Page 29 of The Enslaved Duet

I could feel the satiny texture of his skin under my fingers, the strength of his muscles tensed beneath the flesh, and the heat of his body as he absorbed the temperature of the steamy shower. There was a triangle of small brown moles high on his left shoulder and a faint, nearly indecipherable collection of thin, criss-crossing scars in the valley below his shoulder blades. I traced their edges with my thumb and wondered who had done that to him.

His muscles bunched with tension, and I realized that I had spoken aloud.

“As I’ve told you, every predator is prey to someone.”

“I can’t imagine a beast more terrifying than you,” I told him honestly.

It wasn’t just that he was ruthless or crueler than a starving wolf. Something in his manner spoke of the colossal effort of his restraint, as if one wrong moment would unleash that ravenous beast chained to the floor of his soul on whomever was unwise enough to be in its path.

“Some monsters are made, and some are born. You could say that I’m the worst of both worlds,” he said cryptically.

I chewed my lip as I puzzled over his words, aware that the mystery of Alexander Davenport was dangerous to a woman like me. A woman who enjoyed the riddles of the human brain, and the strange complexities of a single personality. I wanted to sit cross-legged on the ground and assemble the facets of Alexander’s mind like a ten-thousand-piece puzzle.

In my experience, if you could understand someone, it was nearly impossible to hate them.

And truthfully, I didn’t want to hate this man. Not because he deserved warmer feelings, but because that hatred was just as corrosive to my mental health as my two-week stint in the dark. I couldn’t imagine hating someone with all my heart and seeing them every single day for the next five years.

What kind of person would I be at the end of that?

How could I go from half a decade of hatred to a future reunited with my family? How could I find love in my heart, how would I know how to express it?

The answer, I feared, was that I wouldn’t be able to.

If I allowed the horrible unjustness of my situation to disband my ability to love, I’d lose an elemental facet of who I was and the very reason I was even doing this.

For the love of my family.

Alexander interrupted my thoughts to hand me a shampoo bottle.

I sucked in a deep breath and poured the gel into my hands before working it into the thick strands of his hair. His scent bloomed in the humid air, so that I felt he was surrounding me.

He turned to face me when I was done, tipping his head back into the steam of water so that bubbles went sliding down over his chiseled chest. His eyes popped open to stare at me as I popped a big bubble over his left nipple.

Caught like a little girl, I giggled before I could clamp my mouth shut with both hands.

His eyes blazed, but he didn’t condemn me. Instead, his voice was silky when he said, “Get on your knees and clean me with your tongue.”

“Soap would do a better job,” I retorted, but my knees were already softening, melting me like butter to the ground at his feet.

He was already hard. The long, veined length of him pulsed in time with his heartbeat, hypnotizing me as I stared at it. It felt strange to find something so alien to me so utterly attractive, but I loved the thickness of him as I weighed him in my palm and the way his heavy balls were framed by his lean, strong thighs.

I tilted his erection down to my mouth and kept my eyes canted up to his when I licked the flat of my tongue over the crown of his shaft.

His eyes went black with arousal.

Something like a purr vibrated through my throat before I could swallow it back. There was something unbearably heady about having his most delicate organ in my hand, about bringing such a powerful man pleasure.

“Tell me what to do,” I asked, playing my fingers over his shaft, his pubic bone, and inner thighs.

His body tensed with surprise before relaxing. One of his hands slid into the back of my hair and fisted.

“Suck and lick the water from my cock as a guide. Trace the veins with your tongue, take me as far into your throat as you can and breathe through your nose so I can feel how tight and wet your mouth is around me. Essentially, treat my cock like your very own ice-cream cone.” His voice was husky again, and I knew that seeing me lap at the head of his cock like a kitten with cream was the reason for it.

I hummed with my lips pressed to him and then looked up at him to say, “If I make you come like this, I want to be allowed to write a letter to my family.”

The hand in my hair twisted painfully, and the pleasure previously saturating his features calcified. “Are you trying to top from the bottom again,topolina?”

His voice was a menacing hiss that pierced fear through me like a needle with thread.