Page 73 of The Enslaved Duet

I dragged myself forward with my hands at his neck and wrapped myself around him, moving my mouth to the strong pulse in his neck because it steadied me.

“Safe,” I whispered to myself to soothe the wild terror still gnawing at the back of my mind.

“Safe,” he echoed, his strong arms finally going around me in a tight cinch.

It was strange magic, a hug, especially a hug from that man.

It settled the demons at war inside me, sung them a lullaby and put them to bed. So when Alexander finally stroked his hand over my head and tangled it into the back of my hair to angle my face for his kiss, I was ready for it.

His plush mouth ate at mine as if we had all the time in the world, nibbling my lips with his teeth, rubbing his sinuous tongue against mine, and breathing his sweet mint breath against my cheek.

He seduced me with that kiss into trusting him and needing him. A low fire stoked in my center and flooded my chilled body with delicious heat.

“You’re mine,” he said against my lips, nipping them between his words until they felt tender as bruised petals. “You’re mine to protect and comfort just as much as you are mine to play with and use. Say it, Cosima.”

“I’m yours, Master,” I whispered into his open mouth, planting my words like a decadent chocolate to melt on his tongue.

He savoured it, licking his lips as his eyes darkened. “Good, little mouse. Now, I won this pussy fair and square. Lie back and show me my prize.”

Then the hand in my hair pulled tighter, manipulating my desire like a puppeteer with string. My need flared higher, and I whimpered into his mouth as his kiss turned cruel.

He pushed me down into the mud, but he didn’t have to, my legs were already spread, the cold winter air biting into the honeyed folds of my sex. I wanted him to see me, to watch his eyes burn as his fingers trailed in the wetness, smearing my arousal across my entire pussy and inner thighs like some heathen worshipper.

My mouth watered as he shoved his riding pants down enough to free his thick cock and then as he fisted it roughly in his big hand. His face was savage in the dark and with desire as he planted a hand near my face and used the other to notch his dick at my entrance.

“You can scream all you’d like,bella, no one will come to your rescue,” he promised, and then he plunged straight to the end of my cunt.

I screamed, but this time it braided the edges of my torn lungs smooth and felt like honey coating my throat.

I screamed as he rutted into me in the middle of a wintry Scottish night, our combined heat melting the frost on the pine needles overhead so that they dripped over our bodies like a cleansing rain.

I screamed as he bent his head to take my nipples in his teeth, the pain cracking like a nut between his molars into divine pleasure, and I screamed even harder as he used the hand at my sex to slide another finger into my cunt beside his cock, and I became stuffed, deliciously overfull.

I did not scream as I came like a flood over his dick and thighs, as everything inside me that was not beautiful and pure expunged from me in exodus.

Instead, I breathed his name on a sigh and let my terrorized mind find comfort in his discipline over my body.

Dimly, I was aware of the hot splash of his cum inside me as he climaxed, holding me close and tight so that I could feel the sharp tension of his arousal jerk then fall lax with satisfaction.

And then, I think, I passed out.

When I opened my eyes again, it was because Alexander was lifting me atop his horse. I blinked slowly when he didn’t mount it himself, instead turning to walk into the near distance.

I blinked again when I saw something hanging there from a tree.

It was the orange flash that caught my eye and pulled my submerged mind into the clear.

I recognized the colour of that hair from the corral, from the poor girl who had offered to share her hiding place with me.

She hung from a tree by the torn and knotted together length of her shift dress, her milk white body glazed in moonlight and speckled with mud as it swung in the cold wind.

There was blood blackening the inside of her thighs, and I had no doubt she’d been used and thrown aside for the third time in as many Hunts.

The third strike had proven too much for the girl with the dead eyes, and she’d succumbed to her demons by taking her own life.

My heart twisted up, bloody and used like an old tissue as I watched Alexander cut her down from the tree and gently lay her to rest under an old rowan tree. He smoothed by that carroty hair, crossed her arms over her chest and then bent his head over her prone form in silent prayer.

“They’re worse than beasts,” I murmured through the fog of my exhaustion when Alexander swung up behind me on the horse. “Because they know better, and they still act this way.”