Page 160 of The Enslaved Duet

Before he finished coming, he pulled out and painted my cheek with the last two ropes of his cum. I gasped for breath, my clit throbbing like the heart of a hummingbird. Alexander used the opportunity to smear his fingers in the seed on my skin and slide it over my tongue.

“How do I taste,topolina?”

I hummed lustfully around his fingers, so gone to my desire that my inhibitions had been ground to dust. I wanted to roll onto my back, spread my legs open, and beg him to fuck me. I wanted to get him hard with my mouth again and nuzzle him with my cheek just to get closer to the musk and salt scent of him.

His soft, dark chuckle brushed over my skin in a silken caress. I bit my lip to stop my protest as he stepped away, but he was back before my anxiety could build, his legs pressing into the tender skin of my back. Shivers coursed down my spine as his big, abrasive hands slid over my collarbones, collecting the thick veil of my hair on either side so he could move it off my neck.

I sucked in a deep, sharp exclamation of breath when a cold weight settled around my throat and closed with an audibletskunder my hair.

I didn’t need sight or touch to know that Alexander had collared me.

My pussy felt heavy, pulsing with a deep, dull throb that made it impossible to concentrate on anything but that and the cold bite of metal around my neck.

“This is who you are,” he whispered into my ear, tracing the gold thorns around my throat so that I shivered. “Not just a slave, a trinket to own and flaunt and punish, but my slave, mytopolina, a woman so beautiful it makes me ache. A warrior so powerful Joan and Artemis would shudder at your feet. Do you know how it makes me feel to make you sweat and cum and cry? It makes me feel like a god, fierce enough to deserve you, and a peasant, wholly unworthy of such a magnificent gift.”

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.