Masks Read online

  An Ellora’s Cave Romantica Publication

  www.ellorascave.com

  Masks

  ISBN # 1-4199-0442-6

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  Masks Copyright© 2005 Evangeline Anderson

  Edited by Shannon Combs.

  Cover art by Syneca.

  Electronic book Publication: December 2005

  This book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the publisher, Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.® 1056 Home Avenue, Akron OH 44310-3502.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the authors’ imagination and used fictitiously.

  Warning:

  The following material contains graphic sexual content meant for mature readers. Masks has been rated E–rotic by a minimum of three independent reviewers.

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing offers three levels of Romantica™ reading entertainment: S (S-ensuous), E (E-rotic), and X (X-treme).

  S-ensuous love scenes are explicit and leave nothing to the imagination.

  E-rotic love scenes are explicit, leave nothing to the imagination, and are high in volume per the overall word count. In addition, some E-rated titles might contain fantasy material that some readers find objectionable, such as bondage, submission, same sex encounters, forced seductions, and so forth. E-rated titles are the most graphic titles we carry; it is common, for instance, for an author to use words such as “fucking”, “cock”, “pussy”, and such within their work of literature.

  X-treme titles differ from E-rated titles only in plot premise and storyline execution. Unlike E-rated titles, stories designated with the letter X tend to contain controversial subject matter not for the faint of heart.

  Masks

  Evangeline Anderson

  Trademarks Acknowledgement

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  Jell-O: Kraft Foods Holdings, Inc. Corporation

  Jaguar: Jaguar Cars Limited Corporation

  Chapter One

  Chloe stared at the large man in the black leather mask standing on the doorstep. She didn’t know what she has been expecting, but he wasn’t it. He was tall for one thing. Taller than her, despite the four-inch, thigh-high boots she was wearing. Broad shoulders strained the fabric of his well-tailored suit and direct blue eyes stared at her through the eye holes of the mask. The man smiled, revealing white, even teeth.

  He didn’t look like a man that wanted to be dominated. Of course, you couldn’t judge by appearances in this case, Chloe reminded herself. After all, she herself looked like a dominatrix, but nothing could be further from the truth.

  “Mistress Sensua?” The man’s voice was a deep rumble, coming from the bottom of his chest that Chloe could feel in her bones. “Mistress?” he said again, taking another step forward.

  Chloe stumbled backwards a step before she remembered she was supposed to be in charge of this situation. Mistress Sensua—that’s me! She had never felt less in charge of anything in her whole life—including herself.

  How was she supposed to handle this? How was she supposed to dominate this giant when she was shaking in her thigh-high boots? How had she gotten herself into this in the first place? Oh, right—doing her sister a favor…

  * * * * *

  “Chloe, I need a favor. I need you to switch with me.”

  “Are you insane?” Chloe rolled her eyes at her identical twin sister who was currently lounging on her expensive memory foam mattress with her injured right ankle propped on a mound of fluffy goose down pillows. Nothing but the best for Zoe—somehow her twin always seemed to get what she wanted. But not this time.

  “This is really important. I have a meeting with a client that I can’t miss.” Zoe’s big, green eyes begged pitifully. “It’s just a little favor.” She twisted a strand of her honey blonde hair around one perfectly manicured finger and looked appealingly at her identical twin. Same hair, same eyes, but Zoe’s hair was an artful tumble around her perfectly made-up face while Chloe’s was up in a sensible ponytail, showing a face that was bare of makeup.

  Chloe sighed. “We haven’t done a switch since high school. And you remember how that turned out.”

  Zoe’s eyes took on a dreamy look. “Of course I remember. I lost my virginity to Christian Agan in the shallow end of his swimming pool. Most romantic day of my life.”

  “Maybe you’re forgetting what happened to me while you were having the time of your life.” Chloe frowned in frustration. “I was taking your place in advanced dramatics and it just happened to be the day that you were supposed to deliver your monologue in front of the entire school assembly. I’ve never been so humiliated in my life!”

  “Which is why you’ve never switched with me since,” Zoe finished for her. “But this time it’ll be different, Chloe, I swear. It’s been ten years since high school—just let it go.” She shifted on her black satin sheets and regarded her twin with a sparkle of mischief in her eyes. “You might even have fun.”

  “How am I going to have fun dressing up in one of your business suits and pretending to be an investment banker?” Chloe crossed her arms over the sensible, gray turtleneck sweater she wore. Zoe, of course, was lounging in bed in a black silk teddy, but she always dressed impractically.

  “Well…” Zoe bit her full bottom lip and then patted the bed beside her. “C’mere, sis, I have something to tell you. Only you have to promise not to tell Mom and Dad. It would kill them.”

  “What?” Chloe eyed her twin mistrustfully. When Zoe got that look in her eyes, it invariably spelled trouble. Still, she perched on the edge of the luxurious bed, curious to hear what Zoe had to say.

  “I’m not exactly an investment banker,” Zoe confessed. “In fact, I’m not in any kind of banking or finance at all.”

  “What?” Chloe looked at her blankly. “But you were a business major in college. What about all the meetings you have with clients, the way you’re always jetting off to exotic, foreign lands for last-minute mergers? And how do you pay for all this?” She swept out an arm, indicating the plush luxury of her twin sister’s palatial home.

  “I’ll tell you but you have to promise not to be shocked.”

  Chloe sighed. “As if anything about you could shock me anymore.” It was true—of the two of them, Zoe was always the adventurous one. The one always getting into trouble.

  How they’d ended up with such totally different personalities when their faces and bodies were identical was beyond Chloe, but she was more than willing to let her sister have her wild life of travel and excitement. Chloe herself was perfectly content with her own life even if it wasn’t as glamorous as Zoe’s.

  She had a neat, little, one-bedroom house in a nice neighborhood and a rewarding career as a first grade teacher. So what if Zoe always seemed to have the sexiest clothes, the hottest dates, and the most exotic adventures? That was fine for her twin but Chloe preferred security and stability to thrills and chills—or so she told herself.

  “So what do you do?” she asked, seeing the indecision on her twin sister’s face. “C’mon, Zoe, you can tell me. You know I won’t tell Mom and Dad.”

  “Pinky swear?” Zoe held out her hand, the elegantly manicured pinky finger extended.

  “Pinky swear.” It was a ritual of their childhood. No matter how different they were, they were still sisters and Chloe loved her twin with all her heart, even if Zoe was exasperating at times. She held out her own pinky, the nail painted an innocent pink. It contrasted oddly with the fire-engine red of Zoe’s when they locked pinkies.

  Zoe
looked into her eyes. “Chloe, I’m a dominatrix.”

  * * * * *

  “You’re a what?” Chloe jumped off the bed, staring at her sister as though she’d never seen her before.

  “I’m a dominatrix,” Zoe repeated patiently. “I go by the name Mistress Sensua. And before you get all upset and excited—”

  “Too late,” Chloe interrupted her.

  “Before you get too upset,” Zoe uttered. “I just want to make it clear that a dominatrix is not some kind of high-priced call girl.”

  “What is it then?” Chloe demanded. She was pacing the room in long strides, still unable to quite wrap her mind around what her sister was telling her. She had thought that nothing Zoe could tell her would shock her—how wrong she had been! She whirled to face the bed where her twin was still lounging comfortably as though she hadn’t just dropped a bomb of nuclear proportions. “I mean, you are having sex with men for money, right? So what else can you call it?”

  Zoe looked insulted. “I never have sex with my clients,” she defended herself. “I dominate them. That’s what they want. That’s how I can afford to pay for all this.” Her sweeping gesture took in her entire lifestyle. The expensive home, the trips to exotic lands, the designer clothes.

  Suddenly, something occurred to Chloe. The way they had gotten into this conversation in the first place was because… She looked at her twin, her eyes wide.

  “You’re a dominatrix and you want me to switch with you to meet one of your clients?”

  “Well, it’s hard to dominate anyone with a twisted ankle.” Zoe sounded grumpy. “I mean, how can I walk all over this guy with an ice pack on my leg? My stupid ankle is so swollen—it probably won’t even fit into my thigh-high boots, which was what I was planning on wearing.”

  “Thigh-high boots? Walk all over him?” Chloe felt faint. Could her twin sister really be serious?

  “Chloe, this is a really important client for me—I need you on this.”

  “Huh-uh. No way.” Chloe shook her head. “You’re crazy, Zoe. There’s no way I’m doing this.”

  “It’ll be easy.” Zoe smiled the same sweet smile that had landed Chloe up on stage in front of her entire high school, trying to recite a monologue she’d never heard before. “Just think of it as a blind date,” Zoe said coaxingly.

  “That right there is enough to make me say no, let alone the dominatrix thing.” Chloe frowned. “Every blind date you set me up on winds up in disaster.”

  Zoe blew out a breath in frustration. “That’s because you’re such a stick in the mud! You never take chances, you never risk giving away even a little part of your heart. Admit it, Chloe—you’re stuck in a rut and maybe switching with me tonight is what you need to get you out of it.”

  Amazingly, Chloe actually felt herself weakening. It was true that she was too shy to make much of an impression on the handsome alpha male types that Zoe was always trying to set her up with. Every date ended with a chaste peck on the cheek, or worse, a handshake. She just couldn’t seem to overcome her shy, sensible nature long enough to really cut loose and get to know any of those men. They all seemed so arrogant and self-assured while she was…not.

  But wait a minute, what was she thinking? This wasn’t exactly like the usual date Zoe always set her up on. The evening her sister was proposing for her was more likely to end with a boot in the face than a kiss on the cheek. Specifically, her boot in some strange man’s face.

  “No. No, I can’t possibly.” Chloe shook her head, but her sister had sensed the moment of indecision. Now she moved in for the kill.

  “Yes you can! It’s so easy you won’t believe it—I’ll tell you everything you need to know,” she promised. “Besides, what else have you got going tonight? A juicy stack of spelling tests to grade?”

  Chloe wavered again. “It’s a grammar test, for your information,” she grumbled. “And I do need to get it graded before Monday.”

  “So you’ll do me this favor tonight and work on it tomorrow.” Zoe was already getting off the bed, moving surprisingly well for a woman with a twisted ankle. “Come on, let’s get you dressed.”

  Feeling like she’d been suddenly plunged into the middle of someone else’s dream, Chloe followed her sister to the large walk-in closet on one side of the room.

  * * * * *

  “Zoe, I just don’t know about this.” Chloe looked at herself doubtfully in her twin sister’s full-length mirror. Zoe was still wearing the black silk teddy she’d been lounging in all evening but Chole had lost her comfortingly bulky gray turtleneck. In its place she was wearing a black leather bustier that molded her medium-sized breasts into luscious milk-white scoops of vanilla wobbling on an exotic tray.

  The bustier laced up the front with a thick leather cord and dipped down almost to the top of the short black leather miniskirt she was currently wearing. The miniskirt had actually been Chloe’s idea. Zoe had wanted her to wear a brief pair of leather panties that barely covered her crotch along with the bustier and thigh-high leather boots, but Chloe had point-blank refused. “I don’t care how ‘dramatic’ the look is,” she’d snapped at her twin. “I want something else between me and this ‘client’ of yours besides a tiny leather thong.” Zoe had relented and the result was the skintight leather skirt that Zoe normally wouldn’t have been caught dead in.

  Now she stood in front of the mirror, staring at her “new look” and wondering where the tame and timid first grade teacher she knew so well had gone. “I look like a biker slut from hell,” she said blankly, watching the tops of her breasts jiggle like Jell-O as she wobbled in the spike-heeled boots.

  “You look like a dominatrix,” Zoe corrected her. “At least, from the neck down, you do. It’s the neck up we’ll have to do something about. You need makeup desperately and that hairstyle has got to go.”

  “What’s wrong with my hairstyle?” Chloe clutched nervously at the blonde ponytail that trailed down her back.

  “It’s the same one you’ve had since high school, for one thing.” As she spoke, Zoe was ruthlessly stripping the rubber band out of her sister’s hair.

  “Ouch!” Chloe protested. “Change the hair if you have to, but I don’t like a lot of makeup on my face.”

  “You don’t have to wear a lot—you just have to know what to wear. Come into the bathroom and let me work on you.” Zoe smiled excitedly and squeezed her hand. “I’ve wanted to do this for years, but you wouldn’t let me.”

  Chloe felt guilty. It was true that her twin had been after her to spend more sister time together, but Zoe’s life always seemed so full—so different—and that was before Chloe had known she was a dominatrix. The older they got, the more they grew apart. “I guess we should try to keep up with each other a little better,” she said, getting settled in front of the vast mirror that spanned an entire wall of her sister’s bathroom.

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you for the longest time.” Zoe was already heating up the hot rollers and running a brush through her hair. “But you kept putting me off. I had to beg you to come over tonight.”

  “I just thought you were too busy and you always seemed so successful—always on the go. I felt…I guess I felt like we didn’t have anything in common.” Chloe admitted.

  “Well, after tonight we’ll have a lot more in common.” Zoe was balancing a brush, a hot roller, and a kit of exotic and expensive-looking makeup all at once.

  Chloe winced as the brush snagged in her hair. “Ouch! Watch it. So this means you’ll come in and substitute for me the next time I want a day off from teaching first grade, right?” She was joking, of course. Her twin and a roomful of kids would be a disastrous combination, she was certain. But Zoe was unperturbed.

  “Sure, I’ll sub for you. Don’t forget, I’m good at making people mind.” She winked at her sister in the mirror and Chloe felt her mouth go suddenly dry. Could she really do this? Did she want to? The decision was rapidly being taken out of her hands as Zoe painted and perfumed her and hot-ro
lled her hair into a luscious tumble of honey-blonde waves that Chloe was certain she never could have achieved herself.

  “You look perfect,” Zoe said at last. “You haven’t looked this good since you let me do your makeup and hair for our senior prom.”

  “You mean the one where Michael Carlson puked down the front of my gown?” Chloe stared at the exotically beautiful stranger in the mirror.

  “Yes, that one.” Zoe grinned at her. “Truly a magical night. Now, just one more thing and you’re ready to go.”

  “What’s that?” Chloe looked at her apprehensively. What other accessory could this outfit possibly need? A riding crop? A bullwhip?

  “This.” Zoe reached into a special drawer and pulled out a mask.

  “Oh.” Chloe’s voice was low and breathless. The mask was beautiful. It appeared to be made entirely of feathers and it was every color imaginable. Emerald green, glowing gold, deep crimson, and rich, royal blue melted together in a delicate creation. Taking the offered mask delicately in her hand, Chloe saw that it would cover only the top part of her face, framing her eyes in the multicolored feathers and leaving her nose and mouth free. “It’s beautiful,” she said softly.

  “It’s magic,” Zoe assured her. The mischievous glint was back in her eyes and she smiled as she settled the mask gently on her sister’s face. “In a psychological sense, anyway. When you’re wearing the mask, you can go anywhere and do anything. You can be the person you always dreamed of being.”

  “I never dreamed of being a dominatrix,” Chloe objected. “That was your dream, apparently.”

  “It’s yours too, for tonight anyway. Now listen up, let me give you a few tips and then you have to go. The appointment’s at nine o’clock sharp and you still have to get to my office across town.”