Page 178 of The Enslaved Duet

I wrung my hands together and wondered briefly if I should tell him the truth.

I had slept with Dante. Many times.

When I first moved to New York City, I was a mess of emotions barely contained by thin skin and brittle bones. I cried more than I spoke, and it took me weeks to smile.

Only Dante brought me solace, a hot shot of scotch whiskey to soothe my hollow belly, a velvet blanket wrapped around my shoulders to stave a cold even sharper than the one I’d felt my first few weeks in Pearl Hall’s ballroom.

He held me until I slept, force-fed me, and tried everything to make me smile.

I’d substituted one Master for another, though Dante was considerably kinder and infinitely less harmful to my heart. He’d even befriended Sinclair when I’d lived with him in an attempt to rope another person into a tag team to get me out of the house and living again.

“Yes.” I looked Alexander straight in the eye as I confessed, my chin tipped high, my shoulders squared. I wouldn’t be made to feel ashamed for my need or my relationship with his brother. “I slept with him dozens of times when I first arrived, though neither of us really slept.”

Alexander’s rage perfumed the air like gasoline and hot stone. I knew he was ready to explode, to break apart into an inferno he didn’t have the right to light.

I held up one hand to stop him and willed it not to shake.

It was a wonder I was even standing after everything I’d been through as of late, so I let myself have the slight tremble in my fingers.

“I had hellacious nightmares that kept me up for hours. I’d wake up sobbing and thrashing so hard, I would have hurt myself if Dante didn’t hold me down, and even then, sometimes I’d hurt him. I cried so much I went cold, and my body trembled so hard from the shock of it I couldn’t hold still enough to fall asleep at all. He lay beside me through all of it because he knew, unlike anyone else in my life, not even myfamily, especially not them, that I’d been through hell and come back to the world of the living something other than fully human. Something haunted and broken and dark.”

I slanted a long, sizzling glance at Alexander, hating him at that moment the same way I had three years ago after he’d eviscerated me in Milan.

“If you want to condemn me for taking the only solace I could from the only man I could ever hope to find it in, then go ahead, but you’ll be less of a man for it.”

We stood facing off for a moment that seemed suspended in time when everything shifted profoundly, but infinitesimally from night to day. Finally, when Alexander moved toward me, I let out a heavy breath I hadn’t been aware I was holding.

He reached me in three long, brutal strides and hoisted me up against his body so that my toes dangled off the floor. His mouth was on mine in the next second, his eyes open on mine as he took my mouth in a firm but searching kiss. Only when I opened the seam of my mouth for his sweeping tongue did he close his eyes and relax into the embrace, groaning into me like a man finding sweet relief.

When he pulled away, he pushed his forehead against mine, his eyes still closed as if he couldn’t bear to look at me while he confessed. “I’m a great jealous cad, so I hate the very thought of him being anything at all to you. I’ll admit it. Still, I know it’s my own fault you had to turn to him, and so, I know I must and I will live with it. Forgive me for being a brute with my anger.”

“You’re a brute in more than just your anger, Xan,” I said softly, forgiving him with my gentle tease.

His eyes flashed open, sparkling like diamonds in a velvet box. “Ah, but I won’t apologize for brutalizing you with my body. You enjoy it too much.”

The shiver that wracked my frame agreed with him before my words could.

His laughter was smoke against my face, heady and strong enough to drug me. I wanted to hear his merriment every day until I died, and I didn’t care that I knew I would have to work for it.

“What now?” I asked because I was so overwhelmed by the changes the last three days had wrought on my life that I didn’t know up from down or left from right.

I wanted to stay in this dizzying new reality forever, but I knew my life would never be as simple as that. There were still too many things in the way of our peace to relax for long.

Alexander smoothed one of his big, beautiful hands over my forehead and down the cloak of inky hair at my back. “Let me bathe you and wash away the greasy-eyed stares of the men at Club Bacchus while I explain some things to you.”

“That sounds good,” I breathed but didn’t move because I was in his arms and some panicked part of me worried what would happen if I let him go for even one moment.

His smile was slight and gentle as if he knew, and he probably did, exactly what I feared. He turned me around to face the bathroom, somehow knowing where my bedroom and en suite were in the apartment and slapped me on my bottom like a rider to his horse’s flank.

“Get going and start the bath. I have a phone call to make before I join you.”

“Ashcroft?” I asked even as I obeyed him and walked down the short hall to my room.

“Later,” he reminded me firmly before giving me his back and walking down into the living room to take the call.

I left the lights off in my room, not eager to have Alexander’s discerning eyes on the red dressed bed that looked remarkably like my own from Pearl Hall or the overlapping pink and red carpets beneath it.

I flicked them on in my big bathroom so that I could find my St. Aubynd’Orooil and added it to the bathwater as it poured into the wide Jacuzzi tub. While I waited for it to fill, I stepped up to my gold mirror as I unbuttoned the top half of my shirt and looked at my tired but elated expression, trying to discern what was different in my face that made me feel truly beautiful for the first time in years.