Sweet Sinclair (Masters of the Castle) (5 page)

Easing back up to the curb, Jackson got out, saying, “I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind.”

“No, no. Of course not.” She was shaking so badly she dropped her keys fumbling to unlock her store. And then once she got the key to turn, she forgot how close her packages were to the door. She knocked the nearest bag sprawling, sending slick, plastic-wrapped tablecloths sliding in all directions. “Damn it, what is wrong with me?” she exploded. Dropping to her knees, she dumped everything back into the now torn paper bag, and when she stood up, with her arms full, she turned and collided right smack into Jackson.

Hitting him was like walking into a mountainside. He was big, solid, and his hands caught her, practically engulfing her upper arms as he steadied her.

“Hey,” he said softly, his deep voice rumbling over her in a soothing wave. “Breathe, okay. Just breathe. It’s all right.”

“I’m sorry,” she babbled.

“There’s nothing to be sorry for.” He angled his head, meeting and holding her gaze until she could make herself look solidly back at him. “Here, let me help you.”

Taking the bag, he led her back to the van, fishing the keys out of his pocket to pop the back door. Together, they loaded all her decorations into the seatless rear compartment. Locking up her shop once more, Sinclair ran back to her car to fetch her purchases from Crystal Dolphin’s. The paper crackled as she hugged it fiercely close to her chest. There wasn’t a mark on it, but as she slid into the passenger seat under Jackson’s speculative gaze, she flushed, absolutely certain that he knew exactly what was in this sack.

“All set?” he asked.

Her throat too tight to speak, Sinclair nodded instead. Pulling away from the curb felt like a point of no return for her. She had the most dreadful certainty that she was heading straight for disaster; conversely, she also felt like she was headed for the most exciting night of her entire life.

She couldn’t wait to finally be alone with Parker again.

She hoped like hell he wouldn’t be there to meet her tonight.

Her store could have fit into each of the ballrooms at least four or five times. When all three were locked off to the public with the adjoining double doors between them thrown open, Sinclair found herself staring down the conjoined length and trying hard not to imagine nine hundred hungry people packed into this football field of space. This was a daunting task, but she was stubborn and she was determined to pull it off.

“The middle room is the largest. That’s where the dancing and the band will be,” Parker said. He pushed one hand back towards the very far room. “We’ll probably have the games and challenges back in that end, so really, this is your realm here.” A spread of his hands encompassed the whole of the first ballroom. “People will be coming and going all day long, in shifts lasting about three hours apart, so don’t feel like you have to serve everyone all at once.” He paused, resting his hands on his lean hips. “So, where should we get started?”

With me, Sinclair wanted to say.

“The tables,” is what came pouring out of her mouth, and for the umpteenth time in only the last hour, she moved the bag of items she’d bought at Crystal Dolphin
's as far away from him as she could manage without its being obvious. Now that she’d bought the silly things, she had no idea how to broach the subject of any of it with Parker. Knowing she couldn’t carry it around with her indefinitely, she tried instead to bury it under a short stack of Walmart bags until she could either figure out how to work them artfully into the conversation or unobtrusively take them home again.

Sadly, the subject of domination, submission or spanking never came up once. Who’d have thought that possible in a place like the Castle? For the longest time, they weren’t even left alone together. A long line of costumed butlers and maids were reassigned from whatever they normally did to help with the initial task of setting up. They worked in a constant stream, carting in forty long portable tables, with which to bisect the room into a series of neat rows. More than three hundred chairs followed and all Sinclair had to do was stand and point, and
rearrange, and change her mind and then quickly change it back again because the room, as big as it was, was only really big enough to set things up one way in order to support as many people as possible. And in all that time, the only conversation she had with Parker was about where to put things.

Was up against that wall okay? Should there be more or fewer chairs set up along each table? What did she think about a sprinkle of glitter or maybe flower petals down the middle of each table on the day of the event? Bondage was never mentioned once. Nor collars. Nor anything that Sinclair could cleverly use to insinuate that maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t mind exploring some of whatever it was he liked so much about this lifestyle. It was killing her. And the longer that weighted thing hung in the air between them, the more frequently she found herself dashing in between the workers to rescue her bag from imminent discovery. She wished she hadn’t brought it. She wished she and Parker could be left alone for maybe just five minutes or so, but the multitude of Castle helpers continued to come and go unabated, their arms laden with comfortably cushioned folding chairs, and showed no signs of finishing any time soon.

Disappointed, Sinclair went back to work. She put her three buffet tables at the head of the room between the right and left entrances and with the deafening clatter of chairs being set up all around her, she tried to envision what three rounds of three hundred people were going to look and sound like in this room.

“Overwhelmed yet?” Parker asked, while transferring all her bags from the stack on the floor to the tops of the nearest table.

“I’m getting there,” she joked, unobtrusively moving around him to fetch her personal bag before he accidentally found it. If only there weren’t so many people in here. If only she were brave enough to just make a joke, show him some of what she’d bought, maybe strike a sexy pose and ask him how the nipple clamps went on. That old familiar heat wound through her. No. No, she didn’t think she could do any of that. She ended up unpacking tablecloths instead, praying all the while that her face would stop burning.

When the last table was situated and the last chair was tucked up neatly against it, their maid and butler helpers quietly dispersed, leaving Parker and Sinclair finally alone to finish putting up the decorations by themselves. This was the
moment Sinclair had been waiting all night for, and yet, it didn’t make it any easier to broach the unbroachable topic of what she’d found on the internet last night and what she’d spent all those quiet hours in her bed nerving herself up to say. The reality of having to say, “I really like you, so please show me some of the kinky stuff you’re into so I’ll know if I can handle it or not,” remained unpleasantly too awkward to risk.

They worked companionably side by side in a silence that was broken only when she gave directions and he took them. They covered all the tables with the deep red tablecloths, then the smaller lacy white ones
, which they turned diagonally across the tops. They set out the centerpieces, each table receiving a tall crystal vase for the roses set to be delivered Valentine’s morning, followed by two sets of the votive crystal glasses evenly spaced to either side. Parker followed her down the long rows, dropping candles into each as soon as she’d placed them. The tables looked perfect when they were done, but Sinclair was no closer to sidling up to Parker and asking in low and sultry tones if he’d like to help her model her nipple clamps.

“Drapes next?” Parker finally asked, and back to work they went.

The walls were all dark grey stone, but there was a narrow trim of real wood that ran just under the ceiling all the way around the room. With the help of a pair of sturdy step ladders, Parker and Sinclair worked their way around the room, hanging drapes in alternating colors of red, pink and white, Grecian style. There simply wasn’t enough cloth to cover all the stones, but the colors ended up accentuating those thin strips that remained and the effect of the electric torchlight in the dips and shadows of the drapes actually turned the hall into something theatrically beautiful. It was better than she’d hoped for. She took pictures with her cellphone while Parker walked through the hall, picking up discarded plastic packaging and empty store bags. For her first try, she was really rather proud of how this had turned out.

And then she heard it, the heavy crumple of an anonymous paper bag being picked up and opened. Oh God, he’d found the Crystal Dolphin
’s sack. He was holding it. He was looking right at the contents inside. Then he raised his head and looked at her.

Sinclair shot across the room, bumping into one of the food tables with her hip in her haste to snatch the bag back out of his hands. He let it go without comment, watching as she wadded up the bundle as if it were garbage. She blushed furiously, feeling every inch the guilty teenager as she tried, belatedly, to hide the whole damn thing behind her back.

Neither one of them said a word. They just stared at one another and Sinclair blushed even hotter. “It’s nothing,” she finally managed. “These aren’t part of the decorations.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Parker said mildly, his face inscrutable. “I’m far more skill
ed with those kinds of decorations than what we’ve been doing all night.”

If he’d smiled as he said that
, she might have relaxed a little. But he didn’t, and so she didn’t. She shifted back a step, sliding around the end of the table in a vain attempt to get something safe between them. Suddenly, the room felt far too small and intimate. Unfortunately, when she tried to back away, Parker began to stalk her.

“Is there something you want to ask me, Sinclair?” he asked, closing every inch of distance even as she made it.

“No.” Miserable, she tried again to back away. This wasn’t happening at all like she’d hoped it would. It wasn’t sexy. It wasn’t funny. He wasn’t even smiling. Rather, he was intense, focused as he pursued her one step at a time down the entire length of that table until all she wanted to do was drop everything and just run. Fat lot of good that would do. Unless she ran right into Jackson, she was pretty much stuck here.

“Sinclair,” he pressed.

“It’s nothing,” she insisted. “I-I-I… I just… I thought…”

“What?”

Put on the spot, her whole body burning with the heat of her embarrassment, she huffed a laugh that both wasn’t funny and was barely louder than a puff of frustrated breath. She looked at the floor, the table, the drapes they’d spent all night hanging up, because all of that minutia was infinitely easier than having to meet Parker eye-to-eye. “I thought… maybe y-you could show me… whatever it is you like so much about this… stuff.”

Parker didn’t move. He stood before her as stiff as a soldier, his expression offering absolutely no hint at all to what he was feeling, but he didn’t look disappointed or angry or censuring. “Did someone put you up to this?”

His soft voice was as gentle and as reassuring now as it had ever been. For a moment, it was as if they were back in her candy shop, talking seriously a moment as they sometimes did about things that were far and away and had nothing to do with nipple clamps, or faux fur paddles or—God—anal kits.

The paper bag behind her back crinkled as her arms tightened. “No,” she said, shaking her head once. “No one said anything to me at all. I just thought…
I…”

He caught her chin when she tried to look away and searched her face. “Have you ever played before?”

She shook her head again. “I’ve never even looked at things like this before,” she admitted.

“But you went out today and you bought those things,” he guessed. “Why would you do that?”

At the moment, she was having a hard time remembering the reasons herself. “Because I like you,” she said, somewhat pathetically. “If this is what you like, I just thought, shouldn’t I at least try it? But then I got here and there were all those people, and I didn’t know how to say anything, so…” She let her voice trail away. She wished she could see what he was thinking. “I guess I thought you might laugh at me.”

“Do I look like I’m laughing?”

“No, but you don’t look happy either. I’m sorry if I made a mistake.”

He actually looked surprised at that, his fingers on her chin tightening
before he abruptly let her go. For a moment, she thought he was going to walk out of the room, simply leaving her standing there, but he didn’t. He went straight to the far left doors and locked them. When he glanced back at her, a surge of indecipherable thoughts moved through the shadows of his eyes. Across the room, the flickering of electronic torchlight cast him in dancing darkness, blending the black of his leathers with the black of the windowless room. For all the bright decoration they’d just spent all night hanging, an icy chill danced seductively up her spine.

Parker started back across the room. She backed up a step, but it wasn’t her he was coming to. He walked right past her, heading for the far right doors. He locked those too, and finished his circuit at the giant double doors that linked this ballroom with the next. The heavy whump they made when he swung each door closed sounded so…
final. And the clatter of locking bolts sliding home made her shiver.

It had been such a massive room just a few moments ago. Now, as Parker came back to stand before her once more, suddenly it all felt far too small.

“Are you afraid of me, sweetness?” he asked.

Sinclair shook her head, but she was shaking again. She didn’t know when that had started exactly, sometime during those long few minutes when she realized he intended to lock them in together…
and all the rest of the Castle out. “No. I trust you.”

And that was true. She did trust him. Not once in all the months she had known him, flirted with him, laughed and daydreamed about him, had she ever glimpsed a single strange or scary vibe from him. Even when she first saw him walk into the dining hall, dressed all in black leather with Marshall calling him “Master,” had she been afraid. Startled, yes. Intrigued…
okay, maybe. Attracted, hell yes. But not afraid. Never that.

“Do you really?”

She nodded.

“Enough to give yourself to me?”

Her heart gave a single thundering beat and then stopped. Everything in that second fell absolutely still. She forgot how to breathe. She forgot how to blink. “Give myself?” she stammered.

“All of you. Every part. Anything I want. Nobody else matters; it’s just you and me here. Give yourself to me for one hour. I promise—” His dark eyes warming a little as he reached up to brush the rough pad of his thumb over the curve of her cheek. “—I will not hurt you. I won’t violate you or take things further than you are willing to go. If you trust me, sweetness, and if you truly do want to know what it is that I like about this…
stuff, then give yourself to me and let me show you.”

None of this was happening like she’d imagined when she’d been lying in her bed late last night, her body throbbing to be touched and her mind reeling from all the erotic, exotic things she’d just seen online. And yet, when Parker held out his hand, it felt easily like the most natural thing in the world to pass him her bag of scandalous things.

“Okay.” She trembled, but not because she was scared. She’d never done anything like this before in her life, but she took a step closer and she gave herself over into his unfamiliar care. And in that moment, it felt exhilarating.