Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

Even my own safety.

  I checked the gun hidden neatly under my arm in the holster beneath my bespoke Armani suit, and then did a quick survey of my surroundings to make sure my path to her was clear.

  I was taking my wife home with me.

  Sherwood and Noel could bombard us with threats like the London Blitz, but I didn’t give a fuck.

  I’d shield her with my own body and throw my entire fortune like a golden shield up around us if it meant keeping her at my side, on her knees but proud just as she was meant to be.

  Only, as I swung my eyes back to her, I noticed two things that gave me pause.

  A man standing on the opposite street corner from Cosima, his copper hair wet with rain, his trench coat drenched in the deluge but still obviously expensive. He stared at my wife with a cocked head, mesmerised as any red-blooded male would be by the sight of her on that street like some queen finally freed from the underworld.

  Jealousy burned like a straight shot of whiskey to my gut.

  He looked at the ground, then back up at her, and then he was moving with purposeful strides across the road.

  It was only then I noticed the man who had been partially obscured behind a parked tram. He was tall, reed thin, and pale like wax paper, so quintessentially British it made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

  It was his hand, though, that highlighted the threat.

  His arms folded over a suited chest, hand resting just under his left armpit where a slight bulge was noticeable through the material.

  He was palming a gun.

  Adrenaline sluiced over me, my legs aching with lactic acid that urged me to charge out of the car and kill the bastard for following either of us.

  The Order had sent someone to take care of us if we disobeyed orders.

  Despite my show of loyalty by castrating Simon Wentworth, they still didn’t trust me. Indignation burned through me, chased on its heels by the inferno of betrayal.

  That they knew where she was to send someone indicated they were the ones to take her from me.

  I felt the insane urge to tip my head to the sky and howl like a beast with rage. Instead, I pulled my knife out from my pocket, flipped it open, and stabbed it into the passenger seat of the hundred thousand-pound Bugatti.

  The act of violence calmed me enough to take stock of Cosima again.

  As I deliberated how I could instantaneously kill each member of the Order, the strange man reached Cosima and began to pull open his coat.

  I had my gun out of its holster and in my hands, leveled at the threat in the next instant, my breathing calm and cool as I narrowed my sight at the threatening bastard.

  Would they really be so bold as to take her out on a bloody street corner?

  No. I told myself to relax and lowered the weapon as the man took off his trench and handed it to my wife.

  The Order operated in the shadows, illusive and ephemeral as the spectre of a demon sent from Hell. They wouldn’t cause a scene.

  The bastard-in-wait across the street was a sleeper agent. He wouldn’t pull the trigger unless Cosima gave him—and therefore the Order—reason to do so.

  Right now, she was safe.

  If I stepped into the picture again to claim her, I’d be placing her in imminent danger. If we somehow escaped this gunman, there would always be another threat around the corner.

  Sherwood and the rest were not the kind of men who let flagrant rule breaking go unpunished.

  I thought back to the difference between Ares and Athena, of how cool logic and careful planning always prevailed over hot-headed action. I wondered if I was strong enough, clever enough to think hard and long, to craft a plan so precise and perfectly honed I could use it like a lance to drive it through the heart of my enemies and hers. Ours.

  I watched distractedly as the redheaded man spoke with Cosima, obviously trying to comfort and coax her toward a café to get out of the rain.

  She laughed, her head thrown back and her hand snapping out to brace herself against his arm as if the weight of his hilarity was too much to bear.

  The man looked down at her hand on his arm and then back up into her gorgeous face made even more gorgeous by the rain and good humour, and I knew he was caught.

  It only took a moment, a glance, to be hooked by her beauty, but the moment she allowed you a glimpse of her vital spirit, it was like a bludgeon over the head and the end of any protestations.

  He would help her.

  I could see it in the way he led her into the café, leaning down to better hear her lyrical voice.

  I wanted to kill him.

  And not even quickly, simply by shooting him with the cold gun in my lap.

  I wanted to rip him apart with my bare hands just for touching her, for even thinking about caring for her when she was my responsibility.

  But then I looked over at the minion across the street and saw him watching my car, squinting across the distance into the dark interior.

  He couldn’t see me, but if he did, the work I’d done to convince Sherwood I was indifferent to Cosima would be undone.

  And it couldn’t be.

  If I really wanted the best for Cosima, I’d leave her alone to carve out a better life for herself. One that didn’t involve my dark tastes, my sadistic father, the cursed Order, or the past four years of a debt that should never have been hers to settle.

  She’d helped me enough.

  Salvatore was dead. The Order was appeased now that I’d taken part in their twisted games. They had ammo for blackmail should I choose to go against them, which was really why they participated in things like The Hunt and The Trails in the first place. To get dirt on the wealthiest, most powerful men in the United Kingdom and save it for a rainy bribe-ridden day.

  Cosima was only ever meant to be a tool, and she’d fulfilled her purpose.

  It should have been easy to let her go.

  So why did my chest feel on fire?

  Why could I hear the bones snapping and cracking as flames ate away at them, as my organs shriveled up to soot and ash?

  Why couldn’t I fathom a life without her?

  I hit my head against my hands wrapped around the steering wheel and knew in the way I normally instinctively knew about changes in the stock market and trends in media that I’d never be able to get over her.

  How did someone get over a person who had fundamentally changed their life?

  I was strong. I’d been made into a man of intellect and steely determination. I could quit any addiction if I set my mind to it, maybe even my obsession with the girl with gold eyes.

  But I didn’t want to.

  And that made all the difference.

  I thought about that as I got out of the car, slipping silently through the small crowds down the street toward the man stalking Cosima. As I passed him without drawing his notice and then doubled back when another tram arrived to obscure us from the street to catch his thick neck in a chokehold and drag him farther into the alley. I thought of her silken skin as I wrapped my hands around his neck while he struggled and went red, then white with the effort and failure to breathe, and then I thought of her beautiful sorrow as she stood in the rain, rejoicing in the drops as I sharply turned my gloved hands to the right and felt the Order’s sycophant’s spine snap between my hands.

  After I threw him into an overflowing dumpster, I took one last glance at my wife sitting in the small coffee shop drinking tea with her new strange savoir and a woman I’d called only hours before, and somehow curtailed my possessive rage and encompassing grief enough to get back into the car and drive to the airport.

  Then, I thought about her still as I caught my private jet back to London, as Riddick picked me up in the Rolls and drove me straight to 10 Downing Street. Security tried to detain me before Prime Minister James Caldron himself stepped through the famous lacquered black door and crossed his arms over his chest at the sight of me.

  “Alexander, you git, what brings you to my hovel?”


  I stared at my old uni roommate with the familiar comfort of my implacable mask affixed to my face, and said, “I have something of a story to tell you, James, and at the end of it, you’re going to help me take down one of the most corrupt organizations in the U.K., and you’ll go down in history for it.”

  James stared at me for a long moment, his stare almost as aloof as my own. He didn’t come from money the way most of my Cambridge compatriots in Trinity College had, but he was all the sharper for it.

  It was just that razor wit that had driven a wedge between us after graduation when James had tried to recruit me to help his mechanisms in parliament, and I’d told him, quite honestly, I wasn’t a man who did something for nothing.

  “Why now?” he finally asked.

  I felt the wedding ring I’d taken off, thrown into the lake behind Pearl Hall and then had retrieved after the Order had left, burning a hole in my pocket as I locked eyes with him, and said, “They took something from me. One thing that might have meant everything.”

  Cosima

  I saw him. A year into my separation, a full twelve months into my self-imposed rehabilitation project to rid myself of his influence on my mind, body, and soul, I saw Alexander Davenport at Bulgari’s annual Fashion Week party in Milan.

  I stepped into the gilded room and felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up in the oddly static air. There was a ripple of awareness down my spine as I descended the marble steps into the crowded ballroom, that animal awareness I’d learned to hone like an alarm bell to tell me when I was being watched.

  I was alone, unaccompanied by one of the few men I kept on rotation as potential dates to such functions. It was more impactful, I’d found, to enter the room as a beautiful woman unencumbered by the weight of a man at my side. It took confidence and power to arrive as an unaccompanied female, and I’d learned to take every opportunity to show power when the occasion arose. So, when I wanted to make an entrance, as I did that night because I was the star of not one, but three fashion house catwalks that week, I did it solo.

  My eyes swept over the masses of gorgeously attired people, noting the fashion moguls I should talk to and the models I should avoid. I wasn’t expecting my gaze to snag on the brilliant warmth of a head of golden hair.

  I paused on the last step, my stilettoed foot hovering just off the ground as I clung to the bannister and let my eyes devour the man I hadn’t seen in twelve months.

  He was holding court unlike anyone I’d ever seen before, surrounded by a flock of avid admirers who stared at him, readying to hang onto his every word even though he gave them none. Instead, he stood quietly, proud, and perfectly groomed as a lord of the realm warranted. He was the most beautiful, powerful man anyone in the room had ever seen, and he knew it. People spoke at him, trying to lure him into conversation with pretty, flashing praise and the scintillating scent of gossip, but he remained unmoved.

  Until something in the pressure of the air around him must have shifted, penetrated by the hot knife of my regard.

  Instantly, his spine stiffened, and his eyes snapped to mine like powerful magnets clipping together. It didn’t matter how many people stood between us like sheaves of paper stacked between our magnetized bodies. At that moment, it seemed the only two people in the room, in the universe, were us.

  Instinctively, my body gathered itself to run. Not away from him, but toward. I wanted to throw myself across the room into his arms and then slide to the ground on my knees and beg him to take me home.

  Home to Pearl Hall.

  Home to wet and dreary England where I knew no one, but him and his.

  Home was where he was, no matter how hard I’d tried to convince myself for the past twelve months it wasn’t.

  After all my hard work, the hours of therapy and meditation, the countless self-help books, and I was right back to where I’d been before.

  My heart and body were slave to Alexander Davenport.

  I opened my mouth to say something, lowered my foot to take the first step in his direction when his eyes went from smoke to stone, and his gaze cut away from mine.

  I felt that knife’s edge of his disregard cut me off at the knees, and I sank gracelessly from the last step to the ballroom floor, clinging to the rail to keep from falling.

  Unhooked from his eyes, I noticed what he had turned to look at. Not what, but whom.

  A gorgeous woman with hair like spun sunlight stood at his side wearing a smile as bright as the diamonds wrapped around her throat and a dress that was nearly as expensive.

  She was the golden queen to his golden king.

  They looked so perfectly suited, his arm wrapped tight around her hips, her hand pressed lightly to his chest, that for a moment, I wondered if they were real.

  Alexander ducked his head to listen to something she spoke quietly in his ear and then broke into a smile like sunbeams cutting through clouds to bathe her in unfiltered warmth.

  God, but he’d never smiled at me like that.

  Not once, not ever.

  I’d had private moments with him, small intimacies I collected like charms on a chain around my wrist but seeing him with her like that made them feel cheap and fake.

  Nothing like the diamonds she wore around her arms that I knew instinctively that he had gifted her.

  “You look thunderstruck, Cosi,” Jensen Brask murmured as he took my elbow and gently pulled me into his side for stability. “What has happened?”

  I placed my shaking hand over his forearm where it linked with mine and took a deep breath to settle my rabid heartbeat.

  “Someone I once knew,” I explained to the man who had taken me so thoroughly under his wing since I’d re-entered the modelling world heralded by the great Willa Percy. “I thought I saw a man I once knew, but it was just a trick of the light.”

  Or of the mind.

  I wondered with a sinking gut whether my time apart from Alexander and the horrors we’d live through together had only distanced me from the pain of the memories and gilded them with a love and magnitude that had never really existed.

  Jensen’s platinum blond brow puckered, but he knew me well enough not to push me for answers. “Why don’t you come meet some of your admirers then, my beautiful girl? There is nothing like the flattery of shallow people to make one feel better about themselves.”

  I laughed, as was his intention. Jensen might have been one of the most famed fashion house directors in the business, but he was not idle or vainglorious. He believed in hard work, dedication to the craft, and a rigorous level of self-discipline. He was a study in control, and I longed to model myself after him.

  He held me close as we made the rounds, our laughter pretty and perfectly formed, canned like the giggles after a sitcom joke. He knew how to play the game, and he’d taught me well how to do it too. If he sensed my discomfiture as I moved around the room, aware of every shifting angle between myself and Alexander like a star orbiting the sun, he didn’t say.

  But I knew he was aware because of that hold on me, tight and comforting, as if he knew I felt safer shackled than I did free.

  “Did you see him?” a woman I’d met countless time whose name I could never remember expressed excitedly at one point two hours after my arrival. “Did you see the Earl of Thornton?”

  I stiffened, a gazelle downwind of a predator.

  Jenson calmly patted my arm. “I did.”

  The woman touched her blond updo self-consciously as she looked over our shoulders, presumably at the man in question. “Isn’t he the most handsome man you ever saw?”

  Somehow, instinctively, my charm arose to save the day. “My brother would take umbrage with that. He’s awfully vain, but I have to admit, he has good reason to be.”

  Jenson and the other man we were with laughed.

  “He is ridiculously good looking,” my friend and artistic director agreed. “It irks me to no end that he refuses to campaign with you for St. Aubyn.”

  I shrugged a shoulder because
we’d had this conversation before. “He doesn’t like standing still if he doesn’t have to. Acting is more his gig.”

  “Gig.” Jenson shook his head at me, but his small smile was fond. “You’re becoming more American every day. I wish I could lure you back to England.”

  Never, I thought fiercely even though a secret voice I tried to mute whispered, Maybe one day.

  I was hyper aware of Alexander’s placement in the room. Unwittingly, I found myself angling my body and shifting my feet to keep him in my orbit, to feel the gravitational pull he exuded to its maximum effect.

  Just being in the same room as him made me ache for the feel of the hard marble of the ballroom floor beneath my knees.

  “Who is the woman he’s with?”

  My throat closed up as I waited for the answer.

  “Apparently, that’s Agatha Howard, of Castle Howard and the Earl of Suffolk Howards,” one of the women helpfully pointed out. “She’s been one of Britain’s most eligible catches since she came of age. It was rumored she was supposed to marry the younger Prince Alasdair, but who can blame her for choosing Lord Thornton instead, hmm?”

  No one. No one could blame her because while Prince Alasdair was a freaking prince, and at twenty-five, already handsome enough to be an international heartthrob, Alexander was, well, like a god. Someone so viscerally powerful and unflappably cool that he incited the urge to kneel and prostrate oneself before him on the off chance he would bestow you with a cutting look from those quicksilver eyes.

  “He’s one of the most powerful men in the nation,” Jensen pitched in. “His influence, if he chose to use it, would be unparalleled, but he doesn’t take part in politics.”

  “Why not?” I asked before I could help myself.

  I was weak. There were Google alerts set up for Alexander Davenport, Earl of Thornton, heir to the Duke of Greythorn on my computer. I knew he owned the largest media company in England, Davenport Media Holdings, that consisted of a large radio network, news station, and popular culture magazine. He focused on work, he rarely dated, though he was seen out with a variety of upper-class women, and he donated regularly to a rotation of charities.