Dark Desires (Dark Romance Boxed Set)

by Cerys du Lys

  “It isn’t hard,” he said, his voice wintery cool. “Tuck your legs under you and kneel up. Show me you can obey a simple command.”

  Was he crazy? Some kind of psychopath? I realized I could still breathe, but I felt like an animal in a choke collar. Humiliation washed over me.

  Clumsily I knelt. The dipping and rising of the boat confused me and I nearly toppled sideways as I tried to rise on my knees. His hand on my shoulder steadied me. When I managed it, the pressure on my throat was much less, but I was trembling.

  “Good girl,” he said, and lowered his arm, releasing the tension in the rope.

  My hands tried again to remove it from around my neck, but he pulled it taut again. Oh God. I couldn’t deal with this. I couldn’t stop shaking.

  “You will obey me. Drop your hands or I’ll bind them behind your back.”

  I did it. As long as I could breathe, I’d freaking do anything.

  “That’s right. Not so hard, is it?”

  “Please don’t choke me,” I whispered. I hated myself for saying it. It felt like begging. And it showed him that I had a weakness he could exploit.

  And exploit me he did. I felt his free hand move over my hair, then under it. Along my shoulders and down my spine. His touch was light. It didn’t hurt. In fact, as he continued to slide his hand around, I realized it was seductive. He kept it up, and I was horrified to feel a sweetness begin in the pit of my belly as he stroked me. I closed my eyes, afraid he would read my reaction there.

  What was wrong with me? I couldn’t get my mind around it. Everything seemed fuzzy and unreal. No one had ever hurt me, bound me, knocked me unconscious, or tightened a cord around my neck before. I knew such things, and worse, happened to women the world over. I hadn’t appreciated how fortunate I’d been never to encounter a man who wanted to hurt or control me.

  I’d had fantasies about such things, though. Safe unthreatening imaginings that could be banished back into the dark place from which they emerged. I’d talked about sex with enough friends to know that other women shared my fantasies of being swept away by rough, tough, masculine guys who wanted me so badly that they would break social and ethical conventions to get me in their bed. I’d even urged Mark, my last boyfriend, to be a little more adventurous in the bedroom. He’d tried, but his heart hadn’t been in it.

  “I’m not going to strangle you,” Nicholas said, “but I want you under my control.” He loosened the belt slightly, but he did not remove it. “There isn’t time to do this slowly. We are about to enter a realm where your only safety will lie in how convincingly you can demonstrate your devotion to me.”

  I shook my head in silent denial.

  “Get used to it.”

  “I can’t.” I was horrified by the sound of my own voice, which came out as little more than a whimper.

  “You will. Now sit any way you feel comfortable, but do not touch the belt.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I was shaking again, and I hated it. His belt hung like a leash from around my throat. “What kind of freak are you?”

  “It’s not about me. It’s about you learning to survive. You can bend or you can break.”

  “You can’t break me.”

  “Of course I can. I’m bigger, stronger, and a whole lot nastier than you.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m a free human spirit, and nothing you do to me can change that.” Except choke me. Or lock me up alone in a small, dark place.

  He snorted. “Right. I don’t know what world you’ve been living in, but freedom is a luxury known to few people on this planet. Political freedom, economic freedom, religious freedom—how many people living today are fully endowed with those supposedly fundamental human rights? Not as many as you’d probably like to believe. Slavery still exists—you knew that, right? Do you have any idea how many millions of people, mostly women and children, are trafficked every year?”

  Was it a rhetorical question? “So...are you pro or con?”

  He stared at me. His beautiful muscles were tense and a tendon spasmed in his jaw.

  “Because,” I looked down at the macramé belt hanging from my neck, “you’re treating me like a sex slave.”

  His lips curled down. “Except for the sex part.”

  What did he mean? Hope flared in me. “You grabbed my breast.”

  “Yeah, I know, but I don’t fuck unwilling women. If you’re afraid of rape, you can relax. That isn’t gonna happen.”

  I felt a little woozy as relief washed through me. For hours I had been trying to tell myself that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad...maybe he wouldn’t hurt me too much...maybe I’d be able to close my eyes and pretend I was somewhere else.

  “Don’t look so relieved. It doesn’t mean I won’t fuck you. It just means you’ll enjoy it when I do.”

  “If you think you can convince yourself that I’m willing when I’m not—”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t respond to my touch. I hate liars. Anyway, you haven’t heard the bad news yet.”

  “So what’s the bad news?”

  “One of these men we’ll be meeting likes to take things away from me; it’s an old habit of his. Anything I value, he wants. Including women.”

  “I have no value to you.”

  “There’s the Catch-22. You’re with me, so you must have value. This will make you irresistible to my cousin Nigel. His soul, if he has one, is blacker than hell.”

  “Your cousin?”

  “I come from a fucked-up family. They don’t trust me much, and they’ll trust you even less. I can only see one way to make you seem both valuable to me and no reasonable threat to them.” He tugged on the free end of the belt around my neck. “Meet my new sex slave. Discreet, obedient, loyal, and abjectly submissive.”

  Chapter 7

  Ellie

  “I can’t pretend something like that.”

  He tightened the belt a little. “Who said anything about pretending? You are going to learn a few new skills. We don’t have much time. If you have half the smarts I’m giving you credit for, you’ll follow my instructions and learn fast.”

  After getting captured as easily as I had, I wondered why he was giving me credit for any smarts. It felt to me as if I hadn’t done anything sensible or intelligent for weeks. Except maybe for hiding my knowledge of Turkish.

  “So, what? The place you’re taking me is some sort of sex den?”

  “My cousin Nigel is interested in human trafficking, among other unsavory activities.”

  “Your cousin is a trafficker?” I heard the horror in my own voice. I knew human trafficking was still a huge criminal enterprise, despite the international laws against slavery. I had thought antiquity trafficking was bad enough, but what he was talking about now was even worse.

  “I believe it’s a sideline of his, not his main business.”

  “And you? Do you traffic in human flesh, too?”

  “I’m sure I could find a buyer for you, if you give me any trouble.”

  I was running out of sharp retorts. I’ve got to stay strong.

  “In the past, I’ve never appeared in front of Nigel with a slave of my own,” he continued. “He has taunted me about it for some time. He’s convinced that I like to abuse and degrade women. He’s sociopathic, so I must be, too. Sooner or later, he has often said, my true nature would emerge. So I am going to let it.”

  “That’s why you didn’t kill me? So you can let the Sociopath Within come out to play?”

  “You’re getting it. Your devotion to me is limitless, and in return I extend you my protection and don’t treat you too harshly. Unless you disobey me. That would require punishment.”

  The thought darted across my mind that in some circumstances, the scenario he was outlining might actually be hot. If I were home and safe and with a sexy man whom I loved, I could get into this sort of thing. But with a stranger who had pointed a gun at me, knocked me unconscious, tied me up and kidnapped me? I don’t think so.

  “I c
an’t do this. Please. Can’t you set me ashore somewhere? I will keep my mouth shut about you, I swear.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  I won’t cry, dammit. I won’t give the creep the satisfaction.

  “But you can do this. You’re no coward—you’ve proved that much already. And it’ll only be for about ten days. At the most, two weeks. After that, if everything goes as planned, I’ll set you free. In the meantime, you’ll just have to play the game you’ve stumbled into. Play it well, and you’ll survive. Fuck it up, and you’ll die, and probably take me with you.”

  “If I die, you can count on me taking you with me.”

  He laughed. “I don’t think you’ve got the submissive mindset down yet, Ms. Heath. Shall we see how tightly I have to wind this rope around your throat until you do?”

  I shuddered. “What do you mean by the submissive mindset?”

  He looked at me hard before answering. “Most people have played around with this sort of thing. Or at least read about it. Or watched porn on the internet.”

  I had of course. Read about it, at least. It was hard to avoid—books, TV, pop music. Too bad Mark had never been interested in experimenting with kinky sex.

  When I just sat there, silent and embarrassed, he said,

  “No? Please don’t tell me I have to explain this to a 23 year old college grad.”

  “I get the general idea. It’s the practical experience that I lack.”

  “Well, to put it in terms my nasty cousin would understand, I own you. You bow, scrape and defer to me. You obey my orders without a word—or a look—of protest. No more fucking sarcasm. You are sexually available to me at all times. If I’m rough with you, you enjoy it. If I punish you, you thank me for causing you pain. If I tie you up and whip you, you come. Unless I deny you permission to come, in which case you suffer.”

  I experienced a moment of horror as my body reacted with a thrill of excitement to his description. It was something about his voice. It was low, a bit gravelly and hot as hell. A weird memory struck me of reading an erotic romance about a woman kidnapped by a brawny Scottish pirate who did some of the things he had just mentioned. It had been full of sensual love scenes that had rocked my world when I’d discovered the book at age sixteen.

  “I’m not into that,” I tried.

  “I don’t fucking care if you’re into it or not. That’s your role for the next couple weeks. Since you seem to be having trouble with the concept, we’ll have to practice.”

  I wondered what the hell that meant.

  “Strip,” he said.

  Oh god, oh god. I clung to what he’d told me a few minutes ago. No rape. “You said you wouldn’t—”

  “Do it. You have to learn to obey any order I give you without argument or hesitation. That’s what slaves do.”

  “I’m not your fucking slave.”

  He tightened the rope around my neck. “The subject is not open for debate. I see you’re wearing one of my shirts. Take it off.”

  The thing around my neck was just too much. I started to unbutton the shirt, saying to myself, it’s better to be humiliated, even raped, than killed. I have to stay alive. I have to escape. He said that if I do what he tells me for two weeks, he’ll let me go. He said he wouldn’t rape me.

  I know. I was allowing him to frighten and intimidate me. To dominate me. But when someone tightens a cord around your neck, it’s difficult to remain defiant.

  I took off the shirt. I was still wearing my bra, my jeans, and my panties.

  “Keep going.” His voice was cold. So were his eyes. That was good, right? He didn’t look as if he were bursting with lust.

  For the first time ever, I was glad that my breasts were small and unimpressive. I’d never been proud of my body. It was ordinary. On the thin side, which I’d always liked because it meant I didn’t have to go on diets all the time like most of my friends. I could stuff myself with pizza and chips and yummy desserts because I had a fast metabolism or something. I could eat and eat and hardly ever gain a pound.

  My hair was okay—long and fiery red, a color I used to hate but had grown to appreciate in recent years. My features were regular and balanced enough to pass for pretty. Or at least, so my best friend Katy always told me. “You’re not supermodel stunning, but your face is really nice,” she used to say. “You should do your makeup, though. Your eyes are gorgeous when you spend some time on them.”

  Needless to say, I wasn’t wearing any makeup. Anyway, the creep wasn’t looking at my face.

  I removed my bra next, because the thought of removing stuff below the waist really freaked me out. I did it awkwardly, blushing and feeling ashamed. I didn’t know this guy. He had knocked me out, tied me up and kidnapped me. He’d threatened me with a gun and a knife. He’d put a noose around my neck, and now he was making me strip.

  “Faster. Christ, you’re acting like a virgin who’s never taken her clothes off before.”

  I stiffened, ricocheting back to something Mark had taunted me about. We’d had a fucked up sex life during our year together. I don’t think either of us was ever satisfied. I thought he was pretty vanilla and boring in bed, and my attempts to encourage a little more adventure had been ignored. But he hadn’t been happy with me, either, although he never said why. He used to taunt me sometimes by making cracks similar to what Nick had just said...implying that I wasn’t very sexy. Or that I was too shy.

  Maybe I was a little modest, but I wasn’t ashamed of my body or anything like that. I just wanted a man who would take charge. How could I strip if I wasn’t turned on?

  “Well? Do I have to get my knife and cut those jeans off your body?”

  I undid my jeans and slid them down over my hips. “Why are you doing this?” I asked, feeling truly miserable.

  “It amuses me,” he snapped. He sounded either angry or sarcastic. I wasn’t sure which.

  “I don’t take off my clothes for men I don’t even know.”

  “You do now,” he said, yanking the rope around my neck again.

  Dumbass. As I forced down the jeans, my panties started to go with them. What the fuck...they were going to be next anyway. I pushed both pants and panties down my legs and over my feet. They fell to the floor. I hunched up, arms around my middle, hating the man at the other end of that rope.

  “Good,” he said. He pulled me close to him by means of the rope. I froze, expecting him to start pawing at my naked body. But instead, he loosened the macramé belt and removed it from my throat. I sagged with relief. He tossed me a blanket from the foot of the bed. “Now lie down on the floor and go to sleep.” He gathered up my clothes and tossed them into one of the drawers with a lock on it and locked them inside. By the time he had finished doing that, I had wrapped the blanket around my naked body.

  “I need to use the bathroom before I sleep.”

  “You can use it when I’m done, slave.”

  When it was my turn, I dawdled in the head for ages, treasuring the only privacy permitted to me. I kept the blanket wound around me; no way was I letting it slip.

  When I returned to the cabin, Nick was lying on the bunk. He was still wearing his jeans, I was glad to see, but no shirt or shoes. He had tossed a pillow to the floor beside the bed. When I lay down there, I took up most the space left in the small cabin.

  He reached up and switched off the overhead light, then glanced at the head door, which I’d left ajar. “You left the light on in there.”

  “I can’t sleep in total darkness.”

  “Why not?”

  I wasn’t about to reveal my claustrophobia, my desperate need to hold back the night. I felt weak enough in his presence as it was. “I just can’t.”

  “Well, I can’t sleep with light in my eyes.” He started to get up.

  “Please. It’s not bright.” I scuttled over to the head door and closed it until it was only open a crack. “Is that better?”

  He hesitated, and then cursed under his breath. “You’re a real pai
n in the ass.”

  For some insane reason I heard myself say, “I guess if we were lovers, we’d fight.”

  “If we were fucking,” he retorted in a smooth-as-liquid voice, reducing the word “lovers” to it most basic meaning, “I’d be content to leave the light on. In fact, I’d insist upon it.”

  Cheeks burning, I buried my face in the pillow. If we were lovers? What the fuck was I thinking?

  “Go to sleep. No escape attempts. I haven’t bound your arms and legs again, but I will if you so much as stir from the spot where you’re currently lying. I want a peaceful night. No more idiotic attacks with William Shakespeare. I’m a light sleeper, and I’ll know if you try anything.”

  I rolled over with my face turned away from him. I was certain I would be lying awake all night, reliving every horrible moment of my captivity, but to my amazement, I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until morning.

  Chapter 8

  Ellie

  I was alone in the cabin when I woke. The boat was pitching more vigorously than it had been the night before. I sat up. The blanket must have slipped off me during sleep, since I was only half covered. Either that or he had uncovered me to look at my body. I imagined him doing so, while I was unconscious and unable to stop him, and I felt myself flush.

  It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant feeling. Instead of remembering how he had forced me to strip and threatened to strangle me, the first thing I thought of was how built his body was. How honed his face. How sexy his voice was. And once again I grew angry with myself for having such thoughts about the man who was holding me captive against my will. Did I have Stockholm syndrome? How long did that take to set in? I didn’t think you could come down with Stockholm in only 24 hours, but what did I know? Maybe I was just weak and pathetic.

  My clothes, which he had taken last night, were still locked away. Even my own shirt, the one I’d washed and hung to dry on the towel rack under the sink, was nowhere to be seen. Worse, I discovered that he had locked all the drawers and cupboards where he kept his own clothes. He had left me nothing to cover myself with except the blanket.