Saving Sara (Masters of the Castle)

  Saving Sara

  Masters of the Castle Book Three

  By

  Maren Smith

  ©2013 by Blushing Books® and Maren Smith

  All rights reserved.

  No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  Smith, Maren

  Saving Sara

  Masters of the Castle Book Three

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62750-2665

  Cover Design by edhgraphics.blogspot.com

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as Blushing Books' or the author's advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A very wise person once told me there is no such thing as: “My kink is okay; you’re just sick.” I agree with this. Kink, as I view it, is any sexual preoccupation that goes beyond the realm of vanilla sex and which involves one or more consenting adults. Once upon a time, oral sex was considered deviant, regardless of whether you swallowed or not. Anal sex is still on the books as being illegal in some states. Both of these are now so commonplace they are practically mundane—which is wonderful really, since I happen to enjoy both.

  I have been writing and publishing spanking romances for twenty years, but BDSM isn’t just spanking. It arcs a wide, wide field of enjoyable fetishes, many of which rarely (if ever) get seen in the black and white of the printed page. My initial goal with the Masters of the Castle series was to showcase the beauty found in these less-often read about activities.

  In the course of my research, I’ve met a lot of really fun Doms and Dommes, HOHs, and Tops and Bottoms who were only too happy to show me the ropes (pun intended) and let me feel firsthand the unique sensations involved in each of the scenarios I’ve described in this series. I hope some of these experiences intrigue you, dear reader. I hope others don’t weird you out too much. And, if by some small margin of success I manage to interest you in trying something outside your comfort zone, I ask only that you please go about doing so safely.

  Find a local munch (Fetlife.com is a good place to start—yes, I said start—looking). Join a group, attend the meetings, learn how to be as safe as possible while exploring new avenues in the big, bad world of BDSM. Like bungee jumping, skydiving and NASCAR racing, there is a right and a wrong way to flog, shock and sexually torture your partner or yourself into submission. People get hurt when they don’t know what they’re doing. Please, please, please don’t be one of them.

  Last, but certainly not least, this series is dedicated to each and every member of the Fetlife group to which I belong—thank you so much for stringing me up, tying me down, shocking the hell out of me, setting me on fire (and seriously, thank you for putting me out again), and for basically letting me explore all the fragile nuances to these crazy things I like to write about. Bless you all. You are my home away from home.

  Table of Contents:

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  MAREN SMITH

  OTHER BOOKS BY MAREN SMITH

  CHAPTER ONE, HOLDING HANNAH

  CHAPTER ONE, KAYLEE'S KEEPER

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  CHAPTER ONE

  Sara Abrams had a hard time getting off the bus. For almost fifteen minutes, it idled in front of the Castle, a massive gray structure of old Scottish stones and fifteenth-century architecture, awesome and yet so out of place in this freshly-cut Ohio wheat field. All the other passengers had long since disembarked. Beside her, her boyfriend Robert sat shaking his head and trying hard not to fume.

  “Do you want to go back to town?” he finally asked.

  Yes… but she didn’t say it. “No, of course not. We’re here, aren’t we?”

  She made herself move, bending under the seat to drag out her carry-on, and then stood up. After so long on the bus, her hip was a little stiff. It took a few steps before she could walk without limping. By the time she reached the head of the bus, she had limbered up enough to tackle the stairs. Robert still went down first and reached back, offering up his hand for support. Though she stepped out into bright sunlight, she felt no warmth on her shoulders or back.

  “You okay?” Robert asked, in pretty much the same tone he’d used every other time he’d asked: slightly sympathetic, mostly impatient.

  Nodding, Sara self-consciously pulled her long blonde hair forward to hide the burn scars on the left side of her neck. She didn’t want to drag the vacation down. They’d both paid a lot of money to be here and she had agreed to come. Hell, she’d been the one to suggest it, not just the vacation together, but the Castle in particular. Even more, this was supposed to be the fun-filled trip that reconnected them both as Top and Bottom and, more importantly, as a couple. It wasn’t her intent to do anything to jeopardize that, and yet in the very back of her mind, she couldn’t shake the feeling that coming here might have been a mistake. Across the parking lot, the gaping entrance in the admission gate looked like a hungry mouth crowned by jagged iron teeth. She managed a small smile for Robert’s benefit, but she didn’t want to walk through it.

  Her smile couldn’t have been convincing, but Robert, she knew, believed it because he wanted to be here that badly. Adding her bag to the rest of their luggage being unloaded from the outer compartments, he hauled it to the line of porters waiting to schlepp everything inside to their assigned rooms. There was something to be said for resorts that did all the worst parts of vacationing for you.

  “Let’s go have some fun.” Taking her hand, Robert laced their fingers—one of the things she liked best about him; when he held her hand like this, it always made her feel so…connected—and then pulled her into step behind all the other people tromping across the drawbridge. The Castle even had a moat, inhabited by colorful koi and a smattering of water lilies. The koi must have been accustomed to visitors feeding them because they followed her shadow close to the water’s surface all the way across the bridge.

  Passing through the portcullis and into the enclosed inner courtyard, it was hard not to be struck by just how massive this place was. The size of a city block at least, the outer walls encircled not only the Castle but half a dozen outbuildings: a stable with horses of the two- and four-legged variety, some hay carts, a smithy and on the far right, a hedge maze garden that stretched around the side as far as she could see. Two white stone statues stood sentry where the grass met the courtyard cobblestones: a master on one side, a mistress on the other.

  Sara followed Robert’s lead, staring at both, feeling a small tickle of newly-budding anticipation reluctantly unfurling in the pit of her stomach and spreading outward until that old familiar prickle began to travel across her bottom and the
backs of her thighs. The alabaster eyes of that unblinking master seemed to stay with her all the way to the registration tables. He had such a presence about him. She liked that. It kept drawing her eye.

  Three tables in all were set up along the wall just inside the gate. Each table had two attendants and each attendant managed one line of guests with swift efficiency. By the time they’d joined the others, Sara and Robert were dead last to be registered, but they couldn’t have waited more than five minutes before they were standing directly before the cheerful and scantily-costumed maid who would attend them. She took their medical records and signed accountability waivers, adding each to a manila file.

  “Welcome to the Castle,” she said, handing them pens and copies of their online application for final approval and signature. “Your bracelets are inside your welcome packets, along with your maps and room assignments. Orientation starts in about five minutes, so please take a minute to look over your applications and sign each section to show you still agree with and approve of what you’ve written. Even though you brought your own partner,” she beamed at them, “regulations are still regulations.”

  “You bet,” Robert said smiling, and Sara pretended not to notice how his eyes went straight to the abundant cleavage that the spritely maid’s outfit openly displayed.

  They took their seats in the middle row of the half-moon circle of chairs arranged before a simple announcement dais. Opening her sealed packet, Sara tipped out the contents, looking at the purple bracelet first. Robert had two, a purple and a white. Their room assignment was written on the upper right corner of each of their applications. Thankfully, the room numbers matched.

  So far, so good.

  “They don’t leave anything to chance, do they?” she noted, clicking the tip of her pen into readiness and bending her attention to initial each line of her previously completed questionnaire.

  “I imagine they have to be if they want to avoid being sued.” Robert was already halfway finished with his first page.

  It wasn’t a contest, but she hurried to catch up with him anyway, skimming each of her answers. There wasn’t a single question on this application that she hadn’t answered with complete honesty, and in the two months between then and now, not one of her answers had changed. Yes, she was still female, still straight, still submissive. Yes, she still had interests in…good lord, had she really checked off that many fetishes? Sara went down the list: anal, biting, blindfolds, bondage, breast/nipple torture, clamps, etc… Wait a minute. Why was cupping on here?

  Sara sat staring at that and, further down the list, found fire play as well. Cold like a fist gripped her insides. She didn’t turn to look, but from the corner of her eye, she thought she saw Robert checking her progress as he initialed his own answers. She waited until he glanced over at her page before quietly and deliberately crossing both those things out.

  He didn’t say a word.

  Neither did she. Everything else on her list she agreed with. At the bottom, where it was indicated, she signed her name and then slipped the application back into its anonymous envelope. The front door of the Castle opened soon after, and a dark-haired woman emerged to make her way to the dais. Sara knew her at once from the brochure: Mrs. Hardwick, regal in appearance and manner, dressed like an old-fashioned housekeeper, and quite possibly the tallest woman Sara had personally ever seen in her life. She greeted them all with a slight smile and a ready spiel of the Castle rules. Anonymity, to be adhered to at all times, so use your assigned names. Consent, also to be adhered to; no means no, and pay attention to the safewords. Bracelets to be worn at all times, even in the seclusion of assigned apartments. Sara listened, but apart from the bracelets, there weren’t many differences from the play-party guidelines that ruled the dungeons she used to be a member of back when she lived in California. What differences there were, were all common sense ones. Sara relaxed a little, and before she realized it was going to happen, the tall woman on the dais was calling the dominants from the group.

  A cold sweat popped out across Sara’s back when Robert laid his hand on hers and gave her fingers a squeeze.

  “You’ll be all right,” he said.

  It wasn’t a question; she nodded anyway, but he had already let her go and was standing up to leave. If she had said no, a tiny voice in the very back of her mind whispered, would he have left her there and gone inside with the other dominants anyway?

  Stop thinking like that, she scolded herself. She wanted to be here. She needed to be here. This was going to be good for them.

  “I’ll see you soon.” Robert flashed her that boyishly charming smile of his, and then he was gone, squeezing out of the row past those still seated and heading toward the group of white-bracelet wearing dominants and the stiff and proper Victorian-style “butler” waiting to lead them away.

  Sara clasped her hands in her lap, squeezing tight as she watched him go.

  He’s not a crutch. Stop leaning on him.

  But stark feelings of abandonment swept her anyway, and she couldn’t stop herself from trembling.

  She wanted to be here. She had nothing to be afraid—

  Two fingers tapped her left shoulder, coming in on her scarred side and startling her so badly that she nearly jumped up out of her seat. She jerked around, one hand flying up to cover the spot where the scars under her clothing were throbbing, in an attempt to twist the simple sensation of being touched until it felt like pain.

  The woman sitting directly behind her jumped too. She grabbed her chest and then, after a second or two, cracked a smile, though her eyes remained wide and now glimmered with uncertainty. “Sara?” she whispered.

  Sara startled all over again. Total anonymity, that’s what the brochure had claimed. How did this woman know her name? “Y-yes?”

  “I didn’t mean to startle you.” The woman’s smile grew just a bit, but she seemed no less uncertain. “You probably don’t remember me. We never actually met. I’d only started attending the Shadowbrook Den when you…uh—” Her eyes flicked to the only one of Sara’s burn scars that was visible—the one on her neck, that ugly pucker of skin that crawled up out of her shirt collar to engulf and distort her left ear lobe. “—when you left,” the woman finished awkwardly.

  A flicker of recognition itched at Sara, followed very quickly by dread. “Oh.” It was all she could think of to say. “Oh yeah. I…I think I remember you.”

  “I wasn’t there that night, but I heard about what happened.” That awkward sympathy on her face and in her voice grew more pronounced. So did Sara’s dread. “The fire,” the woman specified, as if there could be any doubt.

  Sara made herself smile. “I’m okay.”

  The woman looked at her scar, the one her hair and high collar couldn’t hide. She took her hand back. “You look good,” she said, just a little too earnestly.

  And that was the end of that conversation.

  Sara eased back in her chair and faced forward again. In her lap, her hands fisted even tighter. Inside, she felt sick.

  “Purple bracelets,” Mrs. Hardwick on the dais called, and Sara all but leapt to her feet. She exited the group of chairs, moving more clumsily than Robert had, her hip having already begun to seize up again. She limped all the way up to the front, joining two other women and one man in an impromptu group beside another maid, but then she glanced back. Unfortunately, the woman was following her to the dais.

  “Looks like we’re going to the same place,” she said, trying for cheerfulness now.

  Yay.

  Sara looked away. The Castle was a big place. It was entirely possible Sara wouldn’t see this woman again for the duration of her stay.

  “My lords and ladies.” Mrs. Hardwick bowed as she addressed them and then gestured to the housemaid who had separated herself from the line of Castle servants who stood waiting to one side. “Natalie is going to show you to Wardrobe and then take you to your assigned rooms. Your Dominants will join you there shortly.”

 
“I hope our rooms are close together,” the woman, now beside Sara, whispered. “It’d be nice having a familiar face while we’re here.”

  “Yeah,” Sara said and tried to smile, but that sickly sensation inside her was churning now.

  She wanted to be here, she told herself again. She needed to be here. This was going to be good for them—her and Robert. Nothing else mattered.

  “We’re going to have such a great time,” the woman beside her said, beginning to sound excited.

  “Yeah,” Sara—the one-track recording—said again. She tried to shake herself out of it. “A great time. Sure.”

  Now all she had to do was make herself believe that.

  * * * * *

  “This place has everything!” Robert declared as he came barreling into their assigned room. His face was flushed, he was so excited. And damn, but he looked good.

  Sara didn’t know if dominants got to pick their clothes the way submissives did, but if so, he had definitely chosen right—black leather pants, white poet-sleeved shirt unlaced halfway down his handsome chest and a black leather vest that brought the contrast between them together. She had a thing for leather: the feel of it, smell of it, sight of it. His outfit absolutely made hers—cream-colored brocade, off-the-shoulder princess gown with a shawl that hid her burns (all but the one that crawled up the side of her neck), and a matching corset that made her breasts look twice as large and her waist twice as small. Sara got up off the bed where she’d been sitting, limping slightly as she met him halfway across the floor of the small apartment they’d been assigned to share.

  “Everything,” Robert gushed again. “Dungeon, stockade, equipment the likes of which makes the Shadowbrook look like a wanna-be beginners group!”

  Her heart gave a faltering skip when he caught her face between his warm hands and kissed her soundly. When he pulled back, he looked at her so warmly, so sexily. It was exactly like the looks he used to give her back when they’d first started dating—back before he realized how screwed up she was.