Free My Control by Lisa Renée Jones Page A

reading again; I know damn well that every word will be like salt in my open wounds. It’s that passage about her anger over her mother hiding her father’s identity from her that really slices deep. She’d tried to talk to me about it. I hadn’t let her. I’d shut her down to halt the emotions that she’d stirred in me that I didn’t want to feel.
    But I’m feeling them now. I’m living every last, bitter one.
    Lifting the glass to my lips, I stop at the knock on the door. Crystal is here—and it’s like a punch to the chest. She does things to me. The kinds of things Rebecca tried to do, and couldn’t. And not because I didn’t care about Rebecca, but because I was too removed from everything human inside of me. She woke me up, but it had been too late—and I wish like hell that I was the one dead now, not her.
    Shoving the journal into the accordion file on the coffee table, I sink back against the couch, my glass settling on my pant leg, listening as her high heels click on the hardwood floor of the foyer, and then go silent. She’s hesitating and I don’t blame her. She’d be smart to turn and run, but wrong as it is I find myself holding my breath, praying that she won’t leave. She quiets the storm inside of me and I’ll be damned if I understand it. She is as far as it gets from the submissive who I demand in my lovers—and perhaps that’s her appeal. A Master is supposed to protect his submissive and I simply don’t trust myself right now. I don’t know where that leaves me when control, my control, is what I’ve counted on keeping me and everyone around me safe.
    Crystal steps around the corner of the short hallway, stopping just beyond the rounded archways, a shadow in the darkness that I’ve allowed to consume the room—the way my guilt consumes me. She’s a curvy silhouette in the dark room, but I can make out her pencil-cut skirt, her long blond hair draping her shoulders, the flickering light of the silenced television catching here and there on her pale, perfect skin.
    “Hey,” she says softly, and her voice is electric, shocking my nerve endings.
    “‘Hey’?” I ask, sounding as cynical as I feel. “What kind of greeting is ‘hey’?”
    “My kind,” she replies, crossing the room to stop in front of the coffee table. “The only kind I know how to give.”
    It’s a typical Crystal answer. Direct. Uncensored. Honest. And damn it, I think that’s what draws me to her. The honesty. The absence of games that she won’t allow me to play, games I just don’t have the energy to give a damn about right now. We fall into silence, the air thickening between us, that current of awareness that’s always there sharper, edgier now. The television flickers behind her, casting her in a warm glow that guides my unapologetic downward skim over her slender hips to her stocking feet.
    “I left my shoes at the door,” she answers, drawing my gaze upward, over her black silk blouse and long blond hair. The only blonde that I’ve wanted in ten years. “My dad made us do it when I was growing up. It’s a habit.” She holds up the key that I’d left for her at the front desk with a note to meet me in my room after she settled in hers. “So the press is stalking you pretty badly?”
    “That’s an understatement.” But it’s not why I’m here. It’s the memories, not the reporters, that I wish I could avoid. “I had to have some covert help to rent me the room next door in an effort to stay low profile until I leave for New York on, I hope, Monday.” I tap the folder that I have sitting on the coffee table. “I need to go over the gallery business affairs with you tonight. I can’t risk being unavailable and you being unprepared.” I glance at the TV, and the news is still playing the same scene, as if it’s locked on a repeating loop that gives me nothing when I crave something.
    Anything. I’ll take anything.
    “Anything new?” Crystal asks, and somehow she’s crossed