Page 157 of The Enslaved Duet

“Like this?” he asked cruelly as he plucked both my nipples and twisted.

I hissed but shook my head, desperately wishing I could see him to read what he would try to keep hidden in his eyes. “No, please don’t play with my emotions like this. I don’t understand.”

I didn’t. I was hopelessly confused, tangled up like yarn curdled on a loom.

My heart stuttered and chugged in my chest, a failing engine that wouldn’t survive the test Alexander would no doubt put my body through if I let him…

Maybe even if I didn’t.

Heat sluiced from my brain to my groin where it pooled between my legs.

“I’m not playing,topolina. When I use your body like this”—his hand cupped hard between my thighs, tight enough to feel the heavy pulse that beat through my pussy like a war drum—“it is the way a painter wields his brush or a sculptor his clay. You are mine to use, to mould into something more beautiful than before. It is no game. It isart,and you are my canvas.”

“Not anymore,” I whispered brokenly even as I thrust my chest forward when his fingers left my nipples.

“Always,” he promised darkly and then his lips were sealed over my own and his tongue was thrusting like a lance through my shields and into my mouth.

I hummed instinctively as the taste of him hit me like hot whiskey and burned a path down my throat and straight to my core where it burned and burned.

He ate at my mouth like a glutton at his last meal before death, hungry to the point of devastation, desperate to the point of pain. I loved the bite of his teeth into my lower lip, the way he dragged them over the plump flesh like a wood scraper carving his name into the inside of my mouth.

He owned me in that kiss as if I had never been lost, as if every moment we were apart was only a period in a series of ellipses that was always going to lead to more ofthis.

Him and me.

My brain wildly tried to calculate how to deal with this latest development, but I was so wholly overwhelmed by the taste of him, the scent of him surrounding me like fog on the moors, and the feel of his big body hovering just out of my reach, a taunt, a possible present for good behavior well earned.

“Hush, my beauty,” he ordered softly but no less commanding. “Stop that beautiful brain. Stop the questions and the need for answers. Be with me again and let it be as simple as that.”

I whimpered because I wanted with my entire body to acquiesce to his control and give in to the weight of desire in my sex, but I couldn’t find the latch to open the cage on my thoughts and set them free.

Reading my mind in the way only he had ever been able to do, Alexander straightened and stepped away, the air that rushed between us glacial cold.

When he spoke, it was in the carved stone tones of domination. “I think you need to remember who is in control of you,topolina. Who here is the mouse and who the Master?”

His hand snapped forward and slapped against one of my scarcely clad breasts. Thesmackresounded through the empty room and made the slight pain all the greater as the sharp sting sank deep roots in my chest and added to my feverish burn.

“There are consequences to your actions,” he said almost conversationally as his shoes clipped away from me. “Are you ready to reap their reward?”

I didn’t answer, my ears strained so hard to discern the soft sounds he made rustling in a bag that they felt as if they burned with the effort.

Despite my exertion, I startled when the soft kiss of suede tassels tickled over my collarbone and then settled over my shoulder. I shivered as Alexander bent over my back and whispered hotly in my ear, “Are you ready for your punishment, wife?”

I didn’t ask him any more questions. They burned the back of my tongue, but there was no impulse sparking in my brain to ignite them and toss each burning arrow of thought at his head, to watch him drown in the bonfire of my rage and pain.

I was already too far gone to submission. The cool calm of it sluiced over my tongue and down my throat, dousing the questions and banking those fires. I could hate him later, force him to make sense at another time.

For now, I was free to be his.

Being his meant I could have him in the only way he’d ever let me.

As his submissive.

“Yes, Master,” I said, and the words slotted into something inside me like a key in a lock.

And when Alexander coldly commanded, “Present yourself for me. I want to see how you’ve changed since the last time I touched your cunt,” I felt the lockclickand the door swing open.

There was a space in my mind that was inaccessible to me. Another plane, another dimension, whatever you wanted to call it, it was a place that transcended the restrictions of thought and social constructs. It was the setting of pure sensation.