Claiming Lauren: An eXclave erotic romance, #1

By Emily Ryan-Davis

One night should have been enough.

Twenty-seven-year-old Lauren Brant is the perfect society wife, proper in every way...except for her clawing need to submit to a man she knows only as Master. Unable to deny her cravings, she arranges to meet Master--no names, no faces, nothing but submission and sensation. Except it isn't enough. Even before the night ends, Lauren wants more.

But "more" isn't part of the arrangement and she returns to her polished life only to discover her estranged husband has come home. After five years of being invisible to Jacob Brant, Lauren doesn't know what to do with him. He, however, knows exactly what to do with her...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emily Ryan-Davis
• Release date: Mar 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781497739208

Book preview

Chapter One

These are your instructions

Her manicured fingers hovered over the mouse but didn't settle. She couldn't make the brain-hand connection required to position the cursor to open the e-mail. Her breath clogged behind a knot in her throat and every sensation came down to the heavy pulse of arousal beating between her thighs.

Open meant acceptance. Open meant agreement. Open meant...

Submission.

And just like that, she could breathe again.

Swallowing gulps of climate-controlled air, she gathered submission close to her breast and opened the e-mail. She'd read it before. His instructions weren't new. They'd been living in her inbox for more than a week. She'd fulfilled every imperative except one.

Tell him what you're going to do.

Panic welled up inside her but she drew on a deep reserve of strength—the strength he told her she possessed—and exhaled slowly. She visualized her weakness exiting on a puff of air, dissolving into nothing. When her lungs were empty and the panic was gone, she picked up the house phone and dialed his London number.

A sleep-rough voice answered. A man's voice. Never a woman's voice, not in her husband's house.

She would have taken comfort in the sound of a woman's voice. Jacob taking a lover would mean he'd decided to finally bury his first wife, whom he'd married as an expression of love instead of an action of business. Jacob taking a lover meant...

Is anybody there? Jacob's assistant repeated.

Nothing. It meant nothing. Her marriage would never be anything except a business arrangement negotiated by calculating old men. Lauren squared her shoulders and pushed the whisper of hope from her mind. This is Mrs. Brant. Please notify Mr. Brant that I'm on the line.

A moment, please. Without a single remark about the hour, which approached 2 a.m. in England, her husband's personal assistant put the call on hold.

Cradling the receiver between her shoulder and ear, Lauren typed practice words while she waited.

I've called to let you know I'm leaving.

No, that was a lie. She wouldn't leave. She was a twenty-seven-year-old society wife, bound to him by prenuptial agreement and the public eye. Even if she could bring herself to walk away from her financial future, she couldn't face the scrutiny of family, peers and the media. A divorce would devastate her father, who had nothing left of his empire except what Lauren retained through her prenup. She deleted the words and typed another sentence.

I've called to let you know I'm in love with another man.

But that was a lie, too. She didn't love anybody. Not Jacob Brant, not even the man who'd agreed to create and nurture her submission. Not anybody. Maybe this would be a different conversation if she could speak the love words, but she couldn't, so she deleted them.

I've called to let you know—

Lauren?

Her stomach somersaulted, the way it always did when her husband's voice rolled down the line. She could have fallen in love with a man who owned his voice. She could have—

I can hear you breathing, he said. She expected the words to sound distant. They were speaking across an ocean, after all, but his voice was clear and alert.

She cleared her throat