Purgatory Masters(29)

Maggie shoved her hands in her hair and sighed loudly. Her frustration over this ran deep and she didn’t know how to reconcile who she’d been this morning with who she was now.

Not that she had any idea what the hell that meant. “Fuck!” She yelled the word at the top of her lungs.

She had half a mind to go straight to her office and start deleting half her life’s work. It was all like one colossal fraud. As if she’d been pretending all along to understand something she knew little about. Kind of like how she felt when she was a young girl and she dressed in her mother’s clothes and play-acted what it would be like to be a doctor. She listened to her parents discuss medicine and then she’d take that knowledge to play her role. Is that what she’d done all her life? A role? First her job, then her marriage and then her research.

Maggie lifted her head. What about the book she was writing? Her outlook perked up. Maybe she could use her experience to enrich her research instead of negating it. She’d have to start over with fresh eyes and come at it from a different perspective. Excited to have an idea, she hurried back to her car. She desperately wanted to get to her computer and her notes so she could start making changes. Idea after idea flew through her mind. Ducking into her car, she grinned. The breakthrough she’d been hoping for all along had hit her like a ton of bricks and she owed it all to Tucker.

Maybe when she finished her book, she’d reconsider his offer. Maggie closed the car door and shoved the key in the ignition. For now, she only wanted her computer and maybe a few gallons of caffeine. She had a new story to tell.





Chapter Seven

Tucker blinked and stared at the canvas in front of him. How long had he been sitting here? The quick sketch he’d done of Maggie on the bondage wheel had been transformed into a painting almost as lush as the woman herself. The stark nature of the wood and steel contrasted sharply with the creamy expanse of her skin. Although the memory of the real thing far outweighed any picture.

He moved his neck from side to side and rolled his shoulders. There were no clocks in the studio but his body told him he’d worked way beyond normal as did the finished artwork. Normally a painting of half this caliber would take him weeks. Not days.

Days. Holy shit. He’d worked, slept and ate without leaving this room for at least a few days. He glanced at the cell phone plugged into the wall on the bedside stand. And not a single call since he’d spoken to his sister the day Maggie fled.

Maggie’s silence worried him. It had been a bone-headed move on his part to let things go this long. A mistake he would rectify no matter what it took. While he’d worked at a feverish pace on his masterpiece, he’d relived the scene they enjoyed together over and over again, trying to pinpoint at what moment it had gone wrong. Nothing stuck out to him. She’d reacted to every demand like a natural, her body singing to him the farther he took her. It wasn’t until after, when the adrenaline began to crash that her brain had probably kicked in.

He hated to think what thoughts had prompted her to run, but he’d been a Dom long enough to know that a new sub could and likely would crash pretty hard. If he hadn’t been so concerned for her well-being, the site of her streaking naked out his front door would have made him laugh. For her sake, he was grateful he’d given the housekeeper the day off.

Tucker stood and moved to the desk where he did all of his non-artistic work and booted up his computer. He punched in a password and pulled up the file he’d compiled on everything he could find about Maggie since she’d graduated high school and left town. She’d finished college at the top of her class and immediately took a position teaching at her alma matter where she’d begun dating a fellow professor shortly after she started her new job. Soon after, she wrote her first paper on BDSM and was granted funding to continue her research into the effects of the alternative lifestyle on a long-term basis.

One year later, she married her professor boyfriend and after that the only information he could find was purely professional. Not a single detail about her personal life had been published that he could dig up. Until she’d been arrested… Then there’d been some rumors about her sex life, more than a few jokes published at her expense, and even an article questioning her ability to teach young adults. Something still nagged at him, though. He’d dismissed most of what he’d read as normal tabloid trash, but the look in her eyes in one of the photographs gave him pause, he couldn’t get her out of his mind.

“What other secrets do you have in your closet, Miss Maggie?” He flipped to the picture that had been featured on the front page of the college newspaper. Maggie, dressed in typically conservative clothes being hauled out of a very well known BDSM club in handcuffs. From there things went downhill fast. Thanks to a highly publicized interview between Maggie and the author of a new bestselling erotic thriller, the journalists had begun suggesting that Ms. Cisco had been attempting to turn a fictional novel into a real life scenario between her and two of the patrons of the club.