“You almost died,” he said, his voice cracked through with devastation. “So many bloody times, because of me.”
“I might have died otherwise. You aren’t the only bad guy in my life,” I teased.
He didn’t smile.
I traced a finger along the brutal cut of his square jaw up to his ear and around the perfectly formed shell of it. He was so exquisitely designed that he took my breath away.
Leaning forward, I pressed a kiss to his pulse, keeping my lips there for a moment to feel the beat quicken against me.
“You still make me come alive,” I whispered in his ear. “Sometimes, it feels as if I don’t exist unless you are in a room with me.”
He paused for a moment, breathing deeply through his emotions as he absorbed my words. Then he pulled back only to place his forehead against mine.
“Well then, my beauty, I’ll have to make sure you are never in a room without me.”
He kissed the giggle off my lips and shared his own joy with me using his tongue, then later, his entire body.
Alexander
Every day my wife recovered from the shooting was one I relished like a chest full of treasure. Each time she laughed, her husky chuckle was a diamond collected in my palm, and every minute she spent walking around growing physically stronger again was a gemstone brighter than any occurring in nature. I watched, and I coveted, and when I felt there were no more gains to be had in her recovery, I decided it was time to give back some of the treasure Cosima had given me.
I leaned in the doorway of our bedroom at Salvatore’s and watched my wife as she lay across the bed on her back, legs up in the air, one hand twirling a lock of her hair like some teenage advertisement for a woman’s magazine. She was beautiful even in one of my old Cambridge T-shirts and a pair of her father’s chunky wool knit socks, so beautiful I was happy to watch her while she finished her phone call.
“Honestly, Sin, I’m having a terrible time believing you,” she said in a tone filled with the music of her laughter. “I just…you’re really getting married?”
I’d only had the occasion to meet my wife’s friend once in the two weeks we spent in New York after Cosima left the hospital before we hid her away in upstate New York. He was a stern man, but not the cold, implacable one Cosima had spoken of in the past. No, now happily shacked up with Giselle in a palatial Brooklyn penthouse with a baby on the way, Daniel Sinclair seemed like the happiest bloke in America. Even when Elena had crashed the evening when we painted the nursery to throw what I was beginning to understand was a classically Elena-style fit about the pregnancy, Sinclair had been unmoved in his resolve and his contentedness.
He was a man hooked deeply through the heart by the siren’s song of a woman’s love, and he would not be swayed from it.
Not even to comfort his estranged longtime partner.
Now, it seemed, he had decided to take their short relationship to a new level by marrying Giselle.
The man bloody well moved quickly when he knew what he wanted.
“No, no, of course I think it’s a splendid idea! I’m just shocked that my friend Sinclair organized a surprise elopement in Mexico. I mean, who are you and what did you do with the man I once knew?” She paused with a smile on her face, her eyes sliding to me in the doorway, and that smile blooming even bigger. “Yeah, yeah, I think I know a little something about love changing you for the better.”
I raised a brow at her that had her winking at me.
“Of course, Xan and I will be there,” she said confidently even though I scowled. “We wouldn’t miss it for anything. Just text me the details, and we will make it work. And Sin? I can’t wait to see two of my beloved people have their happily ever after. Don’t let the pain and consequences of your journey to this moment taint the beauty of your future together. What you two have is something very few people ever get to experience. Cherish it.”
She said a few more words, laughing again as she hung up the phone. The moment she did, I was on her, hefting her off the body over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
She squawked, hitting her hands against my arse. “Xan! Che cavalo! What are you doing?”
I ignored her as I took her through the house, down the stairs, and out the back door. Salvatore and Dante were out in town and wouldn’t be back for at least an hour.
Just enough time for what I had planned.
Cosima had settled over my shoulder, tapping out a light beat against my arse cheeks while humming a song as if being slung over my back was normal and comfortable.
When we reached Salvatore’s small stables at the back of the property, though, she stilled, and the quality of her silence turned the air static. She said nothing as I righted her, standing her up beside the blazing hearth so that she would stay warm in the early spring air.
I’d prepared everything that morning while Cosima readied herself for the day, and she caught sight of it then, her eyes widening as she took in the branding iron lying beside the fire.
“Xan…” she said slowly. “You’ve already branded me once. Don’t you think twice is overkill?”
I nodded, keeping our eyes locked as I began to unbutton my shirt. “I’ll admit, that would be excessive. Though, it wasn’t what I had in mind.”
Cosima’s eyes burned brighter, twin noonday suns as she watched me unbutton and pull off my shirt. Her gaze raked over my abdominals before finding mine again. “What, what exactly did you have in mind then?”
“You are going to ride me while I sit on that stool,” I said with a wave of my hand to said stool. “And after you’ve made me come, you are going to brand me.” I stepped forward to take her hand and place it over my heart. “Right here.”
She squirmed, her eyes flashing light and dark as she warred with her instinctual deviant delight and learned shamed. “Xan, I really don’t think that’s necessary.”
“Well, I do,” I said in the tone that meant our conversation, as I knew it, was over.
She bit her plush lower lip and then released it, the reddened flesh beckoning me like a red cape to a bull. “Why?”
“I own you, I branded you, and I married you. As far as I am concerned, we are even on two accounts, but not the third. I meant what I said, bella. You own me as much as I own you. I want that to be known.”
She continued to prevaricate, looking at the branding iron and then back at the unmarred skin over my heart. “No one will see it unless you go to the beach or something.”
“No…but just as with you and your brand, I will know it is there, and I will also feel the ache of it. I want that with me always. Are you saying,” I asked with a cold quirked brow, “that you would rid yourself of yours if given the chance?”
“No,” she snapped immediately.
I opened my hands and shrugged. “Then there we have it.”
“It hurts,” she admitted.
“You can kiss it better,” I said drolly as I took off my pants. “Now, undress. I’m eager to come before we get started.”
My wife moved like a dancer even though she’d never had any training. She made the removal of her overlarge shirt and socks look like a Las Vegas burlesque show, and by the time her perfect form was bared to me in the golden firelight, I was hard as marble.
I stood still for her, watching her move toward me as light and agile as the light of the fire against the wooden walls. She bit her lip before she reached out to touch my chest, her hand hovering with a hesitation that was a request.
I nodded my head, wrapped my hand around her wrist, and pressed her palm to the center of my chest. “Touch me as you please. Sometimes, my beauty, Domination is not about me taking over your body with control and discipline. Sometimes, it’s about letting the submissive worship that which she adores.”
She tipped her eyes to mine, showing me their warm, liquid centers before she concentrated on my torso, running her hands over the steep ridges and cut edges of my muscle groups. The pads of her fingers rasped over my nipples, her
nails scratched through the thick trail of flaxen hair leading to my groin, and she traced the sharp line of the muscles in my groin all the way to the root of my pulsing cock. Her exploration was gentle and venerable, an artist feeling for the form beneath a block of marble, carefully mapping out the form and the emotiveness in her art.
My legs wanted to tremble at that tenderness, and my heart ached like pressure on a bruise as I struggled to believe I deserved that level of love from that level of exquisite woman.
She made me believe.
She made a study of teaching me I belonged with her by sinking to her knees and taking my cock deep down her throat. She struggled against the weight of my shaft as it pinned her tongue and dragged along the hot, warm canal of her throat. She panted at she lapped at my head, purple and big as an Italian plum she couldn’t stop sucking. Her fingers played over my balls, weighing the heft of them, rolling them over her palm.
She made me crazy with desire, and I knew it was to show me how crazy I’d made her with love.
It was an exhibition in worship, and it turned the air around us warm and close as the atmosphere in a chapel. I imagined the scent of incense and myrrh as she sat me down on the stool and carefully took me into her golden body. We dipped our heads to watch my tip sink into her wet folds and then hissed in unison, heads thrown back as she slid all the way down to the root.
I loved the silken snugness of her cunt around me, the way her large breasts jiggled obscenely as she raised and lowered herself over my thick pole, riding it hard even though it stretched her nearly painfully tight. I loved the way she fisted her hands in my hair and held me still so that we locked eyes as she rode me, and I could read the love and gratitude there like an oath written on gold parchment.
I loved it so much, loved her so much, that when I finally came between her thighs, it felt like a blessing and an induction into a faith I actually, acutely wanted to join. One of beauty and surrender, one of trust and sacrifice, one that existed only between this gorgeous Italian girl and her cruel British Master.
She ate my groan off my lips, feeding her moan of climax right back to me as we orgasmed together in the firelight.
Before I could recover, she was dipping the iron pole beside us into the fire, rolling it in the heat until it glowed as brightly as her pleasure fevered eyes. She said nothing as she raised it, yet her eyes said everything.
They said, I love you.
They said, I will never be without you even if you should go.
They said, we are a closed loop.
And then the searing tip of the brand was pressed directly into the skin over my heart, and it felt as if the emotion she’d poured into my once hollow body erupted from that place, spilling out with agony that tangled so closely with ecstasy I didn’t know where one ended and the other began.
I kissed her hard, fisting a hand in her luscious hair to keep her close while I feasted on her warm, spicy flavour. The burn was wicked, the pain so severe I wondered for a moment if I might cry out from it for the first time in my life.
I didn’t.
I took solace in the woman who was my reward for a being born into such a life, and I continued to do so long after she had pulled the iron away from my body, long after our skin had cooled and the fire had died down. I held her, and I loved with only my hands on her back and my tongue in her mouth, and when we finally parted, I felt filled with a previously unfamiliar emotion.
Clean, bright hope like a bubble expanded from my gut, floating delicately to the surface of my thoughts.
I brought her palm over my wound, gritting my teeth against the pressure on the raw flesh. She dipped her head as I moved it away again, studying the stylized initials “CD” covered in thorns and poppies carved forever into my skin.
“Yours,” I said gruffly.
“Yours,” she agreed.
And I thought maybe, at that one moment suspended between agony and joy, an in-between place that seemed to exist solely in the gap between our bodies, if maybe our happily ever after was achievable after all.
Cosima
We held hands as we walked across the thick grass down the sloping lawn to my father’s large, airy home. It felt so mundane and yet utterly profound to be holding the hand of Alexander Davenport, Earl of Thornton and my Master. After all this time and so many tribulations, it was a simple act I didn’t take for granted.
My fingers flexed locked between his, and he slid me a sidelong look that wasn’t quite a smile but spoke of one. I couldn’t help but look at the space beneath his buttoned shirt where the new brand lay, a brand he had willing offered because he wanted to be owned as equally by me and I was by him. Love and awe rolled through me like a warm breeze, and I felt filled with hope for the first time in a long time as we strolled back to the house where my father and Dante would probably be waiting with some delicious home-cooked meal and a bottle of deep red wine.
Car doors slamming around the front of the house and sudden coarse shouts in Italian had both of us freezing mid-step.
“Vaffanculo,” Tore growled as we broke into a sprint and rounded the house to the front yard. “What the hell are you taking him for?”
I slammed to an abrupt stop as if I’d run into a brick wall when I arrived beside the scene and took it in.
There were police cars in a row of three down the drive, their light spinning pinwheels of red, blue, and white light over the yard and the tableau of two men pushing Dante to the hood of a car in order to cuff him. They were both considerably shorter than the Italian-British man, and they used excessive force to keep him in place even though he lay passively against the car.
They read him his Miranda rights in low, ceaseless monotones that I could barely hear over Tore’s ranting questions.
“As I said,” a third policeman was saying to him, “Edward Dante Davenport is under arrest for the murder of Giuseppe di Carlo. If you continue your tirade, we will be forced to arrest you for police assault and impeding a criminal investigation.”
“Like hell you will,” Tore bellowed, shoving a finger at the younger man. I’d never seen him so angry; his face was flushed like a spill of wine, and his voice was as rough as gravel under foot.
Alexander stepped forward with confidence to intercept Tore’s lunging body and began to calmly speak with the officer. I didn’t do anything because my body had ceased to function.
I was mired in shock, my feet tangled in the roots of my own self-hatred and the muck of my confusion.
How could this be possible?
Dante hadn’t killed di Carlo.
My hand still burned with the heat of the gun in my hand as I’d turned it on the Cosa Nostra crime boss, as I’d drilled a round into his black heart and one into his corrupted brain. My fingers flexed in the empty air as the memory ran through me like a physical thing, like a car crash breaking every bone in my body.
Dante was being arrested for a crime I had committed.
No.
That couldn’t possibly happen.
Not the brother of my heart, not my saviour and best friend.
Not him.
I stepped forward like a bullet from the chamber of a gun, shooting into place between Alexander and the cop before they could stop me.
“He didn’t do it,” I said in a voice that clinked my word to the ground like ice cubes from a machine; mechanical and cold. “Dante wasn’t even there.”
“Cosima,” Alexander barked, my name like the edge of a whip slicing through the air against my skin. I jerked back from the impact and straight into his open arms. He banded them around my torso and cemented me to his body.
“You’re the victim, correct?” The officer checked his small notebook. “A Cosima Lombardi?”
“Cosima Davenport,” Alexander snapped. “My wife and the sister of the man you are trying to pin for a murder he didn’t commit.”
I opened my mouth to tell them it was me. That I was a murderess, and honestly, I would do it again, and again, and aga
in if it meant the sum of di Carlo would be rid from the world forever.
But Alexander was there holding me so tightly I couldn’t draw breath to speak, and then Dante was turning, the muscles in his arms bulging as they pulled tight behind his back restrained by the harsh bite of handcuffs. His eyes were large with solemnity, a black so absolute I felt myself being sucked into the darkness like light through a black hole.
He said so many things with that look, so many agonizing truths that I jerked against Alexander as they pierced through me like bullets.
Don’t, they said.
Don’t take this from me, they ordered.
This is for you, tesoro. This is for you, and I will do it because I will do anything for you, even if you don’t ask for it. This is for you, and you will not take this sacrifice away from me.
A sob exploded from the cold chamber of my chest, puncturing the air so harshly the cops all jerked to look at me.
I shook my head manically, my hair flying over my face, strands sticking to the tears trailing down the skin. “No, no, no, fratello mio.”
Yes, yes, yes, mia bella sorella, his eyes said gently, firmly.
I couldn’t bear it, but I also knew the devastation that would be wrecked on my two Davenport men if I was bound in cuffs and dragged to prison. They wouldn’t stop until the rebar was twisted open, the concrete cell blasted apart so they could get to me. Nothing, absolutely nothing, would stop these men from making sure I was free after almost a lifetime of servitude to something.
This was what they had been fighting for the last half decade.
Not just the ruin of the Order and the truth of Chiara Davenport’s death.
But my freedom.
They would not, I knew in the very marrow of my bones, let me sacrifice all their gains now when we were so close to the end.
I whimpered as the realization settled under my skin and itched there.
Alexander felt the shift in my body and let out a rough breath. I felt him tip his chin down at his brother, their gazes locked over my head.
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