My Master was home.
I didn’t look up even as the shoes clicked twice, then paused for an endless moment in the doorframe, before they started up again, crossing the white and black checkered floor to me.
When his black Ferragamo loafers appeared in my line of vision, I could have cried.
He didn’t speak as he stared down at me, not even when he finally placed a heavy hand on the top of my head and smoothed it over my hair. My breath stuttered from between my lips as he stepped closer and fiddled with his shirt.
His hand fell before my eyes holding a brilliant red tie.
I swallowed thickly.
He tied it briskly around my head, over my eyes, and though I tried, the fabric was too opaque for me to see anything.
The metallic gasp of his zipper, the rustle of parting fabric and then the hot press of his erection against my cheek.
He smelled so good there, deep musk and sinful man. My tongue flicked out to lick him, and I didn’t care how depraved it made me seem.
I was empty, empty, empty, and I needed him to fill me up.
As if hearing my thoughts, he wove his fingers into the back of my hair and slowly pressed me forward onto his length, impaling me.
I groaned, and tears sprang to my eyes.
I’d missed this, the swell of him between my lips and the struggle of him in my throat. My beauty had always been my only talent, but now I had another.
Pleasing my Master.
His hand spasmed in my hair, and the other joined it, threading through the locks to use them like reins. It delighted me to melt his usually ironclad control with my mouth.
I sucked on his shaft, squeezed my throat around his length, and lapped at the plump head like a kitten with milk.
He came all too quickly, both of us groaning as if in pain as his cum landed in lush spurts across my tongue.
Finally, he pulled my still eager mouth away from his length and stepped away, breathing hard.
As my submissive high abated, my gut began to clench with unease.
Alexander had never been a silent lover. He enjoyed taunting me as he used me, making me beg as he hurt me so well.
Why was he being so quiet?
I opened my mouth to question him when the hush of the well-oiled door whispered throughout the hall.
My spine snapped straighter, and I fought the urge to run.
I was naked, kneeling in the great hall like a statue meant for use instead of ornamentation, and there was another person there who was not my Master.
“What the fuck is this?” Alexander’s voice boomed out across the hall, the echo sticking in the corners as if caught by spider’s webs. “Get the bloody hell away from my property this minute.”
I ripped off the blindfold just in time to see Alexander in the doorway, his body colossal with rage as he stared down the man standing before me.
The man who had just used me.
He was shorter and slimmer than Alexander, with mousy blond hair that curled floppishly around his ears. It was his cock that perturbed me most though, hanging half-turgid out of his opened trousers and still wet from my mouth.
Bile crashed against my esophagus, and I choked on it once before submitting to the urge to vomit over my shoulder into the massive oriental vase behind me.
From the corner of my eye, I watched as Alexander broke from his terrifying paralysis and stormed across the room, sweeping up the interloper in his cyclone wake. He took him off his feet with one hand fisted in his collar and the other at his shoulder.
I coughed and gasped, my hand over my raging heart as Alexander slammed him brutally into one of the walls. Two paintings plummeted to the ground beside them, the glass shattering into thousands of crystalline pieces at their feet.
Alexander didn’t notice.
He was utterly consumed by his rage. I couldn’t see his face as he pushed it close to my assaulter’s, but I could see the fury in every line of his gladiator’s form as he squeezed a large hand around the man’s neck.
“You dare to touch what’s mine, Lord Ashcroft?” Alexander seethed over the sound of the man choking for breath. “You dare to use the property of a Davenport man without my express permission? I will show you what is done to vile thieves in this house.”
Summoned by the commotion, Riddick appeared in one of the many doorways to the circular room and took the man in a tight grip by the neck.
“Take him to the Iron Chair,” Alexander ordered.
Lord Ashcroft whimpered. “Alexander, old chap, what the fuck is wrong with you? What’s a little sharing between brothers of the Order?”
“I don’t give a fuck about the Order. This is my home, and you stuck your miserable excuse for a cock in the mouth of my lovely slave. You’ve desecrated at my altar, and you will be punished as the heathens did, in a way that is so unmerciful, you will feel the consequences of your actions for the rest of your life.”
Ashcroft wailed as Riddick turned on his heel and literally dragged him out of the room. I stared after them in mute horror.
I wasn’t just traumatized by the assault of a strange man.
I was fractured by my willingness to submit. A healthy woman would have looked up into the eyes of the man she was going to pleasure; she would have demanded something in return or at the very least, not felt elevated to a spiritual plane the moment a cock was between her lips.
It was the realization that I was a slut that razed me to the ground at that horrible moment. So, when Alexander stalked over to me and bent down to tip my chin gently with his curled knuckles to look in my eyes and study my mental state, he found nothing.
No, courageous topolina, no atavistic Cosima.
Just a vacant shell.
“My beauty,” he breathed, his voice vaporous as agony punched him in the gut. “My sweet, pure beauty. I am so sorry he defiled you.”
Sorry from the lips of my Master.
It should have been a gift I spent overlong unwrapping, smoothing the ribbons through my fingers, teasing the tape back with the edge of my thumb like a child on Christmas.
Instead, its prettiness felt foreign in my lap. A present I didn’t deserve.
I should be the one to apologize for being such a floozy.
For allowing someone else to use me for their pleasure when it was only Alexander I wanted to serve.
He was horrible in ways I could recognize and understand. If there was a monster under my bed, I wanted it to be him because his was a cruelty I was familiar with.
The idea of being used and terrorized by another completely undid me.
“I will beat him to within an inch of his life,” Alexander cooed to me as he gently used the edge of his sleeve to wipe the tears I hadn’t known were spilling down my cheeks. “I will sit him in the Iron Chair and use the cat-o’-nine-tails on him until he is a bloody mass of stripped ribbons on the spiked throne. How does that sound, topolina? Do you think then he will understand that you were made for no one but me?”
Yes! my mind hissed. I could just imagine Alexander using his considerable force to flay the man for his transgressions, taunting him for his idiocy so that he could break his body and mind simultaneously.
Alexander was a champion at that.
I should know.
“Would you like to watch? Would that make you feel better?” he wondered, skirting gentle fingers along my hairline, trailing his thumb over my swollen mouth.
I could still taste Ashcroft, and it made me want to retch again. I could feel the shape of him like a phantom in my throat and the weight of his hands in my hair.
No, I didn’t want to watch Alexander beat him.
I needed something else.
Something that my rational mind might consider even more abhorrent.
“I need you,” I admitted on a broken breath.
I reached out to coil my fist in his shirt. He wasn’t wearing a tie. I should have known the moment I saw that garish red tie that it wasn’t Alexander seducing me
. My Alexander never wore ties.
I leaned forward to press my nose to the hollow of his exposed throat, breathing deeply of his delicious cedar smell. “I need you,” I repeated again, stronger this time. “I need you to take me and prove I’m yours and no one else’s.”
Alexander made a noise in his throat that was half agony, half purr, and his hand went up to fist brutally in the back of my hair, yanking it so I was forced to look up at him. His eyes scored the wet depths of my own, looking amid the broken fragments of my spirit to see how to make me whole again.
He found the answer he was looking for and groaned again as he angled my head and plundered my mouth with his own.
I used the minty, manly taste of his mouth to cleanse my palate and pressed closer, kneading my hands into his chest like a cat seeking affection.
He gave it to me.
We kissed until my mind spun like a top, until each breath felt wrung from my lungs and my heart was on the precipice of bursting.
There was one thought in my head that drummed out all else, I need him, I need him, I need him.
I gasped when his hands went under my armpits, and he lifted me up so that I was forced to wind my legs around his neck and sit my pussy flush against his face. My hands dove into the silken strands of his hair and pulled him tight to me so I could balance precariously with my ass seated in the wide bowl of his palms.
He ate at me ruthlessly, nibbling on my lips, sucking hard, smacking kisses against my clit, then tunneling his tongue deep inside me. It pulled my focus to the apex of my sex so that the wet slide of his mouth against my flooded entrance was all I could hear and all I could be was sensation.
Normally, when I came for him, I splintered apart, undone by his touch. This time was different.
As I climaxed, fire flooded over my jagged, broken edges, melding them back together, soothing the connections away until they were seamless, and I was whole in his arms again. I cried out at the oddity of the sensation, and the overwhelming rightness of the pleasure, my shouts magnified by the room until they echoed throughout the house.
I wanted them to hear.
I wanted the servants to know I was Alexander’s so that they would stop their lecherous gazes. I wanted Ashcroft to know that even as he was impaled on a chair of spikes and beaten by Riddick’s meaty fists that I was experiencing pleasure from my rightful owner, expunging his mark on me as easily as wiping a whiteboard clean.
When I finally came down from the height of my climax, I found myself slumped over Alexander, my fingers carding through his beautiful hair in a way that brought us both comfort. He pressed a kiss to the damp inside of my thigh but otherwise didn’t move, letting me take my time to recover.
I realized that it was the gentle intimacy that I so loved about our sexual dynamic. Alexander could fold me in half, break me into weapon-sharp edges of pleasure with his scenes and his demands, but he always, always brought me back to earth with the gentle touch of his hands.
His tenderness was my undoing. Even realizing it, I knew nothing would change. He had been slowly unravelling the great length of me from the moment I’d arrived and even before that when he’d set his sights on me in Milano and grew determined to take me.
I was a goner before I even realized I’d gone.
I sighed heavily, and Alexander took it as the cue it was. He slumped slightly so that my legs slid off his shoulders, and I fell into his lap, his arms binding around me in sweet bondage.
“Who knew something so strong could be so heartbreakingly beautiful,” he whispered as he studied my face and dragged his rough-edged thumb down the line of my jaw.
I wanted to duck my head and hide behind my hair because a compliment had never felt so profound before, but he wouldn’t let me escape his scrutiny.
“He took nothing from you because he is worth nothing, do you understand?” he continued in the hushed voice he always used when dealing with me. As if he didn’t even want the air between us to know our secrets.
My lip trembled, and he pressed it steady with the pad of his thumb.
“Say it to me,” he demanded.
I sucked in a deep breath that burned down my throat and fortified me like strong brandy. “He took nothing from me because he is worth nothing.”
“I am going to give you everything because you are worth everything,” he said in a way that made it a vow, and to seal it, he closed his mouth over mine in a firm, hard kiss that felt like a wax seal stamped with his crest.
“I don’t understand you,” I told him shakily. “You want to destroy me one minute and worship me in the next.”
He closed his eyes, looking so very tired for the first time since I’d met him. I didn’t curb my impulse to reach up and smooth the lines in his puckered forehead with my fingers.
“You aren’t English, and you aren’t a peer, so how can you understand? I was born into something that I cannot change, and I must carry the burdens of my ancestors.”
“Nothing is irrevocable,” I told him, but the words felt like a lie as I sat in the cradle of his arms because I knew there was nothing changeable about the way he had altered the composition of my mind.
“Some things are. There are secrets with roots that stem back into the 1500s in a family as old as mine, and there are some that are as recent as my lifetime that are too egregious to ever lay down.”
“And these secrets explain why you bought me?”
He pulled back to consider me, idly wrapping one of his fingers in a lock of my inky hair. “I think perhaps I would have acquired you even if I hadn’t needed you. The moment you saved my life was the moment you unwittingly became mine.”
“A strange way to repay a debt,” I noted because even though I was soft from my orgasm, there were still thorns at the edges of my thoughts from the trauma of it all, each memory a prick of pain against my psyche.
He’d done that damage to me, directly and indirectly.
“It is. I hope one day to explain it all to you, but that day is not today, and it is not soon. Now, get up and go directly to your room. I want you to stay there while I deal with the bastard currently occupying my dungeon. Unless you want to watch?”
I thought it about it as I bit into my lower lip. There was no denying something would be satisfying about watching a man hurt for his transgressions against me. But I didn’t think I wanted to be the kind of glutton who indulged in such a thing.
“I’ll go upstairs.”
“Good girl,” he said with a small smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
He pulled my chin forward to press a kiss on my mouth, then stood us both up easily.
“Oh good, you’re organizing yourselves,” a voice said from the entryway to the left wing of the house.
Noel stood there in something more formal than a tuxedo, his silver threaded golden hair pushed away from his face with pomade.
I made a noise in my throat and ducked slightly behind Alexander because I was tired of being undressed in front of fully clothed men.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Alexander demanded, crossing his arms over his chest and bracing his feet like a military man.
“The Order is coming.”
Something dark permeated the room, and the light from the small windows at the top of the two-story space suddenly went out. Logically, I knew that the ever-present English clouds had covered the weak late autumn sun, but the omen felt too powerful to rationalize.
“And who the fuck invited them?” Alexander asked even though the answer was obvious.
Noel smiled sedately. “They inquired after the girl, as is their right. You hadn’t done so; therefore, I gave them an update.”
“An update that clearly required them to check up on us.”
His father shrugged. “I am not the man in power. Take it up with Sherwood.”
“Oh,” Alexander said darkly. “I will. You and I will also be having words. Ashcroft arrived early and assaulted Cosima.”
“Cosima?”
He frowned, looking so much like a confused older man that I felt the urge to go to him. “Oh, you mean Ruthie? What a terrible misunderstanding.”
“There was no misunderstanding,” Alexander ground out, his fist clenched at his sides. “You are the orchestrator of this madness, and it is you who should have to the bear the mark of it. Not Cosima.”
Finally, an expression that was not calm or solicitous crossed Noel’s face. It slithered beneath his skin, not quite there, a snake in the grass hoping to move by undetected. Reflexively, I recoiled. The man I’d spent my afternoons with had been wise, kind, and old enough to bring comfort to me because such a man didn’t view young women like me as anything but delicate young ladies.
That look did not say all that had been conveyed that day.
“Do not call her by that name,” he ordered Alexander. “She is Ruthie now.”
I’d never seen anyone order Alexander, and true to my expectations, he took it as the insult it was.
“I will decide what to call her as she is my slave, Father. You forget yourself. Perhaps your senility is impairing your judgment.”
“Perhaps your cock is impairing yours,” Noel snapped, the tendons in his neck straining. “Do you forget the reason we do the things we must? Is it so easy to forget your own mother?”
The silence that stretched between them was dense and toxic like the aftermath of an atomic bomb. The two men stared at each other unmoving for so long that I began to feel uncomfortable.
“Go upstairs,” Alexander bit out, clearly addressing me. “Go upstairs and ready yourself to be presented as my slave tonight.”
My cold feet were fleet against the marble, and I was halfway up the stairs before Alexander called out, “Oh, and topolina, if you don’t follow my every instruction without hesitation, you will be who next sits in the Iron Chair.”
I could hear the low murmur of male voices punctuated by the clamour of cutlery on fine china and the clink of crystal glasses filled over full with wine. My heart was in my throat as I waited outside the servant’s door to the dining hall, my hands twisted like tangled twine in my angst.
Mrs. White had attended me as soon as I’d stepped through the doors to my bedchamber. I’d been bathed, buffed, and lotioned, combed, dried, and curled, then stuffed like a doll into a ridiculous frilled white frock that would have been better fit for a child since it barely covered my ass or breasts.
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