Page 161 of The Enslaved Duet

It didn’t make a difference to the man behind me who cupped me like a ladle, the bowl of his hips tight against the sphere of my ass, his front knit skin to skin against my back, his hands and feet tangled with my hair and toes as if he had to possess me from top to bottom even in slumber.

And he was asleep.

I could feel the soft caress of his short, deep breath against my bared neck and the weight of him so heavy against me like a leaden bracket.

More than anything, I wanted to turn into his arms, touch my fingertips to the steep curve of his thick eyelashes, and breathe in his every breath after he took it.

Then, I wanted to spend the rest of the day in the faintly lumpy bed at the quaint bed and breakfast my agent had booked me on the Lizard Coast while Alexander taught me new and difficult ways to worship him.

But I wouldn’t do any of that.

My heart felt newborn in my chest, too weak and too small to sustain the stress of my adult body and mind. I pressed my fist to my ribcage and felt it flutter weakly, a butterfly suffocating trapped in a jar.

I needed distance to build back my walls, to construct a fortress better than the one before so I could survive living without Alexander again. My heart clenched just thinking about leaving him in this bed, let alone spending one day or a dozen strung together without him by my side.

How was it possible to love someone so much when you hadn’t spent any time with them in years?

Was it true that whatever souls were made of, two could be constructed the very same? One heart cut into two and pressed into separate chests with the hope that one day, they would find each other.

I didn’t think God or science or the universe were that romantic or that cruel, but I couldn’t come up with a plainer explanation for my continued and absolute adoration of a man I’d once called my captor.

My therapist might have said Stockholm Syndrome again, the catch-all excuse for loving someone in a position of power who took advantage of you.

Yes, Alexander had taken advantage of me, but some secret, mammal part of me yearned for him to take more.

He sighed in his sleep, and I cranked my head awkwardly to watch his brow pucker in a way that cracked open the planes of his face and revealed how much closer to forty he was than thirty. There was silver peppered in the gold hair over his ears, but it was still a thick, soft pelt across his crown. Otherwise, there was very little evidence of the last four years in his face or the hard, perfectly cut and proportioned body that was pressed so intimately to my own.

I had to get out of there.

Carefully, I leveraged myself onto an elbow and searched the room. My clothes were folded and placed on the seat in the corner because Alexander was an exacting Dom, and he took pleasure in ordering me to do something for the sake of seeing me obey. My luggage and purse were stacked beside it, and my phone lay overturned on top of that.

It would be an easy getaway as long as he didn’t wake up.

And Alexander was an apex predator; there was no way I’d get out of his grip without waking him and falling into the trap of his domination again.

Metal winked in the crack of light spilling in through the curtains and I turned farther to see my ruby collar and the discarded leather and metal cuffs Alexander had used to bind me into complicated folds after we’d returned to the room last night.

My cheeks burned like twin stove elements as I remembered the way he’d chained me to the brass headboard positioned on my hands and knees with my ass in the air and my cheeks parted like the pages of a book under his big hands. He’d eaten at my crease for an hour, using his teeth, tongues, lips, and fingers until I was dripping juice down my inner thighs and humping back against his face in desperate need ofmore. He had taken my mouth and pussy at the studio, photographing me for his pleasure in profane, graphic ways that still made my core tighten like a fist, but he waited for the plushness of a bed to claim my ass again. I’d forgotten, somehow, how an anal orgasm ripped me apart from the inside out and left my muscles frayed like split wires.

I shook off the memory even as my pussy dampened and clenched with need. I couldn’t afford to give in to my lust if I wanted to get away from Alexander.

And I did.

Whatever pretty words he had spoken last night had long dissipated in the cold light of dawn. I didn’t know what his game was, but I knew there was one. Every step of our relationship had been a carefully calculated move across the board. I didn’t yet know what this one led to, but I was finally smart enough not to let him force me there.

Working quickly and quietly, I leaned over to the bedside table and hooked the cuffs over a finger. I held my breath as I slowly slid the padded leather over one of his wrists, untangled his fingers from my hair so I could thread the chain through the brass headboard rail, and then fastened the second cuff to his other wrist.

The second he was secured, Alexander’s eyes flashed open like headlights, pinning me in the high beams, frozen and frightful as a deer.

After a brief, furious second of connection, we both burst into action.

I scrambled back from his body on my heels and hands, crab-walking to the end of the bed so that his reaching fingers couldn’t grab me.

“Cosima Davenport,” he growled, paralyzing me not because of his venom-laced tone, but because I hadn’t heard my married name in years and only then, once from his own lips.

Even in my current state, I loved the sound of it.

“What the fuck is it that you think you are doing?” he asked me, enunciating each word like bullets shot from the cold chamber of a gun.