Page 247 of The Enslaved Duet

I used my chin to urge his hand over my cheek and leaned into him. “I’ve always been partial to you holding me down.”

Xan’s face broke into one of his rare, beautifully creased smiles that made his eyes gleam like polished silver. I reached over to trace my thumb over the shape of that smile and then chuckled when his teeth nipped at the pad.

“You’re happy too,” I told him because even though he seemed the same staid, regal man with a face like a mask and eyes like two cold stones, I could sense the shift in the air around him. He too seemed lighter.

“I’ve been happier with you in every moment we’ve spent together than I have ever been in the entirety of my life without you,” he admitted easily as if his words didn’t mean absolutely everything to a girl who had never been loved so candidly in her life by a man other than her brother.

“Do you think…?” I ventured before halting the stream of words by biting my lower lip.

Alexander glared at me when I didn’t continue and then carefully unhooked my teeth from my mouth. “Do not hold anything back from me, my beauty. You are a mystery I’ve spent too long waiting to unravel, and the process begins now. I want to know everything.”

“I don’t want to jinx it,” I said with a wince because it was ridiculous to believe in such trivial superstitions after everything we’d been through.

His face settled feature by feature, brick by brick, into a stone wall of somberness. I gasped as he twisted to fit his hands under my armpits and half-dragged, half-lifted me from my saddle onto his where he settled me with my legs draped over his thighs, a diamond of space between our groins, one powerful arm around my waist and the other wrapped in my pigtails so that my head arched back and my mouth bloomed open just under his.

Alexander spoke with a wry, almost nervous twist to his lips, an energy in his eyes that spoke of nearly boyish eagerness and vulnerability. “The tale usually goes, there is a desperate princess locked away in a tower in need of a valiant knight to slay her dragons and spirit her away to a happily ever after, but our truth is different. It was me who needed you, Cosima. I sensed your bravery the moment you stepped in to save the life of a man you didn’t know in a random Milanese alleyway, and I knew it for sure when you refused to break for me, when you promised I wouldn’t win your heart or your spirit unless I could earn them. You saved me from an eternity of hell I wasn’t even perfectly aware I was living. You gave me reason to slay my demons, reason to doubt my own villainy, and now, that part of our lives is over.”

The arm around my waist shifted so that he could rub his smooth leather-clad thumb over my cheek, and he rested his forehead against mine. The wrinkles in his forehead smoothed out as he closed his eyes and released a sigh like a man atoned for his sins by God.

When he moved back an inch to lock eyes with me, his blazed with the fury of an inner flame. “But hear me when I say that time is over. I don’t need you to save me anymore and neither does your family. You have martyred and battled enough. It’s time to hang up your sainthood and your sword because if something ever comes for us again, it will be me who pays the toll, me who takes up the lance. I will nevereverlet anyone touch you again. You see, my beauty, you taught me what it takes to be a hero, so I’ll be prepared if the mantle ever has to be taken up again.”

His thumb continued to move across my cheek, wiping away the tears as soon as they spilled from my lids. A hiccough worked its way up my throat, a precursor to heavy, bloated sobs that wracked my entire body with shudders and gasps.

Alexander held me as I cried, crushed to his chest so tightly I could feel the steady, heavy thud of his heart against its cage. It was that beat that finally soothed me because it reminded me that Alexander was the greatest man I’d ever known, but more than that, there was a dark, dangerous beast inside his chest that would break free if anyone tried to fuck with us again.

And I would never bet against that beast.

I knew he would keep me safe from harm.

“I was going to say,” I whispered through my snot and tears, my voice so thick it seemed I spoke through a cotton-filled mouth. “Do you think we get our happily ever after now? I mean, what happens after this?”

There was something utterly poignant about the way Alexander tilted my chin up with his big hands, their strength subtly reined so that they could brush tenderly over my wet cheeks, collecting my tears. His face was serious as I had ever seen it, features heavy and almost stern as he stared down at me, but it was his eyes that drew my focus. They were wide, dark and light in equal turns like sunlight filtering through storm clouds, and so sincere with love it made my breath catch.

“What happens after this?” he mused as he took my hands in each of his and methodically bit the pad of each finger before kissing each knuckle. “What happens after this is we move you properly into the house. We put your books in the library, your clothes beside mine in our closet, and your portrait next to mine in the Hall of Mirrors. I go to work in the city, you go to work wherever that may take you, and we both come home to each other here. We’re already married.” Alexander pressed his lush mouth to the enormous canary yellow diamond on my left ring finger. “But I see a proper honeymoon in our future, wherever my bride desires. And children. When we are ready, as many children as you’re willing to give me.”

Tears were falling again, but I was never able to think about our miscarriage without them. It hadn’t been the right time or place to have a child, but the devastation was still very real. Knowing that I once again had the chance to have a baby with Alexander’s mercurial grey eyes and gorgeous British accent filled every empty space inside me with unequivocal joy.

“But for now,” Alexander said, an impish grin twisting the left side of his firm mouth. “We must return to the house so that I can give you a very belated wedding present and an early birthday gift.”

Quickly and effortlessly, Alexander was hefting me out of his saddle and twisting me back onto my own.

“If you’d like to attempt to beat me back to the stables, you’re more than welcome to,” he continued mildly, the tiny curve of his mouth belying his arrogant amusement. “The loser will be punished, of course. I think a spanking with a riding crop sounds fitting, don’t you?”

Before he was even finished speaking, I was off, Helios leaping into motion so fluid it seemed that we spilled down the hill and into the valley as easily as water through a stream. My laughter was high and breathless as I pressed my torso into Helios’s warm body, buried my nose in her sweet mane, and galloped across the estate, no demons or monsters giving chase behind me, just the man I always knew would find me if I ran.

Still, somehow, probably due to nearly four decades of horseback riding, Alexander drew abreast with me, grinning like the innocent boy he had never been, and then quickly overtook me with a loud, freeingwhoopof joy.

He beat me soundly, arriving at the stables two minutes before me, and then he beat me soundly again with a riding crop while I braced myself against the same fireplace he’d once branded me against. He held my ass when he finally thrust into my wet, clutching heat, his thumb digging into the flesh over my brand as if he could rebrand me through touch alone.

It was that thought and the belief that he could, that broke the bloated seal on my orgasm.

I was still panting, my hands linked around Alexander’s neck, the only thing keeping my wobbling knees from collapsing, when he started to laugh his gorgeous, rumbling laughter against my neck.

“What?” I asked, pulling him by the hair so I could see his creased, happy face. “Why are you laughing?”

An imperious shrug. “I’m allowed to laugh, am I not?”

“You are,” I agreed slowly. “You just don’t very often.”