His lips twitched with humour before he could screw them shut. “You will begin each day by tending to me the way my valet, Murphy, would. He is currently on a much-needed vacation in Scotland with his family and so, the duty must fall to my slave.”
He moved away from me, walking across the plush Persian rugs to opened double doors that seemed to lead into a walk-in closet.
“Come.”
I cursed under my breath in Italian but followed him.
He continued to speak as he moved through the closet into the enormous marble bathroom beyond that had clearly been recently updated. I watched as he moved to the rain shower encased in glass and turned it on. “You will bathe me and dress me, then see me off every morning. When I return each night, you will be waiting in the great hall in your position, naked and waiting for me.”
“And while you are gone? Will I be made to sit in the ballroom all day contemplating my servitude and shackles?”
I was going to crazy if I spent too much more time alone in that blackhole of a place.
Alexander studied me with a furrowed brow, and I noticed just how clear his grey eyes were, so dark a grey they were nearly black before arrowing near the pupils into a colour so clear it seemed crystal.
He was truly the most beautiful monster.
“You’ve pleased me relatively well in the past twenty-four hours, so I’ll allow you run of the house while I’m away. The rooms that are unlocked are the only ones you have access to. Do not attempt to take advantage of my generosity by breaking in to forbidden places.”
I pouted before I could stop myself, but to my complete shock, my expression made Alexander chuckle softly and gently pinch my chin between his fingers so he could better look at me.
“What a delight your youth is,” he murmured, seemingly surprised by his enjoyment. “I cannot remember the last time someone stood up to my tyranny or pouted in the face of my rules. It’s oddly endearing, topolina.”
“At least you admit that you’re a tyrant.”
“Oh, a tyrant of the highest order. One who rules with absolute power,” he assured me, his tone oddly playful even though his face was cold, almost vacant in its impassivity.
“And you are utterly confusing,” I told him, slightly breathless because interacting with Lord Thornton was like what I imagined riding a roller coaster would feel like, a constant change of atmosphere.
Whatever softness had lurked in his eyes solidified even though his grasp on my chin remained gentle. “If you trust anything about me, trust this. I am your Master, and I will be hard on you. I will break you and reform you into my ideal slave because there is no other option for either of us. If you believe in anything, let it be my cruelty and have my occasional lapse in judgement where I might be kind, be something to enjoy and then discount.”
“But why does it have to be this way?” I asked, an edge of desperation to my tone as I stepped close, my nipples brushing against his lower chest. “I just don’t understand why you’d do this to me?”
“Sometimes we are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes we are born to bad people and live a bad life. There doesn’t always have to be a reason for misfortune, Cosima.”
“No,” I agreed, feeling those words like a punch to the sternum. “But there is for this.”
“There is.”
“You said something when I was out of it about being your enemy. Please, explain it to me,” I begged, my pride drowned in a tidal wave of hope-fueled curiosity.
“What have I told you? This is a give and take relationship, my beauty. You give, and I take. If you please me, I will reward you. You have not even begun to please me enough to earn the answer to the question of your slavery.” His grip on my chin tightened painfully, and he dipped down to bite hard into my lower lip. “You can begin now by bathing me.”
“Bathing you?” I asked incredulously as he stepped away and prowled over to the enormous walk-in shower to turn it on. “Only children need help bathing.”
His face was set in stone when he turned to look at me. “Clearly, that’s untrue as I am a grown man and I require your assistance. I’m surprised you forgot, I also promised you a shower. Two birds one stone, bella.”
I watched as the grown man in question turned to enter the shower, revealing his perfectly sculpted behind topped with deep dimples at the base of his back.
My mouth watered as he stepped under the rain shower. I couldn’t help but watch as the water turned his hair to tarnished gold and every inch of his lightly tanned skin to bronze.
“Slave,” he called out. “Tend to me.”
I shuddered as I fought back my animal desire for him.
I was no animal, and I would not give in to such base instincts even though I knew myself well enough to understand I’d always been too much of a hedonist to resist gorging myself on various delights for any length of time.
And Master Alexander’s body was certainly a delight.
I pushed through the glass door into the quickly steaming shower. Without speaking, Alexander handed me a bar of soap that smelled of pine trees and presented me with the broad, muscle swathed expanse of his back.
I watched my hand lift to rub the soap over his skin, how it trembled as I moved in broad circles over the topography of his spine.
I had never washed a man before.
It was a silly observation. I was a woman and a virgin, so obviously, I’d never been in a similar situation before. But this intimacy seemed to extend beyond sexuality into the realm of real intimacy.
I could feel the satiny texture of his skin under my fingers, the strength of his muscles tensed beneath the flesh, and the heat of his body as he absorbed the temperature of the steamy shower. There was a triangle of small brown moles high on his left shoulder and a faint, nearly indecipherable collection of thin, criss-crossing scars in the valley below his shoulder blades. I traced their edges with my thumb and wondered who had done that to him.
His muscles bunched with tension, and I realized that I had spoken aloud.
“As I’ve told you, every predator is prey to someone.”
“I can’t imagine a beast more terrifying than you,” I told him honestly.
It wasn’t just that he was ruthless or crueler than a starving wolf. Something in his manner spoke of the colossal effort of his restraint, as if one wrong moment would unleash that ravenous beast chained to the floor of his soul on whomever was unwise enough to be in its path.
“Some monsters are made, and some are born. You could say that I’m the worst of both worlds,” he said cryptically.
I chewed my lip as I puzzled over his words, aware that the mystery of Alexander Davenport was dangerous to a woman like me. A woman who enjoyed the riddles of the human brain, and the strange complexities of a single personality. I wanted to sit cross-legged on the ground and assemble the facets of Alexander’s mind like a ten-thousand-piece puzzle.
In my experience, if you could understand someone, it was nearly impossible to hate them.
And truthfully, I didn’t want to hate this man. Not because he deserved warmer feelings, but because that hatred was just as corrosive to my mental health as my two-week stint in the dark. I couldn’t imagine hating someone with all my heart and seeing them every single day for the next five years.
What kind of person would I be at the end of that?
How could I go from half a decade of hatred to a future reunited with my family? How could I find love in my heart, how would I know how to express it?
The answer, I feared, was that I wouldn’t be able to.
If I allowed the horrible unjustness of my situation to disband my ability to love, I’d lose an elemental facet of who I was and the very reason I was even doing this.
For the love of my family.
Alexander interrupted my thoughts to hand me a shampoo bottle.
I sucked in a deep breath and poured the gel into my hands before working it into the thick strands of his hair. His scent bloom
ed in the humid air, so that I felt he was surrounding me.
He turned to face me when I was done, tipping his head back into the steam of water so that bubbles went sliding down over his chiseled chest. His eyes popped open to stare at me as I popped a big bubble over his left nipple.
Caught like a little girl, I giggled before I could clamp my mouth shut with both hands.
His eyes blazed, but he didn’t condemn me. Instead, his voice was silky when he said, “Get on your knees and clean me with your tongue.”
“Soap would do a better job,” I retorted, but my knees were already softening, melting me like butter to the ground at his feet.
He was already hard. The long, veined length of him pulsed in time with his heartbeat, hypnotizing me as I stared at it. It felt strange to find something so alien to me so utterly attractive, but I loved the thickness of him as I weighed him in my palm and the way his heavy balls were framed by his lean, strong thighs.
I tilted his erection down to my mouth and kept my eyes canted up to his when I licked the flat of my tongue over the crown of his shaft.
His eyes went black with arousal.
Something like a purr vibrated through my throat before I could swallow it back. There was something unbearable heady about having his most delicate organ in my hand, about bringing such a powerful man pleasure.
“Tell me what to do,” I asked, playing my fingers over his shaft, his pubic bone, and inner thighs.
His body tensed with surprise before relaxing. One of his hands slid into the back of my hair and fisted.
“Suck and lick the water from my cock as a guide. Trace the veins with your tongue, take me as far into your throat as you can and breathe through your nose so I can feel how tight and wet your mouth is around me. Essentially, treat my cock like your very own ice-cream cone.” His voice was husky again, and I knew that seeing me lap at the head of his cock like a kitten with cream was the reason for it.
I hummed with my lips pressed to him and then looked up at him to say, “If I make you come like this, I want to be allowed to write a letter to my family.”
The hand in my hair twisted painfully, and the pleasure previously saturating his features calcified. “Are you trying to top from the bottom again, topolina?”
His voice was a menacing hiss that pierced fear through me like a needle with thread.
I didn’t answer because it didn’t feel prudent.
“Let me rephrase that for you. If you make me come hard enough with your inexperience mouth, I won’t tie you down and take a cat-o’-nine-tails to your tender arse.”
I could feel my eyes like hot coals in my head as I glared up at him, but he was unperturbed by my animosity, and before I could protest, he jacked his hips forward to sink the tip of his dick past my parted lips.
Gone was the option to learn about his pleasure, to explore him the way a virgin might have the opportunity to study their lover. I’d lost that privilege and the glimpse of a man with some semblance of a tender soul due to my impudence, and now I was just a vessel for his cock.
A slave.
The degradation of being used like that burned in my bones and radiated heat through my entire body until I felt suffused with fire. Yet those flames were not made of shame. They coursed through my blood straight to the tips of my puckered breasts and the apex of my thighs where they raged like wildfires.
It turned me on. The sucking, wet noises I made around his hard flesh as he pumped into my throat, the way my jaw ached with the struggle to accommodate his girth, and the pain prickling over my scalp as he fisted my hair too tightly in both hands.
It was too much, everything too hot. The steamy air, the splatter of shower water and the man towering over me, using me ruthlessly for his own pleasure.
I felt lightheaded with desire and confusion.
How could I be enjoying this?
Before I could find the answer to that question, Alexander’s hands tightened in my hair, and his legs shook as he started to come. Unlike the first time, he pulled out of my throat so that the first blast of his briny cum landed on my tongue. I swallowed around him, then gasped as he pulled out farther, fisting his angry red shaft in a big hand. I was stunned and mesmerized as he pulled at his flesh almost violently, his cum flying out to land on my cheek, my neck, and my lust swollen breasts.
Painted in sin and steeped in shameful lust, I kneeled before my Master feeling as newborn and vulnerable as a kitten. So I was pliant when he reached down to haul me to my feet and then press me against the cold shower tiles. It was only when he stamped the full length of his body to my own and one of his hands went unerringly between my legs to cup my drenched sex that I stirred from the oblivion of my mind.
“Soaking wet,” he rasped into my ear as he dragged his nose down the column of my throat.
I squirmed as he sank his teeth into the flesh where my neck met my shoulder. His hand curled firmly over my pussy, two fingers sinking inside me to bump gently against the barrier of my virginity.
“My beauty likes to be used by her Master,” he continued to say as he ground the palm of his hand into my clit.
Instantly, I was on the verge of orgasming. I panted and winced, trying to stave off the overwhelming heat and the need to grind into his hand for further friction.
“The slave with a spine of steel melts with one touch to her swollen cunt. I’ll remember that next time you try to stand up to me.”
I swallowed the ragged edge of a groan.
“But I will not let you come this morning.” He smiled against my wet cheek when I whimpered in protest. “Be happy I am not punishing you for trying to manipulate me. I will not be wrapped around your little finger, slave. Remember that today each time your greedy cunt yearns for the press of my fingers and tongue.”
He pulled away from me abruptly and stepped out of the shower without further ado. I watched slightly stupefied as he dried off and tied a towel around his lean hips.
“You have exactly ninety seconds to finish washing, and then I expect you to dress me. If you attempt to touch yourself, I will introduce you to the ancient stockade we keep in the backyard.”
Immediately, my pussy still pulsing and my mind sitting eschew on my head like a crooked hat, I did as he bade.
I spent hours walking the house after he left for the day. It was named Pearl Hall quite aptly as there were pearls inlaid in elaborate furnishings and scalloping the edge of sconces and doorframe plasterwork. There were priceless historical trappings everywhere I looked, from the centuries-old tapestries that covered the walls to the delicate draperies pulled back from every window. There was also surveillance everywhere. Cameras, sensors, and keypads beside some locked doors that seemed to call for fingerprints or retina scans.
I felt those technological eyes watching me as I lingered over paintings, and I hated that the only thing I’d been given to wear was one of Alexander’s thin, cotton button-ups. Someone was tracking my every step through the manor and that knowledge made me feel like Alexander’s “little mouse” even though he wasn’t at the house to hunt me himself.
When I tried to open the front doors for some fresh air, Riddick appeared behind me, silent but heavy with censure. He would stop me, I knew, if I somehow found a way to get past the heavy lock. He appeared again when I lingered too long over a set of intricately carved wooden doors. He didn’t touch me, but his presence was enough to have me scuttling forward like a scolded child.
Around midday, my stomach began to rumble, and I went in search of the kitchens, descending the grand staircase onto the main floor and then taking a smaller, darker one into the pit of the house.
Instantly, the eerie quiet permeating the upper levels was perforated with giggles and erratic chatter.
I wanted to be a part of the noise. I wanted to sit down with another woman and talk about the strange things happening to my body. My bizarre attraction to Alexander was even more confounding than puberty had been, and I yearned for someone to smooth
the ragged edges of my panic with their wisdom.
What I really wanted was Mama to sit me down at the kitchen table with a simple task like rolling out pasta dough so that my anxious thoughts were steadied by a mundane task. Only then would she roll out her wisdom as calmly and proficiently as she kneaded the semolina under her fingers.
Even Elena would know what to say to me given her relationship with Christopher, a much older family friend who had been courting Elena since she was sixteen. They slept together even though she had never explicitly told me so. I could tell by the slashes of high colour on her cheekbones when she returned from his home, the way she smelled like him in secret places like behind her ears and in the hollow of her collarbones. She would break my attraction apart the way a mathematician would, into equations with logical outcomes.
It was the kind of advice I needed then, not Sebastian’s empathy or Giselle’s romanticism, but learned wisdom and defined logical. The why and how of my attraction to someone who was more monster than man.
I swept down the worn stone floor into a huge, airy kitchen that somehow maintained the feel of ancient grandeur while being completely modernized. There were a handful of servants working around the room and more sitting at a massive table off to the left, happily living out their day.
Until they saw me.
Instantly, they froze, and the chatter evaporated.
I swallowed back my nerves, hyper aware of the long length of my legs exposed by the shirt and the fact that they probably knew I’d been chained to the floor of the ballroom for the past few weeks.
“Hello,” I said, then cleared my throat when my accent saturated the word. “Hello everyone, I am so sorry to bother. I was just exploring the, um, the house, and when I smelled something delicious, I followed my nose down here.”
They continued to stare without deviation in expression or posture.
Um, okay.
“Excuse them,” said a young man with flaming ginger hair and so many freckles he seemed like a walking constellation of golden stars. “They have no manners.” He moved forward quickly to extend his hand. “I, on the other hand, do. Pleasure to meet you, Miss Lombardi. I am Douglas O’Shea, the chef of this illustrious household.”
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