Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

  Every inch of my skin tingled with fear and hope. I wanted to close my eyes and absorb his words like a neglected plant exposed to light after too long in the dark.

  But he was right. I didn’t trust him.

  He hadn’t kept me safe from Noel, from the Order.

  He hadn’t ever loved me back.

  There was still too much at stake to give myself over to him the way I had in those last months at Pearl Hall.

  My family, Ashcroft, Salvatore and Dante…least of all, my heart.

  “Please,” I gasped softly in benediction. “Please, Xan, let this be enough.”

  He stilled at my use of my tender name for him, and for a moment, I worried he would be angry I broke the scene, furious that I would deny him even though it had been years, and I didn’t owe him anything.

  But then he pressed his palm over the large ruby sitting in the hollow of my throat and planted a lush, open-mouthed kiss to my pulse point.

  “For now,” he agreed darkly. “But the day I demand it all is fast approaching.”

  I didn’t ask him why.

  Why now?

  Why at all?

  Why even after all these years me?

  I swallowed the burn of them as they lodged in my esophagus. I wanted this—his hands on my body, his cock inside me, his words breathed against my skin—too much to deny myself the wonder of it now. I could let it be goodbye. The proper goodbye I hadn’t been able to have when Noel beat me and chased me off Pearl Hall estate and out of the country. Tears scorched the back of my tender eyes, but I blinked them back and committed myself to the moment. If this was the last time I ever enjoyed sex and intimacy, I would indulge as excessively as Dionysus with wine.

  Sucking in a deep, bracing breath, I tipped my head to the side to expose more skin to Alexander’s wandering lips.

  He took it for the acquiescence it was.

  “Thank you, bella,” he breathed as if accepting a blessing from a priest. “Now, I missed your exquisite body, and I don’t intend to ever go a day without seeing it again, even when we are distanced. Spread your legs for me and show me that gorgeous cunt,” Alexander crooned as he stepped back and reached for the camera he’d abandoned on a side table to the left. “I plan to photograph it before I fuck it raw.”

  Cosima

  Have you ever woken up from a dream already crying because you know it was just a dream and the loss of it was so real you feel it like a hiccough in your heart?

  That was how I woke up the morning after Alexander commandeered my photo shoot.

  I was curled the way a cat would, my head tucked into the curve of my arm, my legs pulled tightly into my chest as if I could protect myself from harm by occupying as small a space as possible.

  It didn’t make a difference to the man behind me who cupped me like a ladle, the bowl of his hips tight against the sphere of my ass, his front knit skin to skin against my back, his hands and feet tangled with my hair and toes as if he had to possess me from top to bottom even in slumber.

  And he was asleep.

  I could feel the soft caress of his short, deep breath against my bared neck and the weight of him so heavy against me like a leaden bracket.

  More than anything, I wanted to turn into his arms, touch my fingertips to the steep curve of his thick eyelashes, and breathe in his every breath after he took it.

  Then, I wanted to spend the rest of the day in the faintly lumpy bed at the quaint bed and breakfast my agent had booked me on the Lizard Coast while Alexander taught me new and difficult ways to worship him.

  But I wouldn’t do any of that.

  My heart felt newborn in my chest, too weak and too small to sustain the stress of my adult body and mind. I pressed my fist to my ribcage and felt it flutter weakly, a butterfly suffocating trapped in a jar.

  I needed distance to build back my walls, to construct a fortress better than the one before so I could survive living without Alexander again. My heart clenched just thinking about leaving him in this bed, let alone spending one day or a dozen strung together without him by my side.

  How was it possible to love someone so much when you hadn’t spent any time with them in years?

  Was it true that whatever souls were made of, two could be constructed the very same? One heart cut into two and pressed into separate chests with the hope that one day, they would find each other.

  I didn’t think God or science or the universe were that romantic or that cruel, but I couldn’t come up with a plainer explanation for my continued and absolute adoration of a man I’d once called my captor.

  My therapist might have said Stockholm Syndrome again, the catch-all excuse for loving someone in a position of power who took advantage of you.

  Yes, Alexander had taken advantage of me, but some secret, mammal part of me yearned for him to take more.

  He sighed in his sleep, and I cranked my head awkwardly to watch his brow pucker in a way that cracked open the planes of his face and revealed how much closer to forty he was than thirty. There was silver peppered in the gold hair over his ears, but it was still a thick, soft pelt across his crown. Otherwise, there was very little evidence of the last four years in his face or the hard, perfectly cut and proportioned body that was pressed so intimately to my own.

  I had to get out of there.

  Carefully, I leveraged myself onto an elbow and searched the room. My clothes were folded and placed on the seat in the corner because Alexander was an exacting Dom, and he took pleasure in ordering me to do something for the sake of seeing me obey. My luggage and purse were stacked beside it, and my phone lay overturned on top of that.

  It would be an easy getaway as long as he didn’t wake up.

  And Alexander was an apex predator; there was no way I’d get out of his grip without waking him and falling into the trap of his domination again.

  Metal winked in the crack of light spilling in through the curtains and I turned farther to see my ruby collar and the discarded leather and metal cuffs Alexander had used to bind me into complicated folds after we’d returned to the room last night.

  My cheeks burned like twin stove elements as I remembered the way he’d chained me to the brass headboard positioned on my hands and knees with my ass in the air and my cheeks parted like the pages of a book under his big hands. He’d eaten at my crease for an hour, using his teeth, tongues, lips, and fingers until I was dripping juice down my inner thighs and humping back against his face in desperate need of more. He had taken my mouth and pussy at the studio, photographing me for his pleasure in profane, graphic ways that still made my core tighten like a fist, but he waited for the plushness of a bed to claim my ass again. I’d forgotten, somehow, how an anal orgasm ripped me apart from the inside out and left my muscles frayed like split wires.

  I shook off the memory even as my pussy dampened and clenched with need. I couldn’t afford to give into my lust if I wanted to get away from Alexander.

  And I did.

  Whatever pretty words he had spoken last night had long dissipated in the cold light of dawn. I didn’t know what his game was, but I knew there was one. Every step of our relationship had been a carefully calculated move across the board. I didn’t yet know what this one led to, but I was finally smart enough not to let him force me there.

  Working quickly and quietly, I leaned over to the bedside table and hooked the cuffs over a finger. I held my breath as I slowly slid the padded leather over one of his wrists, untangled his fingers from my hair so I could thread the chain through the brass headboard rail, and then fastened the second cuff to his other wrist.

  The second he was secured, Alexander’s eyes flashed open like headlights, pinning me in the high beams, frozen and frightful as a deer.

  After a brief, furious second of connection, we both burst into action.

  I scrambled back from his body on my heels and hands, crab-walking to the end of the bed so that his reaching fingers couldn’t grab me.

  “Cosima Davenport,”
he growled, paralyzing me not because of his venom-laced tone, but because I hadn’t heard my married name in years and only then, once from his own lips.

  Even in my current state, I loved the sound of it.

  “What the fuck is it that you think you are doing?” he asked me, enunciating each word like bullets shot from the cold chamber of a gun.

  I blinked at him and bit my lip. “I’m leaving.”

  Fury darkened his face so savagely, he looked more monster than man.

  “You will absolutely not.”

  I gritted my teeth against the intractable demand in his voice and began to hum under my breath as I slid off the bed and quickly donned my thick rust-coloured sweater and silky oyster beige skirt.

  “You will uncuff me in the next two minutes, Cosima, or I will make you very dearly sorry for your disobedience,” he promised darkly.

  I hummed louder, ignoring the way my pulse raced like prey sprinting away from its predator. I continued to shoot him quick, short glances as I dressed just to reassure myself he was still sturdily locked to the bed.

  His eyes blazed with rage so bright it made my belly quiver.

  “Hear this, topolina,” he said, his voice so low, so filled with the gravel dredged up from the bottom of his stony core that I could barely discern the words. “If you think locking me up will stop me from reclaiming you, you are pitifully, sorely mistaken. We have things to discuss, you and I, things I hoped to bring into the light this morning. But if you insist on being foolish…” The word slapped me across the face, but I continued to tug on my knee-high boots as if I didn’t feel his scorn like a handprint on my cheek. “The next time I find you, I’ll cuff you to each leg of the bed and beat your pussy until you cry every single one of the tears your body has to offer me, and then I will fuck your sore, ravaged pussy and smear my cum in the cuts across your arse. Then, when you are wrecked beyond thought or further feeling, I’ll bundle you up in my arms and hold you there until you bloody well listen to what I have to say,” he roared.

  But I was already hastily dragging my suitcase to the door, wrestling it open, and hesitating in the doorway to take one last thirsty look at the lord in my bed. He was sitting upright, the large muscles in his arms coiled rope under golden skin as he strained against the cuffs, his abdominals so clearly defined they looked like a checkboard just waiting for my tongue and fingers to make a game of it.

  My mouth went dry at the sight of him. He was sexy and regal somehow even bound, a lion you knew was seconds away from breaking free and devouring you whole.

  “Please,” I told him with quiet desperation. “Don’t come for me again. I don’t want a half-life with you. I don’t want to be your secret or your slave. I’m tired of existing in the dark, dismissed to your shadows. I know now that I deserve the light, and I swear, Xan, even though I can’t handle this—you—if you come for me, I might cave, and I will never ever be satisfied with what you have to give.”

  Alexander stared at me, his mouth pursed tightly, a lock of golden hair caught on his eyelashes, but all he did was watch as I slowly backed out the open door and then closed it on his face.

  I slept on the plane, not because I was exhausted and emotionally spent, but because my back ached each time I shifted in my seat, and I couldn’t stop thinking of the beautiful, hard man I’d turned away from again. He hunted me, a predator even to my thoughts. Finally, thirty minutes into the flight, I succumbed to weakness and took two sleeping pills.

  The flight attendant had to wake me up with a brisk shake that reminded me instantly of the state of my back, and I was up, groggily walking off the plane.

  I was still out of it when I saw the man standing outside of the arrivals gate holding a sign written with my name. It was the same man who had delivered Ashcroft’s missive to me in Central Park. I recognized him not because his features struck a chord of remembrance, but because he was so completely forgettable with his bland features and pale British colouring, I knew instantly he was a servant of the Order.

  “I’m not going with you,” I told him as I stopped by his side. “I just returned from less than thirty-six hours in a completely different time zone, and I’m knackered. Tell your employer to beckon me in six hours after I’ve had a nap.”

  His hand shot out as I went to move by, clutching my bicep in a bruising grip.

  “I think you’ll find, slave Ashcroft,” he jeered quietly. “That my employer has a heavy hand with a whip when he’s been kept waiting.”

  “I think you’ll find that so do I,” I retorted, using one of the moves I’d been taught in self-defence class over the years to twist my arm out of his hold, catch his dislodged hand, and then leverage it back against his wrist.

  He hissed with pain, rage animating his stoic face.

  I leaned in close to softly jeer at him, “Touch me again and I promise, I’ll kill you.”

  He cursed as I released him, but dutifully stooped to take my bags from me and lead me to the waiting car parked illegally at the curb.

  “No wonder Davenport let you lose,” he muttered as opened the door for me.

  I ignored him, but my chest panged with guilt as I thought about Alexander locked to the bed back in England. I had no doubt Riddick or the inn keeper would find him before long, but he would be furious and maybe even embarrassed at the predicament.

  I was prepared to deal with Ashcroft. I had plans for him just as he had ones for me, and I knew I didn’t need Alexander there with me to hold my hand while I plotted.

  But I would have preferred it.

  Though, knowing Alexander, I wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t storm into Ashcroft’s Upper East Side home, slit his throat, and then raze it all to the ground.

  I was a woman; therefore, my plan was slightly more understated, but hopefully just as deadly.

  Ashcroft was waiting for me in the foyer of his townhome, hands held behind his back and feet braced like a general expecting his orders to be obeyed.

  Before I had even crossed the threshold, he demanded, “On your knees, slave.”

  I gritted my teeth as I folded myself to the ground.

  “Good little thing,” he praised, petting my head the way one would a dog.

  A deep breath helped to quell my more imminent rage. I was there because he was blackmailing me, but I was also there to learn from him all there was to know about the Order.

  I didn’t know what was going on with Alexander or why he was suddenly back in my life with a tenacious vengeance, but I did know that even if we weren’t together in any way ever again, I still wanted to end the Order.

  They had made him into a monster, so I was going to become theirs.

  “I didn’t give you permission to leave the country,” Ashcroft said mildly as his hand jerked a hank of my hair back brutally. “You’ll have to be punished for that.”

  Honestly, that was fine with me. Ashcroft was a true sadist; he didn’t need to fuck me to take his pleasure from me. He only needed my sweat, my tears, and a little blood. Then again, his reluctance to fuck me might have stemmed from the damage he’d garnered from his stint in the Iron Chair at Pearl Hall. I’d seen the mangled bend of his cock and his horribly scarred scrotum. Riddick and Alexander had not been kind to him after he’d forcibly taken my throat.

  “I had to work,” I demurred as I blinked tears from my smarting eyes.

  “Maybe I should move you in with me. Get myself a permanent little slut and maid to do all the dirty work around here.” He stepped close so that the hard length of his dick pressed to my cheek through his slacks. “Would you like that?”

  I looked at his feet in answer, unable to bend and contort myself into the origami folds of submission I usually fell gracefully into at Alexander’s feet.

  The memory of his cold voice like a collar around my throat, his will a chain-link leash ruthlessly guiding me through the obstacle course of his desire made my throat go dry.

  “That’s more like it,” Ashcroft said, flicking my harde
ned nipples. “I would beat you so fucking soundly bent over my desk, but The Trials are tonight, and they need each slave unmarked before the start.”

  The Trials.

  I’d heard of them before, in my past life as slave Davenport, but I didn’t know what they entailed. Alexander hadn’t participated in The Trials at Club Dionysus the year he owned me in England because I’d only just been broken.

  I didn’t know how Ashcroft could delude himself into thinking he could put me on display, and I would happily obey his demands like some trained bitch at a Best in Show.

  “I know you’ll obey beautifully for me,” he said, reading the expression on my face and sneering at it. “Or I’ll not only release the tawdry photos of Davenport fucking you into the ground, but I’ll also give you over to his father.”

  His sinister laughter rang through the foyer like the track to a bad b-list movie.

  My skin broke open in gooseflesh, and I fought the urge to wrap my arms around myself as a protective shield.

  As much as I had missed Alexander over the last few years, I had been that much more relieved to be away from Noel.

  You could still see the faint silvery trace of scars on my back if you caught me in the wrong light, and when I dreamt, it was often of the vicious beating he and his third son had bestowed upon me as a wedding present.

  The very mention of Noel’s name was akin to invoking the devil.

  “I see you understand the gravity of your situation now.” Ashcroft tipped my chin and leaned down so that his smug, fleshy smile was all I could see. “Noel wants you. He’s mentioned offhand enough times at the Club that he would pay handsomely if someone turned you over to his possession. It seems he didn’t get enough of you when you were Alexander’s pet. Apparently, the Thornton is not very good at sharing.”

  No, Alexander wasn’t, which was only one of the reasons he had warned his father to never lay a hand on me.