My Hunger

  Dear Readers:

  Thank you for taking the journey through the Inside Out world with me. This story continues the story that Mark and Crystal began in The Master Undone. You can read My Hunger as a stand-alone story, but I believe you will find it a more pleasurable read if you read The Master Undone first.

  I hope you enjoy!

  Lisa

  Part One

  It Never Happened

  New York

  I’m sitting in my mother’s hospital room where she is sleeping soundly, her body trying to fight off stage 3 breast cancer. I lean back in the recliner, pretty sure my normally neatly trimmed blond hair is standing on end and turning gray from the hell of the past three days. Nearby, my father pays attention to his notebook computer, no more rested than I have been for the past week. We were sideswiped by the cancer diagnosis, the timing vicious since I’ve just lost someone close to me. Worry for my mother and guilt over that death eat away at my mind and body.

  To most, Rebecca had been an employee at my San Francisco art gallery. To some, she’d been known to be my submissive, a woman who shared my home and my life. To me, she was so much more than either of those things—so much more than anyone, including her, will ever know. Knowing I couldn’t be what she wanted me to be, I had let her go, and I’d believed that for months she was off traveling the world with a rich man she’d met. She’d called me and promised to return, and I’d promised things would be different. But she never showed up, and I’d believed she’d blown me off. Instead, she’d been murdered by another woman I’d brought to our bed at a time I’d desperately been fighting what I felt for Rebecca. A woman who’d killed her out of jealousy. I’m not sure how I can live with that. Right now I’m only doing it for my mother, and barely doing it at all.

  More guilt eats at me as my mind goes back to last night, when I’d done what I always do: used sex to fight the hell in my mind, to control the demons clawing at my insides. I tell myself Rebecca, more than anyone, knew that was my way. She understood me and what sex and control are to me. But even if I get right about what I did, I can’t understand my illogical choice to get naked with Crystal Smith. Knowing she is acting manager of Riptide in my mother’s absence and thus too close to my family for the distance I like to keep with my women, I still fucked her.

  No. It was more like spontaneous, out-of-control sex. And I do not do spontaneous, out-of-control sex. I do planned Master and submissive encounters. I do contracts. I do it my way. She is everything I don’t want, yet the minute she’d shown up at my hotel for work, and our eyes had met, the inevitable was in the air.

  In all of ten minutes we were naked, and she’d been screaming more, more more. Demanding more, when it is I who demand. I who decide when and how, and what is satisfaction. There was not a submissive bone in Crystal’s body last night—or ever, for that matter—and I’d still wanted her.

  I don’t understand it. I need to understand it, and me. But more than anything, I’m bothered by the way she’d darted away, leaving me a note I’ve re-read in my head a million times, with troubling conclusions.

  Mr. Compton:

  I’m sparing you the awkward morning after. This never happened. Okay, maybe it did. But this really was “just” a fuck.

  Ms. Smith

  Just a fuck . . . Those three words bother me not because she wrote them, but because the very fact that this was not my normal kind of fuck, makes it not just a fuck. What happened between us means I have a problem. I don’t trust myself to be the Master, to be responsible for anyone else’s pleasure, let alone their safety, anymore.

  My cell phone rings in my pocket and I quickly remove it so it doesn’t wake my mother. The caller is the very woman who’s been driving my mind in circles, and I push to my feet, motioning toward the door at my father. He waves at me, flicking me a look with softer gray eyes than mine, quickly returning his attention to the video footage of the college baseball team he says he’s using to plan his next play for the championship. But I know him. Baseball is to him what it once was to me, before my world shattered and emptied a whole lot of hell into my life. It’s what sex has now become for me. It’s control—a place to funnel the crap he doesn’t want to bleed into the rest of his life.

  Stepping into the hallway, I pull the door shut. “I trust your travels went well, Ms. Smith,” I say, referencing her trip to Los Angeles to make a big purchase for Riptide.

  “Crystal,” she corrects.

  “That’s not what the note you left me last night, when you ran off, said.”

  “I didn’t run off. I left before we had an awkward moment neither of us needed.”

  “So you thought leaving me a note that assured me it was ‘just a fuck’ achieved that goal?”

  “Thanks for putting that out there in all its bright and shiny glory. No discretion with you, I see.”

  “You told me you don’t like people to filter, so I’m not.”

  “Hmmm. It’s more like you’re trying to prompt a reaction from me, but I’ll stick with facts. So here they are. My message was simply that your giving me an orgasm does not mean I require roses and chocolates. We’re business as usual, and you can count on me to do my job and do it well.”

  The mention of roses, so symbolic in my relationship with Rebecca, stirs my inner demons to life with a vengeance, and I use this opening to do exactly as she’s indicated. Get back to business, starting with the large check that I’d written her to make an out-of-state, in-person purchase, which had been her reason to stop by my hotel room yesterday. “Then I take it that means you spent my hundred K well.”

  “It was a rough trip but yes, I did. The seller was an asshole who tried to jack the price up on our purchase, but I stayed firm and got the Beatles items for the one hundred thousand he agreed on. After seeing them, I’m even more certain that we’re going to make double that on the auction block.”

  “I’ll be impressed if we do.”

  “Really? I wasn’t sure impressing you was possible.”

  “I’m impressed when someone does something exceptional, Ms. Smith.” Certain she’s about to correct me on the use of her name again, I quickly ask, “When will you be back in New York?”

  “I’m at the airport now. If we take off by eleven L.A. time I should be there by eight New York time.”

  “Call me when you get in. I leave in the morning. We need to discuss some things before I do.”

  “Oh. Well . . . I . . .”

  “For once, she’s speechless,” I say dryly.

  “No. I’m not.” She sounds convincingly indignant. “But if this is about us and—”

  “Last night never happened,” I say. “You said so in your note, and therefore there’s nothing to talk about in that regard. Call me when you get here.” I pause, and for no reason other than it’s not what she’s expecting and because it leaves me in control, not her, I softly finish the sentence with “Crystal” and then hang up.

  It’s nearly nine when Crystal calls me again and I answer as I climb into my rental in the hospital garage. “I just got home,” she says.

  “There’s a restaurant named Jake’s a block from your apartment. Meet me there in thirty minutes.”

  She’s silent a moment and I’m certain she’d expected me to say my hotel room. Until a few minutes ago, so had I. “Okay. I’ll be there.”

  “Until then,” I reply, hanging up. And when I start driving, it’s with determination to keep things with Crystal where they belong: all business, and me in control.

  Fifteen minutes later I arrive at Jake’s, a ritzy American cuisine joint, and since it’s Sunday night and a later hour, it’s sparsely populated. I easily claim a fairly private but compact, black half-moon shaped booth. Combine the size of the seating with the back corner
location and the seductive glow provided by a dangling tear-drop light, and we’re in intimacy overload.

  I’ve just settled into the seat facing the door when Crystal enters, and there’s an instant thrum of awareness in me that I don’t expect or welcome. She spots me and comes forward, her black trench coat parting to reveal a slim-cut, fitted red dress that hugs the curves I know so intimately. Tracking her every step, that thrum becomes deeper, and unwillingly I find myself anticipating how she smells, remembering how she tastes. My reaction to her remains wholly illogical in every way. She’s blond, when I like brunettes; outspoken and quick-witted when I prefer quietly intelligent; and last night she painted a picture of obvious expectancy, whereas I crave eager and willing.

  The more she closes the distance between me and her, the more certain I am that a public place isn’t where I need to be with Crystal. It’s alone with her, fucking her the right way, until she’s begging, not demanding. Washing away the memory of how out of myself I’d been when we were together, allowing myself to get my head back on straight—where it has to be when I return to San Francisco and face what awaits me there.

  Standing up, I greet her coolly, a perfect gentlemen as my parents taught me to be. I’m taken off guard by the way her sweet, feminine scent stirs memories of her naked and in my arms, and it spikes an instant, ravenous hunger through me. Our eyes connect and I see heat there, and the confirmation that we both know damn well that last night happened, and it’s not going away. Now we both have to decide what, if anything, to do about it.

  “Hi,” she says softly, almost timidly, and this part of her is as much who she is as the one who screamed more at me. The contrast appeals to me. She appeals to me.

  “Hello, Ms. Smith,” I reply.

  “Make up your mind,” she insists. “Is it Crystal or Ms. Smith?”

  My lips curve. “I find I’m surprisingly willing to keep my options open where you’re concerned. Let me help you with your coat.” I step behind her, my hands settling on her shoulders, my actions making my words a command rather than a question. I do not intend to ask Crystal Smith for anything.

  “Thank you,” she murmurs, shrugging out of the trench coat.

  Testing the tension between us, I drag it down her arms, letting my hands caress the sheer red chiffon sleeves of her dress, and she shivers. The attraction between us is a simmering heat ready to boil over, and no matter how absolutely wrong she is for me, or me for her, we aren’t through with each other.

  The waiter appears and I’m handing off Crystal’s coat when she whirls around and intercepts it. “I’ll keep it here,” she says quickly.

  The way she holds it close tells me she’s preparing for a fast retreat, which means I’d been right. She ran from my hotel room.

  I motion to the seat, silently suggesting we sit, but she doesn’t immediately move. Of course not. That would suggest a hint of submission, and she doesn’t intend to submit. And since I don’t intend to ever convert another woman who isn’t already living the lifestyle, we have no options. We cannot fuck again, no matter how much tension is in the air.

  So we stand there, the seconds ticking by, and I arch a brow. Her sweet little pink tongue flicks over her lush, red-painted lips, and I think of how close I’d been to having that tongue and mouth on my cock. I slide into the booth, noticing how Crystal sits far from the center, where lovers might gravitate. We, though, are not lovers. We are “just a fuck.” Not even two.

  The waiter returns and offers us menus. Crystal accepts hers, opening it, and glances across the table at me. “Do you have a recommendation?”

  “We’re both virgins tonight,” I say.

  She laughs, mischief in her eyes. “I’m pretty sure you weren’t a virgin even when you were born, Mark Compton.” The waiter chokes and Crystal flushes, as if she’d forgotten he was there.

  I cut a look at the college-age waiter, who is looking like a deer in the headlights, not sure if he should go or stay. “Do you have a recommendation?”

  Looking relieved, he quickly replies, “Best burger and fries in New York City.”

  “Just fries for me,” Crystal says. “And a Diet Coke.” She slides her menu across the table. “The diet drink makes up for the grease.”

  This somehow perfectly fits the logic I’m coming to expect from her. “I’ll take the burger with my fries,” I say, also offering my menu to the waiter. “Well done, with bacon and cheddar cheese.” My lips quirk. “And a Diet Coke to combat the grease.”

  He snatches up our menus and departs. Crystal smiles at me. “I’m a good influence on your diet.”

  “Had I known Diet Coke killed grease, I’d have given up my gym routine and healthy eating for burgers and fries a long time ago.”

  She sighs, and the tension I’d sensed in her seems to be fading. “Truthfully, I normally force myself to order a salad, but I’m just too exhausted to care tonight.”

  “I trust you had our contracted courier handle the delivery of the auction items?”

  “Yes. They should arrive tomorrow.”

  “And I’ll head back to San Francisco tomorrow. They hope to release my mother from the hospital on Thursday, so if all goes well I’ll be back by then.”

  “Don’t worry about Riptide. I’ll take care of the auction house and let you know if I have a problem I need help with.” Her tone sobers. “You can count on me, Mark. Nothing is going to change that, and I’m very attached to your mother.”

  “As she is to you.” My curiosity about why she doesn’t work for her family’s computer empire gets the best of me. “Are you close to your mother, as well?”

  “I love her very much, but we’re very different. I think I bond with your mother because we’re so alike.”

  “Driven and hard-headed,” I comment. “I’d have to agree. And your mother is . . . ?”

  She seems to consider her choice of words before saying, “Submissive.”

  “Submissive,” I repeat, reminded of a few other comments that make me wonder if she’s more familiar with the BDSM world than she’s let on. “To your father?”

  “To him and to everything. It’s her personality.”

  “Then you inherited the dominant gene from your father, I assume.”

  “I’m adopted, so what I inherited are overly protective, loving parents and two brothers. If they all had their way, I’d work for the family business and I’d live in a luxury apartment I didn’t earn myself. They’d examine the resumes of any men wishing to date me and ask for a medical report on anyone I slept with, and in general my world would be those roses and chocolates I mentioned.”

  Her words seem playful, but there’s something dark in her eyes, something vulnerable—and if I’m right, there’s pain. “How old were you when you were adopted?” I ask, choosing my questions cautiously.

  “Fourteen, and yes, it’s an old age to get adopted.”

  I know what it’s like to bury something that hurts that you don’t want to be known, and I know when I see it in someone else, as I do now with her. Suddenly there’s so much more to Crystal Smith than there was before, an explanation for why I’m drawn to her.

  About to ask where she was before the adoption, I silently curse when the waiter appears and places our drinks on the table.

  “So,” Crystal says the instant we’re alone, as if she’s trying to direct the conversation away from whatever I might ask next. “You mentioned wanting to talk to me about something. What is it?”

  Seeing no point in waiting, I reply, “I assume you know what happened with my gallery back in San Francisco?”

  “I know your sales rep Mary was arrested for trying to move counterfeit art through Riptide, and shockingly Ricco Alvarez was involved. I’m not sure what makes a famous artist worth millions do such a thing.”

  Jealousy over Rebecca. “The important thing is that you’re prepared for customers who might have read about it and have questions.”

  “Your mother and I discussed how to hand
le press inquiries and customer concerns.”

  There’s one problem solved. “Do you know about Rebecca?”

  “The last I heard, she was on a leave of absence.”

  A band seems to tighten around my chest. “She was.”

  Brow furrowing, Crystal asks, “Was? She’s back or . . .” Her eyes go wide. “Oh no. Was she involved in the counterfeit situation, too? Your mother seemed to think so much of her. That would destroy her.”

  She’s right. My mother was fond of Rebecca, much like she is of Crystal. “She wasn’t involved. She’s dead.”

  “What? God. No. How? Did she catch Mary and Ricco? Did they . . . did they kill her?”

  Though I prefer to keep my private life private I don’t have that option with the press involved, and she has to be prepared for what might be thrown her direction. “I was seeing Rebecca. We broke up and she took a leave of absence to travel the world with a new man she’d started dating. That was months ago and she’d gone silent on us all.” I leave out the part about me asking Rebecca to return. It’s not relevant and that’s a personal boundary I plan to keep in place. I continue, “Two nights ago, Sara stopped by my house to ask me a question. Ava, the manager of the coffee bar next to the gallery, was with me at the time, and though Sara and I have nothing personal going on, Ava went nuts. She attacked Sara, and threatened to kill her as she had Rebecca.”

  Crystal gasps and covers her mouth. “I . . . no. Is it true? Are you sure?”

  “The police checked Rebecca’s passport and confirmed that she returned to San Francisco a few months ago, but no one ever saw or heard from her. The assumption is that Ava got to her before anyone else did. Unfortunately, Ava’s retracted her confession. I’m going to do my best to try and close the gap that a lack of evidence creates, and help the police keep her behind bars.”

  “So,” she asks, sounding tentative, “there’s no body?”

  “No.”

  “Then there’s hope she’s alive.”

  My throat thickens. “The police don’t think so.”