Sweet Sinclair (Masters of the Castle) by Maren Smith

Parker walked through the hall, picking up discarded plastic packaging and empty store bags. For her first try, she was really rather proud of how this had turned out.
    And then she heard it, the heavy crumple of an anonymous paper bag being picked up and opened. Oh God, he’d found the Crystal Dolphin ’s sack. He was holding it. He was looking right at the contents inside. Then he raised his head and looked at her.
    Sinclair shot across the room, bumping into one of the food tables with her hip in her haste to snatch the bag back out of his hands. He let it go without comment, watching as she wadded up the bundle as if it were garbage. She blushed furiously, feeling every inch the guilty teenager as she tried, belatedly, to hide the whole damn thing behind her back.
    Neither one of them said a word. They just stared at one another and Sinclair blushed even hotter. “It’s nothing,” she finally managed. “These aren’t part of the decorations.”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” Parker said mildly, his face inscrutable. “I’m far more skill ed with those kinds of decorations than what we’ve been doing all night.”
    If he’d smiled as he said that , she might have relaxed a little. But he didn’t, and so she didn’t. She shifted back a step, sliding around the end of the table in a vain attempt to get something safe between them. Suddenly, the room felt far too small and intimate. Unfortunately, when she tried to back away, Parker began to stalk her.
    “Is there something you want to ask me, Sinclair?” he asked, closing every inch of distance even as she made it.
    “No.” Miserable, she tried again to back away. This wasn’t happening at all like she’d hoped it would. It wasn’t sexy. It wasn’t funny. He wasn’t even smiling. Rather, he was intense, focused as he pursued her one step at a time down the entire length of that table until all she wanted to do was drop everything and just run. Fat lot of good that would do. Unless she ran right into Jackson, she was pretty much stuck here.
    “Sinclair,” he pressed.
    “It’s nothing,” she insisted. “I-I-I… I just… I thought…”
    “What?”
    Put on the spot, her whole body burning with the heat of her embarrassment, she huffed a laugh that both wasn’t funny and was barely louder than a puff of frustrated breath. She looked at the floor, the table, the drapes they’d spent all night hanging up, because all of that minutia was infinitely easier than having to meet Parker eye-to-eye. “I thought… maybe y-you could show me… whatever it is you like so much about this… stuff.”
    Parker didn’t move. He stood before her as stiff as a soldier, his expression offering absolutely no hint at all to what he was feeling, but he didn’t look disappointed or angry or censuring. “Did someone put you up to this?”
    His soft voice was as gentle and as reassuring now as it had ever been. For a moment, it was as if they were back in her candy shop, talking seriously a moment as they sometimes did about things that were far and away and had nothing to do with nipple clamps, or faux fur paddles or—God—anal kits.
    The paper bag behind her back crinkled as her arms tightened. “No,” she said, shaking her head once. “No one said anything to me at all. I just thought… I…”
    He caught her chin when she tried to look away and searched her face. “Have you ever played before?”
    She shook her head again. “I’ve never even looked at things like this before,” she admitted.
    “But you went out today and you bought those things,” he guessed. “Why would you do that?”
    At the moment, she was having a hard time remembering the reasons herself. “Because I like you,” she said, somewhat pathetically. “If this is what you like, I just thought, shouldn’t I at least try it? But then I got here and there were all those people, and I didn’t know how to say anything, so…” She let her voice trail away. She wished she could see what