Page 92 of The Enslaved Duet

Only, it wasn’t hard anymore, not in the weeks since the miscarriage. Alexander was attentive as a celebrant to his deity, bathing with me every morning and dressing me just as I dressed him. He ate dinner with me every night when he returned from work and continued to fuck me, in ways both hard and soft, as before.

But it was the way he looked at me sometimes with an edge of primal fear like a cornered predator even as he let me caress him or question him about his day that made me question his emotional landscape.

It was as if he feared my intimacy as much as he craved it.

My life at Pearl Hall was full in many other ways too. I enjoyed my time in the kitchens with Douglas as he taught me to make wonderful confections out of spun sugar and chocolate lacework. Mrs. White was determined to teach me the lady-like art of needlepoint even though the only thing I’d ever be close to stitching successfully was the word “sex” in shaky script. I improved every day in my fencing and martial arts training, whether it was with Riddick or Xan, and I’d taken to riding my beautiful golden stallion, Helios, over the extensive grounds.

For the first time in a long time, I felt a sense of joy in my everyday life, and England was beginning to feel like home.

My mother noticed my accent, how I’d clipped off the ends of vowels and stopped instinctively rolling my r’s. I began to notice it too, how my English had ceased to skip and hop with the foreign lyricism of my homeland, how my vocabulary had swelled to include such British sayings as “scrummy,” “botched,” “chuffed,” and “dodgy.” When I commented on it to Alexander, he’d smiled his secret smile with his eyes half closed in pleasure and then fucked me so hard, he had me cursing in Italian.

He did that a lot, it seemed. Reading into my skin like a blind man with Braille, and the subtitles in my eyes like a deaf man with the news. As if his other senses could tell him my secrets more readily than his sight could.

Sometimes I wondered, after he’d worked over my body until I was crying out his name, what kinds of secrets he’d already divined under my skin.

The happier Alexander and I became, drawn together inexplicably by the loss of our child and the mystery of his or her death, the more agitated Noel seemed.

I would catch him pacing down the hall, muttering under his breath as his palm twitched, then smacked against his leg, and sometimes, at strange hours of the day, I would hear something like the wind howling through the walls of the house and wonder if Noel still kept a slave hidden somewhere on the grounds.

One day when I was on the way to the gym, I even witnessed a peculiar tableau. Mrs. White had been crying on her knees, her head tilted into Noel’s thigh as he sat at the kitchen table below stairs and stroked her hair.

The image stirred a deep mistrust inside my soul, but I had no real reason to be suspicious of Mrs. White and only speculation and terrible history with his son to pin against Noel.

So I watched, but waited quietly until one morning when Alexander and I were cuddled in bed after a vigorous session tossing around the idea of him teaching me how to exercise his falcon, Astor.

The door to my bedroom flew open, and Noel stood in the frame, shaking a letter terminated in a familiar red seal in one hand.

A missive from the Order of Dionysus.

“They cut the bloody funding to my port project in Falmouth,” he seethed as he stalked into the room and ripped the covers off us to reveal our naked, tangled limbs. “You fucking cock-up, this is not how men do business.”

“As a more successful man than yourself,” Alexander said haughtily, despite his lack of dress. He stood to get toe to toe with his combative father and stare down at him from his more advance height. “I dare to disagree.”

“Fix this, boy,” Noel demanded, shoving the thick card stock into Xan’s chest. “Fix it now and stop being such a pussy. Your mother, your grandfather, and the entire Davenport clan are rolling over in their grave right now as they witness your idiocy and pigheadedness. Maybe if you weren’t so tied up in that one’s snatch, you’d remember what you brought her here to do.”

My ears burned at Noel’s crude language, but it was my chest that churned with rolling flames.

I hated Noel more at that moment for speaking to Alexander and relating to him the way he did than I’d ever hated anyone for myself.

Noel stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him so forcibly that the painting rattled on the wall.

Alexander didn’t move.

He stared down at the paper in his hand blindly.

“Xan,” I asked softly, moving to the edge of the bed to place a hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“He has a point,” he murmured. “I can’t forget your purpose here.”

A shiver of foreboding rocked through me.

“I can have more than one purpose. I am not just a utilitarian tool,” I told him.

His eyes slid to mine, but they were some place deep inside his mind where the maze of his thoughts was at its darkest.

“Aren’t you?”

I watched as he dropped the letter to the ground and marched from the room, naked yet utterly regal on his athletic, rolling gait.