breeze swept in from behind us with the strong scent of salty marine air. My anxious hands curled into loose fists, my toes down into the fine sand, as a weary air of resentment filled my chest and mouth. Resentment not so much of Penn, for driving me here with his infidelity and total inability to grasp emotional intimacy. Or of Adrian Knight, for taking me as simply and casually as he might order off a wine list and for having that privileged class audacity to want more. Mostly of myself, for reveling in Adrian’s touch just the same. For having bent the rules of ethics by getting involved with a client’s son when I’d started seeing Penn in the first place—and staying with him far too long. For acting like my mother, leading with my heart instead of my head, arms and legs open, eyes closed.
    Still, I wasn’t just a leaf blown on the winds of others when I almost numbly placed one foot before the other and started up that fateful path. I’d been stubborn and willful my whole life, as strange as that might have sounded from a woman who harbored a secret taste for dominating lovers. It was my own commitment to what I had begun when I’d given myself to Adrian Knight, my determination to explore and understand and… master this male talent for separating one’s sexual and emotional selves, that directed my steps.
    The villa was even more beautiful and exotic than I expected, long and low, with a gently pitched roof and a fair portion of its walls made of fold-back wooden floor-to-ceiling shutters, nested in the concealing green boughs of the rainforest. Eggshell-white interior, so many shades of polished wood, a sienna concrete floor cool and lightly textured under my bare feet as I entered past a stone patio and a gap in the shutters that led to a large bedroom. The view of the bed, broad and overbearing with a cream-colored pleated canopy gathered and tied back against its posts, confronted me as I forged into the room. An appropriate symbol of what I was about to do, what my life would become with Adrian Knight. A symbol of liberation as much as submission—I hoped.
    He took his time following me, and I stood waiting, facing that oversized bed. When I finally heard his footsteps, I could tell he was still barefoot, having slipped back into his tuxedo shirt and pants but not the polished black shoes. I jumped at the clatter as something hit the floor just inside the shutters, and I turned my head. Not enough to look at Knight—I couldn’t do that yet—but enough to see he had gathered our clothes and shoes and dropped them in a pile. I was just as surprised at the idea that he hadn’t left it for someone else to do, but I knew already that he had certain…quirks that ran contrary to most men of wealth. That was part of what set me on edge about him. And part of what intrigued me.
    From the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of movement coming toward me, and I