Eric opened the door to Alexander’s bedroom as gently as he could. He let his eyes adjust inside the dark for a long minute before moving deeper inside. He’d waited for hours on the other side of this door, his ass on the carpet, arms hugging bent knees. Only when the sounds abated—pained voices, sexual moanings, desperation—did he dare venture inside.
Light seeped under the bathroom doorway. He padded to it silently so as not to wake Alexander, though he doubted the man was asleep by the way he lay on his back soundless, motionless, hardly breathing.
Rebecca sat with her back to the tub, her laptop open, typing furiously. She didn’t register him entering until he clicked the door shut behind him.
She gasped, and her hand slammed the laptop shut with a loud click. “You scared me.”
“Not as much as you and Alexander are scaring me.”
“I’m sorry.” Her throat moved as she swallowed. “It’s fine. We just had an argument. It happens, you know.” She smiled at him, an obvious ploy meant for him to drop the subject.
“That why you’re designing a new game plan there?” He indicated the laptop she held close to her chest.
“A game plan? How about the assignment of a lifetime?”
Sure it was. A wild need to escape rippled in her eyes. Her body, even her voice, screamed, “flight.” Her fingers curled around the edges of the laptop, and her spine was ramrod straight, as if prepared to jump to her feet.
Now he needed to not spook her. “Oh?”
“Glamping in West Virginia. It’s the new millennial thing. It makes them feel like they’re roughing it, but not … I need to go see.”
The door cracked open, and Alexander, in nothing but boxer shorts, filled the door frame. “You’re going somewhere.” Not a question, it came out like a foregone conclusion.
“It’s work.” Her fake smile faded.
“I see.” He moved to the tub and sat on the edge. “When do you need to leave?”
Rebecca’s eyes widened. “Really? You don’t mind?”
“You’re not a prisoner here.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” Alexander lifted his eyes but didn’t seem to see anything. He wore a mask of glazed resignation.
“What is going on here?” Eric had no business interrogating them, but this odd formality between them made every organ in his body harden. “What’s happened?”
Rebecca’s lips thinned to a straight line, her gaze staring at the wall behind him. “Nothing.”
“Not the time, Eric.” Alexander placed his elbows on his knees and looked down at the tile. “When do you leave?”
This was bad. He didn’t know what their fight was about, but no way was he going to wait for some other time. “Something’s—”
“Leave it.” Alexander’s bark made him step back. He backed out of the room, but left the door open. His center ached at her next words as they drifted into the bedroom.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice, pumped full with false good cheer, echoed slightly in the cold bathroom. “I just need to take a step back. See the stars again for my sanity. It won’t be for forever. It’s a work assignment. I’ll be back.”
No, she wouldn’t.
41
He’d awakened the next morning to find her gone. Alexander fingered the note Rebecca had left on his desk.
“I know you can find me. You can do anything. If you are the man I know you to be, you’ll grant me this space. I promise I’ll be back. I always keep my promises, even the ones that were hard to. Remember that.”
P.S. You are the love of my life. Always were and always will be. I’m leaving this with you for protection while I’m away.
Another fucking note. This one, however, he didn’t want. He clutched the moonstone pendant she’d left hanging on the lamp. That was even worse than the note. He sighed and laid the gemstone face down on the desk. He couldn’t stand the sight of it.
How had things deteriorated so badly? This wasn’t just about what happened forty years ago. He’d let her lose her way, right under his nose. She’d gotten confused and confusion is a terrible state.
He knew firsthand. After Charles had died and Rebecca was lost to him, he grew so disoriented he couldn’t have told you if it were night or day. He found himself back in San Francisco, roaming the streets until Carina Rose took him in after he passed out outside a club. The Rouge? Was that the name? Later, his uncle found him in a bar in Kansas City attempting—and failing—to drink himself into oblivion or get beaten to death. As they drove back to D.C., he’d told his uncle the whole story, sparing no details. God bless the man, he’d said nothing as they crossed over state line after state line. He just nodded as the lights of passing trucks lit up his features. When they’d pulled into his driveway on Foxhall Road, not five miles from where Alexander now sat, he’d turned off the ignition, faced him and told him—not asked, told him—he was going to work for him. He was a newly-elected, first-time, state senator, who then proceeded to teach him the most useful tenets of his life. Don’t beat anyone. Best them. Keep all your promises. Surround yourself with friends. Always help if you could. Don’t owe anyone anything.
Alexander had built a new life on those basic ideas.
He’d amassed his fortune with one idea in mind: keep the three promises he made on the day Charles died. He’d repaid everyone who’d ever helped him—from getting Carina Rose a permanent gig in Washington D.C., to making sure when his uncle died of cancer it was in the finest cancer ward in the United States and only after exhaustive medical care. He’d helped so many other people in the following decades. The only one he hadn’t helped was Rebecca. He could have been kinder to her when she confessed what truly happened decades ago. He knew how vile Alice, in particular, could be. He just had to pile on more guilt? He’d likely validated every fear she’d held about telling him. Oh, to have those few hours back … he’d handle things better. No wonder she ran away—for that was exactly what was happening here.
Fuck.
Like hell he’d let her disappear again. Anger rose hard. It was not unlike grief, he supposed. It all boiled down to having to bear a contemptible injustice that originated in their past and despoiled their current happiness. His foot tapped a rhythm on the oriental under his feet. Unjust? How about despicable?
He stood, unable to sit any longer, and turned to face his gardens through the window.
Having everything and valuing nothing. He’d had nothing and valued everything. What did it get him?
Rebecca should be here, not in some Marriott in Baltimore because, hell yeah, he’d tracked her movement. Glamping in West Virginia, his ass. She was hiding from him. So, he put eyes on her, ensured she was at least safe.
He fell back into his chair and pictured all the things he could do to Marston Wynter. He snatched the phone from its cradle. He could ruin a person in a variety of subtle ways impossible to defend against. Sully their name from restaurants to the White House. Put them on banking blacklists. Hell, drop a dime to the Justice Department with suspicions of money laundering. The JD might believe something was there given that the original paperwork on some of those paintings—some rare and priceless—seemed fishy. The man likely did more than sell ivory across state lines.
What the hell was he doing? What had the man done, really? Offered to marry Rebecca? He was certain Marston had caved to pressure from Alice Wynter, for that bitch had orchestrated the whole thing. So the man kept a secret? Some tiny, goddamned, do-gooder part of him had to give the man credit for his discretion. Fuck. He didn’t want to give the man anything.
The problem was the real person he wanted to destroy was already dead. He was sure if he held a sledgehammer right now, he might be tempted to destroy the very walls that surrounded him just to exorcise this red-hot anger.
He rested the phone back in its cradle. For the first time in his life, he didn’t know who he wanted to be in this scenario. The destroyer of the last remaining heir to a family he no longer had the e
nergy to despise? Or something else?
He leaned back in his chair and tapped his finger on his lips in thought, again lost in a maelstrom of options, strategic moves he could play, possibilities … how often had he done this over the years? In his mind, the remaining years of his life stretched out before him and the clarity of what he saw stunned him. Without Rebecca, he was destined to live the same year over and over again like Groundhog Day.
42
Eric stepped inside Alexander’s office just as he hung up the phone.
“Clarisse.” His rough tone froze her for a moment. Hell, it froze him.
He handed her a manila folder. “Tell Carson this is all his. I’m through managing this one.”
The man turned his chair and gazed out on the gardens through the window. Alexander didn’t move when Eric cleared his throat. Clarisse gathered up a few folders. Her face before she slipped through the door adjoining their offices told him everything. Alexander was not all right and that would shake anyone who knew the man.
Eric rapped on the doorframe, and Alexander finally turned his head. “Come in.”
“Came by to see if you’ve had a chance to go over that auction list.”
“Clarisse has it. I think.” No emotion. “Your plan is fine. Go ahead, disperse everything as you see fit.”
“Okay, five auction houses, two private sales and the rest—”
“I don’t care,” Alexander snapped.
Eric scrubbed his chin. The man had been tight-lipped since Rebecca left, shutting himself in his office. Meetings were held. Scenes happened all around them. Alexander had not come to bed until very late and sometimes not at all. Eric had parked his butt in Alexander’s bedroom, refusing to give up the field he’d been granted. They didn’t touch. They didn’t speak. Eric still stayed.
Rebecca called. They sometimes talked to her together, sometimes apart. Every time Alexander hung up, he was a little bit more like granite, the air around him growing heavier.
Time to step it up. Eric set his ass on the corner of the desk. “Care to go downstairs?”
Alexander’s eyes slanted toward him, his body rigid as steel. “Downstairs.”
“Whichever room you choose. Any instrument. Any room. I have a pain level tolerance of eight. In case my folder didn’t make that clear.”
The man’s chest expanded in a long inhale. “Enjoy pain, do you?” His nostrils flared.
Hell, he was pushing it right now. “Yes.”
“Never say that to a sadist.”
He inched his lips up in a smirk, on purpose. “That’s exactly who I’d say it to.” Goading the man out of this mood might not be smart, but it was all he had at the moment.
“Another time.”
Eric rolled his eyes. Of course, another time. But when he returned his gaze to Alexander, something had shifted. He smirked anew for extra measure.
Alexander slowly rose from his chair. Eric swallowed the distinct feeling he was watching a lion unfold himself from resting into a battle position.
The man’s steel blue eyes bore down on him. “You’ll meet me in thirty minutes. Bottom level.”
A violent shiver ran through Eric’s whole body, as Alexander gathered up a single tail whip, running the length of it through those large hands, circling the leather tail over and over until it coiled in loops.
Eric was insane to do this. The man was hurting viciously, and he’d just taunted a sadist to take it out on him, but he wasn’t backing out now. Alexander needed this, needed him.
He had bent Eric over that spanking bench, squirted in a hefty amount of lube into his ass with an inserter and affixed heavy thick leather cuffs to each wrist. Now, with arms overstretched overhead, he tested the chains for the third time, yanking hard to see if there was any give—as if there would be a change from five minutes ago—and only managed to spin on his toes once more.
“You keep testing them like that I’ll stretch them farther. Make you hang.” With the whip coiled in one hand, he cupped Eric’s balls and squeezed them. Like a wanton pussy, Eric huffed out a groan. His cock had been at full mast ever since he’d knelt outside the door, waiting for the man who was late. Very late. His knees were practically numb by the time Alexander showed up in jeans, a white linen shirt open with sleeves rolled up. He’d showered, and smelled like fresh rain and evergreen. God, he’d wanted to latch his mouth onto one of those nipples outlined through that linen fabric. Instead, he’d dropped his clothes outside after Alexander’s clipped instructions to do so and crawled inside behind him like a puppy.
Alexander brought his face so close his rough unshaven chin tickled his skin. “Safeword.”
“You choose.”
His eyes narrowed to slits. “Don’t test me.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He cried out when Alexander twisted his balls. “Winter.”
Alexander’s jaw tensed so hard, a muscle twitched in his cheek. He nodded, his eyes almost violet in the red lighting. His pecs and abs planed beautifully in the low red lights. He played his fingers up and down Eric’s cock. “You enjoy being a brat. So like Rebecca.”
“She’s not here.”
Alexander’s lips curled up slightly. Saying that was throwing down a gauntlet, but one Eric willingly laid at his feet. He wanted Alexander to unleash on him. The man needed to discharge whatever he was holding inside.
The door cracked open, and in his periphery, he caught a woman crawling into the space.
“I invited Lina to watch. You enjoy being watched, don’t you, Eric? Shared? Used?”
Shit. He’d wanted Alexander to himself. But the man would have guessed that, wouldn’t he? There was no taking Alexander off guard, no room to play the man.
Lina crouched in the corner.
“Look at this spectacular cock, little pet,” he called to her. He didn’t take his eyes off Eric, his rough finger moving up and down his erection at a maddeningly slow pace. Eric openly panted. Cold concrete under his toes did little to cool the heat that was rising up like rocket fuel.
Eric spent his life at Accendos semi-erect just from Alexander’s proximity. Now, arms overhead in the Accendos famed dungeon, his skin crackled and buzzed with adrenaline, and his cock was going to explode from Alexander’s eyes narrowing to slits of intention—of need. That’s what he saw there. The man needed. How had he not noticed that before?
“I’m all for you,” he breathed. Rip his skin off his flesh. Wail on him. Whatever the man needed he was going to get from him.
“I should take you down, put you on all fours, spread your ass wide and fuck you hard.”
Oh, yes, he should.
Alexander’s fingers left him and his hips pitched forward as if trying to follow. His cock bumped the man’s wrist, and Alexander’s eyes fell down to his wayward member. He stepped backward, snapped his fingers, then pointed at Lina. The woman scooted forward on hands and knees and lay prostrate before him.
Alexander kept his eyes on Eric’s face as he grasped the woman’s hair and yanked her forward, putting her face in Eric’s crotch.
“Fuck him with your mouth.”
The woman’s warm wet mouth swallowed him whole with no warning, no hesitation. He cried out at the sensation, the unwavering assault on his cock. He didn’t dare break eye contact with Alexander.
In his periphery, he caught Alexander’s shoulder muscles ripple under his shirt, as the slick heat of Lina’s tongue and lips glided over his cock. Alexander, with eyes locked on his face, fed Lina’s mouth to him in an aggressive rhythm. Holding back was going to be nearly impossible. A wet lick of sweat trailed down his back and rivers of tingles ran up and down his arms.
“You like that, Eric? Having a slave suck you off?” He let go of her hair. “Slave, you keep that mouth on his cock.”
Alexander then moved behind him. The rasp of the single tail whip uncoiling mixed with the wet sucking sound at his crotch. The air changed, and he cried out at the first sharp bite of the whip tip hitting his sh
oulder blade. Alexander didn’t wait long to land a second crack on his ass.
“You keep that cock hard, Eric. No coming.”
Then he went to work on him.
For a brief second, Eric worried the ends that sparked across his skin might hit Lina in the face, but his hips shielded her, and Alexander’s aim was spot on. Blows fell on his ass cheeks, the tips scoring his skin until he was sure he bled. He got lost in the sounds of the leather hitting his flesh, the wet sucking sounds from Lina, and the brush of his feet on concrete. His hips pitched forward with each crack, shoving his cock deeper into Lina’s mouth. Her wet breaths sounded around his erection and, fuck, he was not going to be able to hold back.
“Don’t you dare.”
Three words from Alexander and his orgasm stalled. He focused on his breathing, the numbness forming in his arms, the fire on his back and ass, anything to keep from losing it down Lina’s throat.
The devil brat applied more suction to her lips, and anger shot through his system. She wanted to make it difficult for him? Fine, but he was trying to do something here: perfect obeisance, distraction of the highest order, to put Alexander back to the man he was for at least a few hours. Eric’s teeth ground together, and his eyes slanted down, trying to catch her eyes, but she kept them forward and continued that infernal sucking, licking … fuck, he was going to explode.
He unloaded with a loud hiss and fuck. No, no, no rattled in his brain as his hips bucked and his legs and arms thrashed as he came hard.
With a loud thunk, the single tail hit the ground. His pants filled the room and he blinked. Alexander had stopped. Eric tried to turn his head, but he couldn’t. Rough hands circled his wrists. Alexander was undoing Eric’s cuffs.
“No, I … I can do more.” Was that his own voice in his head? He floated a little, the lights made it hard for him to focus on any shape or shadow. His depth perception was nonexistent, and he stumbled a bit.
Alexander didn’t say a word as he brought his arms down, banded Eric against him so he didn’t pitch straight to the floor. Chest hair hit his skin. Alexander had rid himself of his shirt at some point.
Invincible (Elite Doms of Washington Book 6) Page 19