“Or would you rather go back to your room?”
“No,” she replied immediately, sidling up to the saddle.
“You’ll swing your leg over—”
He stopped, for she’d already settled herself in and grabbed hold of the reins. “Riding astride,” she said to herself with a smile. “I never thought.”
He gripped the pommel and swung himself up behind her. “You look like a natural horsewoman.”
“I am. Hold on.” With a nudge of her heels, Athena took off.
Damas wrapped one arm around her waist as they plunged into the dark forest, a path weaving in and out of the leafless trees. She laughed a deep, throaty laugh for the first time in so long.
“As I said.” Damas chuckled in her ear. “A natural.”
She tried to ignore the way he gripped her tight, the way his thumb pressed the underside of her breast, their bodies molded together as Athena galloped farther afield. But she could not. The sensation was enticing, spinning her conscience into a storm of guilt. And yet she urged her mount on, thrilled to feel the wind on her face and the horse pounding the ground beneath her.
Damas nuzzled into her hair, his lips grazing her ear. “We’d best not go too far from the castle, though we can ride as long as you like.”
One of his hands slid to her thigh. The hard ridge of his arousal pressed against her bottom. She spun Athena around and galloped fast and hard back to the fortress. Once through the gates, she pulled Athena to a stop. The mare breathed out cold smoke.
“I want to go inside,” said Katherine, hands trembling as she squeezed the reins.
“I know you do,” he said, easing his arms from around her so he could dismount first.
He lifted her down, whether she wanted help or not, and planted her firmly on the ground between him and Athena. With her hands on his shoulders, keeping him from pressing too close, she repeated, her voice a slight whisper, “I want to go inside.”
He drank her in for what felt like an eternity, his hands still gripping her waist, the seconds ticking by slowly.
“I know you do.” He leaned close to her ear. “And I know what else you want.” Pressing a kiss beneath her ear, he finally released her.
Katherine didn’t stop running till she’d made it to her bedroom and barred the door. Not that it would matter. He could sift into any room he pleased. After climbing into bed that night and tucking deep into the covers, she expected that he would come to her in the night. He didn’t. But the dreams did.
As she galloped through the wintry forest on her black mare, naked and bare, her lover rode behind her. The sound of the horse’s hooves echoed through the trees. The sound morphed into pants of passion. The vision of the horse faded. She was on all fours on the forest floor, her dark lover behind her, thrusting hard and deep, both of them sweating and moaning with pleasure. She screamed, but not in fear or terror. She screamed for more. And she screamed his name.
She awoke in the dark, saying “Damas.” No light at all but a subtle hint of indigo filtered through the parted curtains. Cursing herself, she curled into a ball and wept again. This time it wasn’t the unknown or her endless imprisonment or her heartbreak of losing George that caused the tears to burn hard down her cheeks. It was her own weakness—dry and brittle like the branches of the Black Forest—threatening to bend and break under the temptation that would surely send her into madness this time. She felt like Marguerite, completely under the guile and power of Mephistopheles.
“No,” she whispered. “Please, no.”
But there was no one to hear her prayer in the darkness of Damas’s domain.
Chapter Thirty
The next time Damas came for dinner, he offered her another night with Athena, but this time on her own. She took the gift gladly. After he pointed out the perimeter, which she understood was for her own safety, she stayed within the border.
She went out again on Athena the next night. And the next. These escapes into the woods with the wind in her hair were a reprieve from the days isolated in her castle bedroom, though he’d unlocked her bedroom door and given her permission to explore any room where the door remained open. She did, finding rooms upon rooms of paintings, artifacts, weapons and furniture—ancient and beautiful. Roman battle shields, Baroque paintings, Grecian urns, Viking battle-axes, medieval swords, Rococo furniture appearing as if it had been taken directly from the palace of Versailles. Perhaps it had been. All of it magnificent and lovely. This occupied her days with little journeys through time. He’d join her at dinner by night, when they’d talk of books, usually whatever she happened to be reading.
One evening after a long ride, she paused outside a room where the door was closed. She’d never disobeyed his orders before, but she’d been through every room on the first floor, twice. Something beckoned her to open the large iron-studded door, the first room off the vast foyer. Its proximity to the main hall and the intricate designs marked it as important in some way. Like Pandora, her curiosity got the best of her.
Pushing open the heavy door just enough to slide her body through, she found the massive room mostly empty. A pointed ceiling with ribbed vaults and wide columns with Gothic capitals framed a center aisle, leading toward a throne at the head of the long room. The throne was tall and wide, carved of deep mahogany wood with a pointed arch at the head. A second throne, smaller, sat to its left, equally elegant in dark mahogany. Black velvet draped behind the dais where the thrones stood. A perimeter of shadow surrounded the room. These weren’t museum pieces or artifacts. An eerie tingle rippled over her skin.
Then something caught her eye. Along the right wall stood three tall mirrors. Glancing to the left, she saw three more in perfect symmetry. She edged closer to the left, realizing they weren’t mirrors at all. There was movement on the other side of one, and torchlight. Peering closer, she saw figures, though blurred, moving in another room on the other side.
“Naughty girl, Katherine.”
She spun to find Damas standing a few feet behind her, his clothes disheveled, a riding crop in his hand, and a streak of black blood on his white shirt, ripped halfway open. Eyes wide, she took in his appearance and trembled for being caught.
“Don’t worry. It’s not my blood. Just a few trespassers on my border. They won’t be returning.”
He stalked closer. Something was different about him tonight. He wasn’t playing the gentleman but moved rather like a predator. She backed away as he circled closer.
“I had planned to wait before showing you this room myself.”
“What—what were you waiting for?”
“For you to finally surrender to me.” His footsteps echoed in the hollow room as he walked forward.
“Surrender?” Her voice trembled.
“I believe we can dispense with the games, sweet Katherine. The wooing stage is over.”
Her heart hammered against her rib cage as she eased away from him, glancing at the riding crop in his white-knuckled grip.
“Do you think I’d hurt you?” He laughed and dropped it with a clack to the stone floor. “I might break you, but you’ll love every minute of it. I promise.” His expression cracked into a wolfish grin, but his gaze remained intense and cold.
“Please, Damas—”
He sifted and pinned her to a white marble column before she could even blink.
“I don’t love you,” she murmured as his body pressed hard against hers.
“Lust will do. For now.” His lips molded to hers, tongue stroking in, wickedly sweet, stealing her breath and tasting her deeply. He crushed her body with his own before breaking the kiss.
They both panted, breaths mixing.
“I don’t love you,” she protested again, more weakly than the first.
“No. But you’ll worship me before I’m through. I’ll even make it easier for you.”
He sl
id his hands down her arms, gripped her wrists and pinned them above her head. With a guttural chant, he swung back an arm, and a stake formed in his hand by the time he plunged it into the marble with a resounding clank. Two cuffs swirled out of black smoke and bound her tight.
“You said you wouldn’t chain me anymore. I kept my promise. I haven’t run away.” Her desperation rang in her own ears.
He kept his body pressed to hers, letting her feel his strength and the intoxicating power vibrating an aura around them both, smothering her with his sensuality.
“I’m not binding you to keep you here, sweet lady. I bind you to remove the guilt you still harbor in your heart. Humans can’t seem to escape their consciences. Free will and all that, I suppose. I’m removing the choice. Now you can let go. Now you can take what you want, what you’ve been resisting for so long.”
With a wave of his hand, her riding jacket, trousers and boots vanished into thin air, leaving her in a blouse and her corset. Shock must’ve shown on her face.
“That’s right, Katherine. My essence is in everything in this place. I rule in every corner and every fiber of everything…except in here.” He spread his fingers into her hair with his palms on either side of her head at the temples, as he had that first night she let him touch her. She whimpered, realizing all her mistakes, allowing him to get closer and closer, weaving a tight rope around her will until she had none left. He swept his lips over hers. “But I’ll be in here after tonight, and you’ll never wish for another.”
“That’s not true,” she whimpered.
He grinned, his lovely face turning wicked. “I’ll let you have your fantasy the first time. But not after.”
His black hair lightened to auburn. His eyes brightened to clear aquamarine. The angles of his face shifted to the lines of the face she longed to see more than anything in the world.
“George,” she cried.
He ripped open her blouse and admired the view.
She knew he wasn’t George, but just seeing the likeness of him made her heart ache and yearn for his touch.
“Please. Have mercy,” she begged, for she knew she couldn’t resist what he was offering. She did want him and hated herself for it. All this time feeling an aching loneliness dig deeper into her soul, and now to feel his passionate, if rough, touch was divine. The rougher, the better. She finally felt alive again.
“You’ll find no mercy here,” he finally answered, in Damas’s voice, not George’s. Her mind reeled. “I’ve given you long enough.”
He assaulted her mouth again, both hands curling around the top of the corset. He deepened the kiss. She couldn’t resist the likeness of George as the bodice vanished altogether. He mounded one breast with his palm and descended on the other, nipping down her throat to her breast and teased the taut nub, before gliding to the other. She dropped her head back and squeezed her eyes shut, unable to defy the pleasure coursing through her body.
“Don’t lie to yourself anymore. Or to me,” he said, before his hand trailed up her thigh to the apex between her legs, two fingers stroking. He moaned at her readiness. She could hear the smile in his voice, for she refused to look at him any longer. “Your body says yes, sweet Katherine.” He chanted three guttural words, and his clothes disappeared. All that heat pressed deliciously against her. “If you can tell me no, and mean what you say, then I will show you mercy.”
She opened her eyes to stare into the face of the one she loved and longed for most in the world. A tear slipped, for she knew this wasn’t truly George, only a fantasy Damas offered. One she couldn’t resist. She wanted it. She wanted him.
“That’s what I thought,” he said with a smile.
He spread her thighs and took her hard and long against the cold marble. She thought she saw pairs of yellow eyes watching from the shadows, but she didn’t care. She was lost, falling farther and farther into that dark abyss. Her moans echoed through the stone chamber as he slowed his rhythm, prolonging their pleasure as he drove deeper and deeper. He drew out their coupling in exquisite torture.
“Mine,” he ground out as he bit her neck.
She cried when she climaxed. The intense pleasure overrode the soul-deep pain that had kept her company for so long. The sensation of sinful ecstasy filled her up to replace the hollow emptiness, leaving behind a wound that would never heal. Even so, she longed to lose herself in sensual bliss once more.
No matter that she hated herself for it, when he came to her the next day, she let him take her again on the carpet in front of the fire, on all fours like her dream. He’d come to her in her bed in the middle of the night, crooning soft words, petting her under the covers, fondling her breasts, teasing her nipples and stroking her between her legs till she rolled into his arms and let him crawl on top. He came to her during her bath, ordering her to stand up. She would, every time. He’d drink his fill of her, motionless, water dripping down her body, waiting for his command. He’d dismiss Laurie, or sometimes not, and take Katherine on the floor, still wet and steamy from the bath. It became easier and easier to yield to him. And every time, another piece of her heart broke away, leaving nothing at all in its stead.
Each time he left, Katherine told herself she wouldn’t let it happen again. She knew that if she could deny him in truth, he would leave her unmolested. Force didn’t bring him pleasure. Damas wanted full surrender or nothing at all. But the moment he entered her presence, she trembled and her body responded, longing for his dark touch, needing it like she needed breath in her lungs. His passion was opium, poisoning her veins, ensnaring her soul. She needed him while at the same time he was killing her, one sliver of her spirit at a time.
One night, after she’d been reading a book by an author she’d never heard of before, Charlotte Brontë, she found herself crying on the red velvet sofa. The heroine of the story had been alone all her life and had finally found love. But due to tragic circumstances, the heroine could not keep her beloved without losing her virtue. Rather than forfeit her own soul for what she wanted most in the world, she ran away, leaving him behind in order to stay true to herself.
Katherine wept. Knowing she’d been weak, that she’d forgotten her own beloved—George—that she’d succumbed to Damas’s will, that she’d felt pleasure at the hands of George’s greatest enemy, all of it threatened to break her in half. She’d come to the realization she would never see George again. She had no idea how many years had passed, but the constant change of Damas’s clothes and the wardrobe he brought to her told her the world had gone on without her. Her world was now Damas. And still, she wept for not being as strong as the heroine in the book, for forsaking all that was important to her.
Damas walked into the bedchamber. Katherine stood immediately, her back to the hearth.
“Why are you crying, my lady?” He seemed so sincere when he wanted to be. “Have you missed me?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want you anywhere near me.”
“I don’t believe that’s true.”
He tossed his coat to the side and began unbuttoning his shirt, a maddening exercise to torture her, because she knew all he had to do was make the command and their clothes would disappear, which was his usual mode of operation. But he was making a scene of it, disrobing slowly, showing her what was coming whether she liked it or not.
“What has gotten into you?” He glanced at her book on the sofa. “Jane Eyre? It is fiction, Katherine. No woman can resist the longings of her heart.”
“You’re right.” Hands at her back, she bumped into the dining table and grasped the knife from the silverware setting. “She can’t resist the longings of her heart. For too long, I’ve hoped for something, someone, who has never come.”
“I told you he would not. We’re beyond that now.”
“Beyond that?” She laughed with scorn. “I’m damned!” she screamed, her voice shaking with sorrow. “My soul is blac
ker than yours. I know what true love is—or at least I did…once.” Tears burned down her cheeks. “And I let it go. I let it all go,” she whispered more to herself than to him.
“You had no choice.”
“Because you took my choice away? No. I could’ve been true to him still.” She edged around the table, her knees shaking.
“No, you couldn’t.” He removed his shirt, tossed it aside and glided closer. “We were always meant to be. You and I.”
She backed against the wall, desperate to get away from him. “I don’t believe that.”
He drew closer. She slashed out with the knife, almost nicking his shoulder before he grabbed her wrist. Squeezing tight, he forced her to drop the knife, which clanked to the stone floor.
“I don’t want you anymore,” she cried on a sob.
“Must we go through this again?”
Within seconds, she was shackled to the wall, after he whispered the sinister words to bind her.
“You are mine, Katherine.” With a hissed command, her dress and undergarments vanished in a whirl of smoke. “Your body answers my call, even if your mind tries to resist.”
“No.”
His eyes glowed ice blue. His chest and shoulders tightened as he drew closer.
“Yes. You must give yourself up, once and for all.”
She shook her head. “There is nothing left to give.”
“I beg to differ.”
Now naked, he pressed his hard body to her soft flesh, prying her mouth wider with a deepening kiss, demanding entry. She yielded. As she always did, her heart suffering while her body thrummed with pleasure, wanting him.
He groaned as he slid his fingers between their bodies, testing her readiness. He stroked with slow, slow precision till she whimpered.
“Yes. Do you want me to ease the ache inside, my sweet?”
While he stroked again in a torturous rhythm, she wished she could disappear, just vanish from this world in a puff of smoke like everything else. But he wouldn’t let her go.
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