“And if you think being hung from a pretty tree with bells tied to your ankles is a poor way to die, you’re better kept in the dark about how this danger would dispose of you.”
I shivered brutally, my teeth biting down into the soft pad of his thumb.
The next instant, I was hauled up under my armpits and deposited on the table, my bottom cupped by the gilded plate at Alexander’s place setting.
“Enough talk,” he growled, wrapping his arms around my legs so that his hands could splay my inner thighs apart. “I’m starving for some sweet Italian pussy.”
Fear sluiced through me as he reached beside my thigh for the sharp steak knife and brought it to my neck. His gaze was just as sharp against the pulse pounding in my throat as the weapon was pressed against it.
My entire body trembled like a mouse held by the tail in the mouth of its hunter.
Then with a quick slash and the quiet gasp of ripping silk, Alexander drew the blade down the center of my chest through the fabric barely covering my torso and groin.
The black silk slithered over my curves and pooled to either side of my body.
“Exquisite,” Alexander murmured, looming over me. He ran a wide palm over the center of my body, following the line the knife had taken. His hand stopped over my pubic bone, and his thumb flicked out over my clit hood piercing.
“Do you know why I did this?” he asked me rhetorically. “So that from the moment you woke in your new life, you would know that your body was mine to do with as I pleased.”
I shivered, and I didn’t know if it was from the cool air, lingering fear, or the possessive, greedy way Alexander looked at my body.
He sat back in his chair, wrapped his legs once more over my legs, and jerked me closer. I fell back on my elbows against the table, disturbing expensive dishware that fell with a clatter. The plate under my butt tipped, cutting into my thighs for a second before Alexander dragged me farther to the edge of the table, and it fell to the floor with a loud crash.
I stared at his bright golden head bent over my sex, his breath wafting over my sticky wet exposed flesh, and I thought he looked like a king bent to pray at the altar.
My altar.
Desire ignited in my belly and blazed to the very tips of my fingers and the ends of my toes. Flambéed with desire, I wondered what I tasted like down there as Alexander slowly dipped his mouth to my inner thigh and trailed his strong tongue over my bare cunt.
“Burnt sugar,” he murmured against my skin, his fingers tightening until they felt like staples holding me open. “I was a boy the last time I had dessert for dinner.”
Then his mouth was on my clit, and he was sucking, licking, fucking my pussy with his tongue, his teeth, his lips, and his nose. There was pressure and suction everywhere at once. My head fell back between my shoulders as I gasped, my thighs a quivering frame around his broad shoulders as he feasted on me.
“Si, cosi lo voglio,” I gasped in my mother tongue, unable to believe how amazing his mouth felt on my sex.
“When you beg, do it in the language of your Master,” he said into my slick folds.
I tried to find traction, in reality, in the fact that the man bringing me such pleasure was not a good man nor one I liked, but the way his tongue flicked my new piercing back and forth over my clit dissolved all of my recalcitrance.
“I want to hear you,” he growled, nipping at the hood of clit so that my hips jerked and sent a salt shaker spilling to the floor. “Tell me how much you love my mouth on your cunt, or I’ll keep you here all night on the edge of climax.”
A sob bubbled in my throat.
I wanted to give voice to the pleasure, to release a little of the helium desire filling me overfull until I felt I would burst.
But I didn’t want to give in to his desires. I promised to obey him, but I had warned him I wouldn’t be docile.
“I doubt you can get me there no matter how long you try,” I panted out.
His shocked, rusty laugh bathed my hot sex in cool air.
“That is what we call topping from the bottom, topolina, and it will not work with me.”
His mouth went back to work on my pussy, somehow even more intense this time. Then there was pressure at my entrance, and I tried to squirm away because I had never before been breached.
I’d had a strange relationship with my old agent Landon Knox, but it wasn’t sexual, and even though I’d always been curious about sex, I shared a bedroom with my three sisters so exploration was simply not an option.
“Has anyone ever played with this sweet cunt before?”
I moaned as his thumb swirled harder and harder with each pass until it slid through my incredible slickness inside me a few inches.
He reared up out of his seat, his hand still on my cunt while the other used my hair as a lever to pull me up to meet his mouth. His lips swallowed my gasp as he continued to rotate his thumb inside the sensitive walls of my sex.
He tasted like lightly salted pasta water.
He tasted like me.
I groaned against his tongue, undone by the onslaught of feelings, so ready to orgasm for the first time in my life that I was willing to do anything he asked in exchange for an end to this climbing, swelling pleasure.
“One day soon, topolina, I’m going to bury my big cock in your pussy. You’re going to struggle and writhe against me, beg me to have mercy on your painfully tight cunt. But I won’t take mercy. I’ll bury myself to the hilt inside you and use you until you are raw.”
I gasped into his mouth, then moaned as his tongue traced my lips before plunging back inside, rubbing against mine in sync with the rhythm of his fingers between my thighs. My poor, confused brain struggled to understand how his words could pour over me like kerosene, lighting the fire he was kindling between my legs into a full-blown blaze.
Was it possible to hate a man, but love the way he made your body feel?
It didn’t seem possible, yet there I was, on the edge of my first orgasm given to me at the hands of my own personal Hades.
“I’ll fuck you while you cry, and I’ll keep fucking you until your sweet, sore cunt clenches around me when you finally come for your Master,” he continued in a slightly roughened voice that gave away how aroused he truly was. “I’ll train you to orgasm on command and, topolina, your first lesson begins now. You have thirty seconds to come for me, or I’ll take a cane to your ass.”
He pulled away enough to look into my eyes, his prominent cheekbones flushed with pink, his eyes entirely black with pleasure, and I thought I did that. I was satisfying some primal need in him, something dark and base that needed to pin me to the table and dominate me. Even as he gave me pleasure, I knew I was returning it threefold.
He needed this, needed me to get off.
It shouldn’t have been so arousing to know that, and it shouldn’t have made my chest warm with something more than lust, but it did.
I looked into his ferocious, bestial eyes, and in less than thirty seconds, I came all over his hand.
My body seemed to split along every seam, my molecules falling out over the table like stuffing from a doll. The world disappeared as my mind fractured, everything but those big, long lashed grey eyes that stared at me in fiery triumph as I pulsed around his thumb and gasped into his face.
“This is mine,” he growled, slapping my pussy sharply so that I shuddered violently. “You are mine.”
And for one brief second while I lay depleted and torn apart from desire on his dining room table, I agreed with him.
When I woke up the next morning, my inner thighs were slick with arousal, and a groan was lodged in my throat.
I’d been dreaming of Alexander.
Riddick was standing over me, his stern features entirely free of censure even though I was naked once more, and there was enough dim light filtering in through the windows to make the moisture on my thighs glisten.
Shame sluiced over me like a bucket of ice water extinguishing the lingering d
esire burning through my skin. Even then, I could still feel Alexander’s mouth on my sex like a permanent brand, and I wondered anxiously if it was a mark I’d wear for the rest of my life.
I wanted to hate that such a cruel, nonsensical man had given me my first experience with mind-bending pleasure, but a small part of me wondered if that wasn’t one of the reasons I’d loved it.
For so long, I’d been navigating the choppy waters of my family’s future, struggling to keep the ship upright and airtight against all the odds.
It was oddly liberating to have someone else make the decisions for me.
“Lord Thornton requests your presence in his rooms,” Riddick said, cutting through my thoughts.
I frowned, shaking my head to clear it before looking out the massive windows to the murky landscape beyond. It was the first time the shutters were open, a boon I gathered that I’d been granted because of my obedience last night in the dining room. There wasn’t much to see in the tenebrous light, through the diaphanous plumes of fog rolling across what seemed to be gently rolling hills of green in the distance, but what I could decipher was beautiful.
It was also clearly much too early to be awake.
“What could he possibly want me for at this hour?” I demanded.
Riddick blinked at me, then when I didn’t move, he repeated, “Lord Thornton requests your presence in his rooms.”
I huffed and unwound my aching body from the unforgiving marble floor, planting my hands on my hips and rolling my eyes as if I wasn’t chained to the floor stark naked.
“Take me to his Mighty Lord then,” I acquiesced.
It could have been a trick of the light, but Riddick seemed to smile as he crouched down to unlock my shackle.
I followed him across the wide expanse of the ballroom, holding my breath when he unlocked the door and led me into the hallway without blindfolding me.
The corridor was long, lined again with nearly floor-to-ceiling windows on one side and enormous, exquisitely detailed portraits on the other that were clearly Davenport ancestors. A coat of arms was worked into the middle of the wall, sculpted and painted out of stucco so that it drew the eye from every angle of the hall. Framed by a fierce looking griffon and lion on either side, topped with a vicious hawk and footed by a phrase in Latin that I didn’t fully understand, the shield represented pearls, thorns, and red blooming flowers. It was beautiful.
I wanted to burn it.
We moved through quickly, bypassing an opening that led down to a grand marble staircase at the base of which lay a two-story grand hall painted pale blue with elaborate swirls of plasterwork. I noted the front door and thought briefly of running away, the thought of freedom so tangible I could taste its earthen grassiness on my tongue.
But Alexander’s words echoed in my head, if you want to put your family at risk with the mafia, Cosima, you must know that you are free to leave at any time.
It was excruciating to quell my inherent flight or fight response to the situation. I wanted to run out those doors and never look back. I wanted to shackle Lord Thornton to the ballroom floor and beat him until he was a black and blue smear on the shiny tiles.
I couldn’t do either.
In fact, I had to do the opposite.
I had to allow him access to my body, give him control over my every action, and cede to his every rule.
The house itself was a work of art. I couldn’t help but think of how much my artistic sister, Giselle, would love it here, and it made my heart pang like a lost echo.
I wanted desperately to check in with my family, to see what they had made of my sudden job offer and of Seamus’s inexplicable disappearance. Sebastian would be furious with me for not saying goodbye, his anger masking his broken heart. My own organ felt lopsided in my chest, half of it still sitting behind my twin’s breastbone where it belonged. I missed him with a ferocity that stole a piece of my every breath. Elena would be struggling to make a life for herself in a city she hated, and Mama would be busy as she always was trying to hold down the fort in a home of big personalities with very little space to move.
We continued down the other side of the hall and came to a stop at a massive set of double doors. Riddick knocked twice but didn’t wait for permission before pushing the doors open, snagging my wrist, and dragging me into the room.
The room was dark blue, gold accents winking in the low light streaming through two narrow windows framing a colossal four-poster bed draped in heavy navy velvet tied back with thick gold rope. They revealed a slick duvet, silver sheets and pillows and propped up against them with the same shade of grey in his eyes and a golden disarray of hair was a man.
It was clear Alexander had just awoken by the slumberous cast to his gaze, the softness to his full mouth when it was usually pinched closed.
A fist squeezed around each of my lungs at the sight of him like that, bare chested and stripped of his usual tailored armour.
He looked like a man, not the cold, domineering god I’d come to know him as in my short weeks there.
“Thank you, Riddick,” he said in a slightly sleep-roughened voice that reminded me of his lustful tone of the night before. “You may leave us.”
I stood just inside the doorway and fought the urge to wring my hands together. I’d never been shy or awkward and being so now was not how I wanted to present myself to the arrogant Lord Thornton. But I couldn’t help the girlish giddiness and embarrassment that stemmed from knowing that the man lounging like a king in the bed before me had had his mouth between my legs just hours ago.
A slow smile slide across his lips as if he knew exactly how he affected me. “Come here, my beauty.”
Subtly, I sucked in a deep breath to settle the butterflies in my stomach and the confusion in my head and then I walked to the left side of his bed. His eyes followed me, sharp and intent as a hunter tracking his prey.
“You are beautiful even in your confusion and misery,” he said softly, reaching out when I came to a stop beside him to run the back of his hand over my breast.
My nipple beaded instantly, mirroring the tightening in my belly.
“I need to feed you more.” He frowned as his thumb passed over my ribs, visible protrusions under my skin. “Did you enjoy your meal last night?”
I blushed at the memory of the dinner we’d shared after he’d eaten my cum from between my legs and settled me in my kneeling position back beside his chair. Then, he’d proceeded to feed me from his heaping plate of pasta alla Genovese, deftly spinning the noodles into his spoon and then waiting until I parted my lips to place the twirled bite on my tongue.
It had been oddly erotic to look into his eyes as he fed me, to watch as he studied my lips closing, my throat swallowing. Fresh arousal had swelled in my pussy and leaked down my legs. It was only at the end of the meal, when we’d finished his goblet of wine and my favourite pasta, that Alexander had acknowledge his effect on me by ordering me to stand. He’d then cupped my weeping sex, our eyes locked fiercely, and drawn his hand away wet with my juices.
He offered me two of his damp fingers.
I stared at them for a long moment, my mouth watering shamefully.
“Taste how wet I make you, topolina,” he encouraged lowly, smearing his index finger over my parted lips before sliding them over my tongue.
My mouth closed instinctively, and I sucked hard when he groaned at the sensation.
He pulled away from me too soon and placed his two other fingers at his mouth, sucking them off with a long pull of his pale pink lips.
I was panting by the time his hand fell away.
“You were an excellent slave tonight,” he’d praised. “Tomorrow, you’ll get your reward.”
I blinked away the memory and focused on him. “My mama’s pasta is better.”
Alexander blinked, and then his pursed lips smiled. “Defiant to the last, even when you’re eager for me to touch you again.”
I snorted, determined to regain my atavism. “I woul
dn’t hold your breath for that… actually, no, please do.”
This time, I received a low, sinister chuckle. “Careful, bella. If I were to touch your sweet cunt right now, are you promising me it would not be soaking wet?”
I narrowed my eyes at him even though I could feel the heavy pulse of lust thrum at the base of my groin. “And here I thought I was the one who’d need help understanding English.”
His eyes flashed in warning, but to my surprise, he didn’t give in to my taunting. Instead, he threw back the covers, exposing every naked, carved marble inch of him.
My eyes felt as if they would fall out of my head at the sight.
He was clearly not an indolent lord who spent all of his time indoors drinking scotch, reading, and writing letters.
No, this man was an athlete, his long lines of strength individually striated under his golden hued skin so that I could’ve traced each boxed abdominal, every lean thigh muscle under my fingertip.
My mouth went dry.
Alexander moved to the edge of the bed beside me and stood so that suddenly I was dwarfed by his awesome height. He had to be at least six foot four by the way he towered over my own impressive height.
“I will not be drawn into your games like those silly, virginal Italian boys you dealt with in Naples, led around by their dicks and your beauty. I am a grown man and a seasoned Dominant; you’d do best to remember that and not continue to taunt me into conceding control. Is that understood?”
“If you’re so damned controlled, I think you can withstand a little taunting from an inexperienced Italian girl,” I retorted, stepping even closer so I was toe to toe with him.
Desire burned in his eyes, and I knew he wanted to punish me for my insolence.
A shiver nibbled at the base of my spine.
“I don’t have time to show you just how utterly inexperienced you are at the moment because I have meetings this morning. You are here to commence what will be part of your daily chores.”
My eyebrows shot into my hairline. “Being your sex slave isn’t enough, now I have to clean?”
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