Freeing Rowan (Masters Club 3)

“I get it,” Brandon replied. “It’s hard to share. But think about the positives of having a sister slave. One of my favorite times is when Cleo and I hole up in one of our rooms late at night, gossiping about the members and comparing notes. I don’t know what I’ll do if Master Jack steals her away from us.”

“Hmm,” Rowan mused. But maybe he was right. After all, look how content he appeared with his arrangement. Maybe a sister slave wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe this training would help her break through the barriers Master John said she’d erected between them. Maybe she’d finally be able to please him.

“Tell me about Master John,” Brandon said, correctly intuiting the direction of her looping thoughts. “How long have you been together? How did you meet him? What made you fall in love?”

“Let’s see,” Rowan replied, returning to the moment. “We’ve been together almost three months now.” She smiled. “It was kind of amazing really, the way it worked out. I was just finishing my degree at Pratt.”

“So, you’re just a baby, right out of school?” Brandon asked.

“Not that young,” Rowan replied with a laugh. “I’m nearly twenty-four. Even with scholarships, it took me six years to graduate because I was working full-time on top of my course load.”

“Good for you,” Brandon said. “School was never my thing, but I admire people with that kind of drive. Pratt is an arts school, right? What are you? A painter? A sculptor? A graphic designer?”

“I’m a painter. Mostly abstracts. For the past year, I’ve been doing this series of portraits, but instead of painting someone’s face, I paint them like skies.”

“Wait, I’m not following,” Brandon said, wrinkling his nose. “How do you paint someone like a sky?”

She chuckled. “I know it sounds weird, but it’s going really well. I’m amassing a significant portfolio.”

“Sweet.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, happy to talk about her work. “Mostly, I paint people I know, but sometimes it’s just someone I see on the street who looks interesting. I’ve gotten really good at snapping surreptitious photos with my phone,” she added with a laugh. “I like to imagine what someone’s personality is based on their expression. If they looked down, I might paint them in dark grays and blues, fading into black. Someone else might be a sunset, rich golds and oranges melting into indigo. Someone else a dark, roiling sky, with storm clouds on the horizon.”

“Wow, that sounds really cool,” Brandon said. “I’d love to hear more about it. But first, back to Master John. You were saying how you met.”

“Oh, yeah. Master John is an art dealer, a very successful one. He was doing a stint as an adjunct professor at Pratt when I met him. I took a course he offered about business strategy. It’s something most artists, me included, don’t like to think about. I figured it might give me a leg up, in the event I ever made it as an actual artist. When I went to the first class, I noticed almost all the students were women, which I thought was odd. Then he came into the lecture hall, and I saw why.”

She closed her eyes, remembering the first time she saw John Garfield, back before things got so fucking complicated.

“The guy was the most drop-dead gorgeous man I’ve ever seen in my life. Period. Thick dark hair, rich brown bedroom eyes, this luscious mouth you either want to paint or kiss or both. He just turned thirty-nine but you’d never know it. He looks like a young Richard Gere, only better. To top it off, he has this deep, silky voice and this intense, penetrating gaze every girl in the class was sure was directed right at her, including me. I had to force myself to close my mouth that first time I saw him. It had actually fallen open.”

“The coed and the professor,” Brandon said with a grin.

“No, no. It wasn’t like that,” Rowan protested. “I never hung around after class like some of the girls, pretending they had questions about the lecture. That wasn’t where we connected. It was a week after I’d finished the course, actually. I was at this BDSM club I used to go to and who should I see there but John Garfield! It took me a minute to recognize him, all decked out in black leather.”

“No kidding,” Brandon exclaimed. “That must have been weird. Worlds colliding and all that.”

“Right? But, just like at school, there were all these girls hanging off him. No way I was going to approach him. But then he came over to me! He recognized me from class, and if he was freaked out to see me there at the club, he didn’t show it. He informed me we were going to scene together. Not in a bossy way,” she hastened to add, aware how it might sound. “It was more in that super confident Dom way some guys just have, you know? Like it’s a foregone conclusion you’ll want to scene with him.”