Page 46 of The Enslaved Duet

Before I could protest, my hand was in his, and he was pulling me in the current of his wide stride down the hall.

“Fencing is an ancient sport first developed by your Italian kinsfolk, though it was popularized by the French. It’s been a popular pastime of the Davenport men since the 19thcentury. I played varsity for a spell at Cambridge.”

“Ah,scherma,” I said, translating the word into Italian as I made the connection. “It doesn’t surprise me that you play with weapons.”

A short, startled laugh burst from his lips, and I noticed how full the bottom one was compared to the bowed top, and how pearlescent a pale pink they were.

“I am very skilled with tools and weapons, as you’ve begun to discover.”

We descended the grand marble staircase into the great hall and the left wing of the house where we entered a large hall that had been turned into a kind of gymnasium. There was a long pool at the very end that seemed at odds with the elaborate décor and Grecian pillars, and modern exercise equipment arranged beside a wide length of mats.

A man stood in the center of those mats wearing a similar outfit to Alexander’s only his was black. It took me a moment to recognize Riddick because his colourful tattoos were covered up, but when I did, I blanched.

Alexander, observant bastard that he was, noticed my surprise and smiled slightly.

“Riddick is trained in eight martial arts.” I blinked at him, and he slid me a pleased look as he moved past me to shake Riddick’s hand. “And I am trained in nine.”

I stood mutely as I watched the two huge men shake hands and quietly discuss their workout. Alexander moved back to me as Riddick went to a sideboard and retrieved two large masks with perforated fronts.

“Sit over here and watch quietly.”

“Why should I? Are my days not mine to do with as I please?” I retorted.

“They are unless I have need of you.”

“And you need me to sit here and validate your prowess with a child’s sword?”

My tyrant’s eyes were dark, thrashing like storm clouds as he glared at me, but just as there was in a storm, electricity crackled in the air between us. My skin buzzed and raised into goose flesh.

“I need you to sit here and watch your Master. I need you to watch me move, witness the strength of my body and the discipline of my gait. I need you to watch as I attack and parry with calculation as easy as my next breath.”

“Why?” I asked even though every time I’d asked such a question before, he’d mocked me with silence and enigmatic looks.

He quirked a brow and snapped forward to grab my hand, tugging me into his body so hard I fell against him. His torso was stiff with Kevlar, but I could still feel the heat of him against me and the way his erection pressed like its own weapon against my hip. “I fight the same way I fuck. Think of it as foreplay.”

He let me go so abruptly, I stumbled a step forward before I could right myself. His soft chuckle burned like too close a flame against my cheeks, and I kept my hair curtained across my face as I moved over to the small set of stands opposite the mats to sit down.

By the time I was settled, both men were in crouched stances with their thin swords raised and one hand behind their backs.

“En garde,” Riddick called out.

And the flurry began.

Their movements were quick as dragonfly wings, landed and parried with total calm and precision. I noticed a servant sat at a table off to the side and kept score on a digital screen. There was never more than a moment when Riddick was the one in the lead.

Alexander was right.

He was a Dominant in the bedroom just as much as he was on the court and in life. It awed me to watch the sheer breadth of his large body move with such speed and grace. Unbidden, thoughts of how he’d used his quilted arms to rain the flogger down on my heated skin roused to my mind, of how easy it had been for him to chase me across the ballroom on his thick thighs and quick feet then to hold me down with every carved inch of his frame when he fucked me into the floor.

They fenced three games, and Alexander won all three.

It didn’t surprise me.

In fact, I felt an odd fluttering of pleasure in my chest that Alexander had so soundly beaten Riddick.

Maybe it was that the man who had conquered me in so many ways had just proved himself capable of conquering another, someone even more capable of thwarting him than I could be, and still he’d lost.

Alexander was the king of this animal jungle, and it gave me a sense of relief to know I wasn’t the only one forced to bend to his rule.