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without seeing anything except the way Sara had looked when Robert (aka Dickwad) washed his hands of her, right here, in the middle of the hallway. He hadn’t even had the courtesy of pulling her off to someplace private first. Nope, he’d shredded her dignity and self-esteem in front of Jackson and whoever else had been passing by at the time, and then he’d just walked away.
    Walked away. Like she didn’t even matter. How could he do that? Jackson couldn’t begin to understand it. In the back of his mind, he tried to guess what Marshall might have given him—another room, another submissive—some good time little girl with a ready smile, someone uncomplicated, someone who had come here geared to fuck and suck and submit because she wanted to play the game.
    That wasn’t Sara. Sara didn’t do this for games. She did it because deep down inside her, she needed this. She needed to feel overwhelmed by the will of another. She needed to feel herself bending, yielding, submitting, and damn but he wanted to be the one compelling her to give in. Her submission back at the Shadowbrook Den had been so beautiful, so complete the one and only time they’d played together. She’d been a fucking fantasy brought to life beneath his mouth and hands. Wanting to please him had been like breathing to her, so instinctive and necessary.
    At the time he’d thought if he could Top her once, he might have a shot at some kind of relationship. A steady couple arrangement would have been his preference—he’d always been something of an optimist that way. A Master/submissive contract within the Den, if only at the munches—would not have been ideal, but he could have lived with that. But something had scared her and, after that one time, Sara had refused to let him Top her again. He had no idea what he’d done wrong.
    A couple walked by—the female in nothing but high heels and a leash, the Master in only a pair of red leather breeches and spike-studded wrist cuffs. Jackson watched them walk downstairs, heading for the Rainbow Room, and felt again that hard knot that had gripped his gut way back in Shadowbrook, when he’d stood on the sidelines, surrounded by flirtatious subs and watching while Sara let herself be topped by someone else. Oh, she’d always come to sit beside him both before and afterward, laughing, talking, smiling as if nothing were wrong. But she never did let him scene with her again and she never gave him a reason why.
    Then the fire had happened.
    Sherman Nelson. He could still remember the man’s name. He’d been new, but it wasn’t his first time fire fleshing and to be honest, it wasn’t fair to blame the man. Fire play was exactly that; it was playing with fire, and like the old adage said, people could get burned.
    God, he could still remember the smell. The screaming. The wild look on people’s faces as they’d come racing out into the smoking area, where he’d been tapping out his pipe. By the time he’d got in there, the fire was out, they had her untied from the table, ambulances were on the way, Sherman had third -degree burns on his hand from trying to extinguish her, and Sara…
    His gut clenched all over again.
    A woman plopped down on the bench beside him—petite, dark haired, pretty in a spoken-for sort of way—and bumped his shoulder soft and playful with her own.
    He made himself smile. Good ol’ smiling Jackson. He tipped himself and bumped her shoulder back. “Hey, Kaylee.”
    “Hey. How’s it hanging?”
    His smile wasn’t quite so forced now. “Little to the left. You?”
    “Little to the left,” she quipped back.
    Jackson liked Kaylee. He’d pretty much liked her right from the start, back when she’d been a scared little newbie searching for her niche. That Marshall himself had taken her under his expert wing had surprised no one; that the experienced Master had fallen for her practically instantly had. So, ha. Happy endings happened in this sort of place after all.