Page 175 of The Enslaved Duet

This was the person I had become in every carefully cultivated vase and colour-coordinated fabric choice. I wasn’t sure how he would react to seeing an autonomous me because it was never something he’d had to face.

Alexander read my hesitation at the door and stilled my fumbling hands as I searched for the right key with a large, heavy one of his own. I watched as he took the key ring from me and easily found the correct one to slot into the gold lock. His smile was slight, but smug as he opened the door and placed a hand on my back to usher me inside.

“I knew where you lived before you finished signing the papers,” he told me, his lips against the shell of my ear, tickling the thin skin so that I shivered. “I might not have been beside you for the past four years, my beauty, but I still made sure you had everything you’d need.”

“I needed you,” I told him in a moment of intense honesty.

My skin went hot and tight with embarrassment, but Alexander only pulled me inside and then pressed me to the door as it closed so that he could pin me against it in a hot, punishing kiss. I groaned into his mouth, slipping my hands into the short, silky strands at the back of his head to hold him to me.

I wanted answers almost as badly as I wanted his kisses, but the latter still trumped everything. It felt as though I existed only under his touch, an apparition made whole by his will and his alone.

Alexander froze against me so suddenly, I kissed his unmoving mouth for a moment, making out with a statue. When I clued into his paralysis, I moved my head back the inch it took to meet the wall at my spine and noticed the gun trained to Xan’s golden temple.

Before I could tilt my head to see who yielded the weapon, Dante’s tangled British-Italian accent slithered low through the room. “Step back from Cosima and keep your hands at your fucking sides.”

“Dante—” I started exasperatedly, moving forward to block him from Alexander.

His black eyes cut to me, sparkling and hard as chips of obsidian in his glowering face. “Move another inch, Cosi, and I’ll put a bullet straight through his soft temples.”

“Dante, don’t be astronzo,” I snapped even though I obeyed his order and held myself still.

Alexander merely stood, strong and immovable as a tree being threatened by a slight breeze as if the gun at his head was nothing but a mild nuisance. He stared at me with a flat face and eyes gone black with predatory instinct.

“What the fuck are you doing in New York City, Alexander?” Dante demanded, his stance just as firm, his face just as implacable.

They had never looked more alike.

The air was distorted like blown glass with the waxy waves of their anger and animosity.

A secret, animal thrill worked its way down my back and sparked in my sex.

“I’m here for Cosima. What the fuck are you doing lurking in her apartment like a bloody thief?”

“I have a key,” he retorted smugly, grinding the gun into Xan’s temple as if to physically rub it in.

“She’s my wife,” Alexander reminded him in a tone like a gavel strike before moving so sharply, I couldn’t discern the series of movements that had Dante’s gun knocked to the ground, skittering over the wood floors, and both men in a fierce grapple on the ground.

Alexander emerged on top and pounded one large fist brutally into Dante’s side, somehow knowing exactly where his brother had been shot a couple weeks ago. Dante’s breath punched out of his lungs, but he twisted his massive body even as he struggled to drag air into his lungs and leveraged his torso to sock a blow directly to Alexander’s chin that had him reeling back. He took advantage, pushing him back with a push to both shoulders so Xan fell to his ass and Dante scrambled over him, pinning him to the ground to growl in his face.

“You motherfucking, selfish prick,” he bellowed into my husband’s face, spittle flying, face vermillion. “You couldn’t stay away, leave her to her peace?”

“You think what she had was peace?” Alexander said, the ice to his brother’s fire, laying calmly beneath his hulking adversary as if he had chosen to lie down and wasn’t pinned there. “You think she could ever have peace without me?”

“Egotistical maniacalbastardo,” Dante spat. “You really think she needs you? You fucking abused her! You chased her and raped her andruinedher.”

“You’re right,” Alexander punctuated his words with a hard grunt as he reared up to smash his forehead to Dante’s nose and switch places with the reeling man, kneeling over him with a placid face that was somehow more threatening than Dante’s twisted sneer. “I ruined her just as surely as she ruined me. It’s done. There’s no going back. I think it’syouwho has to learn to live with that, Edward, because Cosima already has. This problem you have? It’s yours.”

They glared at each other, nose to Roman nose, gold and black pressed together in a way that no woman could ever think was anything other than pure masculine beauty. I was arrested by the sight of them, by the fact that they both loved me enough to fight for me.

I was also completelydonewith their dramatic alpha antics, though.

“Get off your brother, Xan,” I ordered, pulling at his shoulder until he reluctantly acquiesced. “Dante, get up and step back.”

As soon as they gained their feet, I stepped between them and pressed a hand to both their lightly heaving, massive chests to ground the electric power charging through their veins. They both watched me narrowly, angry with each other, but also with me for interfering, for even interacting with the other man.

The headiness of stepping between them sluiced through me until I was almost light-headed. I was an organism entirely dependent on the male mind to survive. I needed them to want me, crave me, become enamoured with me.

The hole at the center of my being that had been ripped out of me when I left England fed on the meat of their attention, and as I stood between the two men who had become the center spokes of my world, I embraced my gluttony with verve.