“For now, be still, habiba, and let me enjoy your beauty. We’ll talk when we get home.” 25

TRUE to his word, Mason had little else to say on the plane, or on the Jeep ride through the rain forest to return to the estate.

When they got there, it was nearing dawn, and she knew it wasn’t likely that she would get anything further from him. On the plane, she’d curled up, her head on his thigh while he’d stroked her hair absently. When she opened her eyes, he was gazing out the window, his thoughts far away. She curled both hands around his leg, holding on to him as if she could be an anchor line to keep him from getting too lost in his mind. As her eyes closed again, she felt his lips brush her temple.

In her dreamlike state, her thoughts wandered. She thought of Hasna and Coman, her room and the view of the ocean from it. In truth, she was anticipating it like a home. Was it because some part of her had been denied simple pleasures so long that she easily fix ated on it that way, after only a couple months? After her night of discarded inhibitions, she was back to the same conflict, the one he refused to let her forget. What was real and illusion, but did she even care anymore? Yes, because it was important to Mason. Of course, she’d insisted he see her, not Farida, when he touched her, so some portion of the reality between them was important to her as well.

Since the sun was rising by the time they got to the estate, they drove into the underground parking garage. The Jeep was outfitted with tinted windows to protect him from sunlight, but she could tell he was instantly more comfortable when he parked the vehicle.

She hadn’t even realized he could drive, but of course it would be absurd if he couldn’t. On the way back, he explained all but a bare skeleton staff had been given several days off. Before she could assume that meant they had the estate pretty much to themselves, and the significance of that, he dispelled the mixed anxiety and pleasure of the thought with a much more harrowing revelation.

“I have some guests coming,” he said quietly, as he took her hand to help her from the Jeep and opened the stairwell door to the upper quarters. “They’ll be here in a couple days. They’re vampires, Jessica.” She stopped on the stair above him. “I see,” she managed.

“You handled yourself well tonight. You can handle yourself with them.” Amara and Enrique would be gone. She would be the only third-marked servant available.

“Jessica.” His hands were on her shoulders, and she realized she’d backed up to the wall, was pushing at him. “You can go back to the city. You don’t have to stay.”

“If you meant that, you would have told me before we left.”

“No. I didn’t tell you then because my mind was elsewhere.” His brow furrowed in a rare expression of frustration, catching her attention, because it made her notice something new and unexpected. He looked tired. Letting her go, he rubbed a hand behind his neck. “I didn’t think of it. With these guests, servants aren’t required to serve as entertainment.”

“Vampires always share servants.” She shook her head. “If you don’t, you lose standing in their eyes.” He took one of her tense hands, so the clasped fingers hung between them, a link. He attempted a smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of me, and you know it.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s practically an unbreakable code for all of you. How do you get a free pass from that?” He sighed, and began to lead her up the stairs, while Jessica tried to force down the butterflies. Vampires always shared servants.

Always.

“Because when it boils down to it,” he said, “what vampires respect more than anything else—no matter what they say or how they act—is strength and power. Control. I happen to have more of those three than any other vampire in the world, save one or two.”

“You’re lying,” she decided. When he glanced at her, she shook her head. “No, I don’t mean about the power and control thing. I don’t know about that, but you do care what others think. Like me, or Amara and Enrique. You don’t care what vampires think.

It’s what they did to you, growing up, that made you hate them, isn’t it?”

“I should have burned that second journal.” He bared his teeth in a feral smile. “Psychoanalysis is an amusing pastime, habiba, but vampires are what they are. Put any of us in a room with a human baby and no blood source, and eventually we will smell a basket of nachos with talcum powder seasoning.”

“Crash an airplane in the Alps, and the survivors will eventually eat the wounded or dead,” she retorted, unimpressed. “You yourself told me that the desire to survive is the strongest imperative, right?” She could feel his irritation rising, but she pressed on anyway. He’d promised her answers here. She wanted them. She wanted a hell of a lot more than that, in fact.

“Occasionally trumped by love.” His gaze flashed. “But that’s appreciated only beyond the grave.”

“Mason.” She gritted her teeth. “I hate it when you bullshit me.” That startled him, not an easy feat. She would have smiled at his expression, if he wasn’t frustrating the hell out of her. “I beg your pardon?”

“You want me to figure things out in my head, to know what I really want. Well, part of that is understanding you, why you’ve done the things you’ve done for me. Why you keep pulling away when you obviously want to fuck me ten ways to Sunday, and keep me as your third-marked servant. I can feel all of that, no matter what you say, but something keeps holding you back. Just tell me, goddamn it. I went through too much, for too long, to be patient over stupid bullshit.” She’d crossed her arms during her tirade, and when she finished, she realized she was shouting, the last words echoing off the walls of the stairwell. Reaching out with firm, not-to-be-refused fingers, he cupped the side of her throat and drew her to him, until she was pressed into his chest, her fingers resting on it, body canted into his. The leg braced on the higher step pressed into her hip, the curve of her buttock. “I would prefer it if you wouldn’t use foul language around me,” he said softly. As she glanced up, the tips of his fangs showed, reminding her it was well past dawn. “It doesn’t suit you, and it offends me.” She set her jaw. “Then answer my fucking questions.”

His nostrils flared. Tension thrummed through his body, and when she would have drawn back, a belated sense of self-preservation, she found he could hold her immobilized with nothing more than that one hand. “Jess, I mean it. You have nothing to fear from my guests, for I do not force my servants to entertain them, vampire etiquette be damned. But I also do not brook active disobedience from my servants. So if you want to get the spanking of your life, I’d keep it up.” His brow drew down, the sensual lips distractingly close. “I will not cause you injury, but it will hurt, as every girl who’s been taken out behind a woodshed by her father knows.”

She swallowed, made herself hold that gaze, knowing as well as he did that most servants didn’t lock gazes with their Masters in a moment like this. “I’ve had skin stripped from my back, my lord. My legs were broken in three places and cuffed in that position so the healing could be delayed until I had been fucked by a quaint little dinner party of five vampires. Do you really think I’m scared of having my ass paddled by Daddy?”

“Yes,” he responded. In a quick shift, he had her against the wall, his thigh pushing between her legs, causing her to suck in a breath. He watched her bite down on her bottom lip. “Because ‘Daddy’ will not only paddle your sweet buttocks; he’ll do it until you’re writhing with pain and pleasure both. Then he will manacle you to the wall next to his bed, put the most relentless little clit stimulator you’ve ever felt between your legs, on just the right setting. Your waist and hips will be anchored so you can’t move, and you’ll be painfully aroused for hours, not allowed to climax until I wake. So you won’t disturb my sleep, I have a perfect ball gag for those clever lips of yours.” His thumb came up now to graze her exposed teeth where they pressed into her lip, swollen with the compression. “The most effective tortures are those of deprivation. You will be begging my forgiveness, promising never to curse again.”

He was quite obviously getting aroused again, but she was being sucked along in the same tide. “Bring it on,” she said, her mind torn between desire and apprehension. “When that’s all done, you’ll still have to tell me what you’re wishing you hadn’t brought up in the limo. And it’s not the Council’s decision. It’s something even more important than that, at least to the two of us. The more we’re together, the more it’s eating at you.”

Mason stared down at her. He had an overwhelming urge to do exactly as he’d threatened, but if he did, he wouldn’t be able to keep from fucking her ten ways to Sunday, as she so inelegantly put it. With an oath he turned and left her, striding up the stairs. It wasn’t easy, not with a hard-on like a tree trunk. He wanted her in his bed. He wanted to finally penetrate her deep, take her into him, make her his.

But because she was right, he left her behind. He had to tell her first.

He slept fitfully. Without Amara and Enrique here, she was fairly unsupervised. But she had the bracelets and collar still, and of course Jorge was on the premises, helping to cover any light maintenance needs as well as minding the horses. But he knew it wasn’t that. He wasn’t going to sleep well until he did take her to his bed. And if that never happened, well, he just wouldn’t sleep well ever again.

He went to find her as soon as the afternoon sun slipped behind the horizon, while rose and gold still bathed the darkening sky. She was sitting on the upper verandah railing, her bare feet dangling over the steep drop to the gardens. As eager as he’d been to see her, Mason stopped in the shadows to study her at a distance, silent, not wanting her to see him yet, dreading what she’d shrewdly perceived he had to tell her.