Page 99 of The Enslaved Duet

I ignored everything but the sound of my blood rushing through my ears and the dangerous thrum of my racing heart.

“Cosima,” Salvatore said firmly, catching my attention as he took my listless hand off the table and cupped it in his own. “I know this isn’t easy, and it’s a lot to digest. Stay here with us for a few days, a couple of weeks, and let’s get to know each other before we make any decisions. I know it seems like I’m using you, and I’m sorry for that, but it’s the nature of my job and the nature of fatherhood. I know I don’t have the right to say this, but I truly am doing what I must to keep you safe.”

“You have a decision to make,” Dante said, solemn once more. He looked like Salvatore’s sidekick sitting there, just as dark and powerful, utterly in sync with the older man’s criminal thoughts and intentions. “You can help us take down a sect of terrible men, and we can help you and your family set up a new life in America, free of the past and of the Davenport influence. Or you can go back to Pearl Hall and the Master who will use you just as surely as we are, but toward a more bitter end.”

Three weeks later.

“Alexander, please come, I think he knows I’m here to spy on him.”

The words of my earlier phone call echoed in my head as I paced around the small sitting room in my hotel suite in Roma.

I’d called Alexander in a panic, begging him to get me because I feared Salvatore and his men were onto me.

Alexander had answered his phone on the first ring, was barking orders to bring the car around to someone, probably Riddick, in the background before I could finish my first sentence, and the moment I stopped speaking, he promised he was on the next plane to Roma to bring me home safely.

Home.

Safely.

The two words were laughable.

My childhood home had never been safe with Seamus living there. Now it was no longer even ours because we had sold it, and Mama and Elena were just now settling in Brooklyn, USA in their new home. One I wouldn’t be a part of, at least not for a long, long time.

Pearl Hall could never truly be my home although it was safe because I would never be anything more than a slave inside its walls.

Salvatore’s Roman country villa might have been my home for the past three weeks, but I was by no means ready to call it my home and him my father.

It was one of the reasons I was doing this.

I jumped when I heard a loud banging against my door and then the sound of a key card sliding and clicking in the automatic lock.

My breath froze in my lungs as the door swung open to reveal Alexander.

His golden hair was a tousled mess from his anxious hands and a long plane ride, his handsome face creased with exhaustion, and his expensive suit wrinkled beyond what he would normally ever allow.

But it was his eyes I couldn’t look away from.

They traced every inch of my body as I stood stock-still across from him, accounting for every new mark on my body or expression flickering across my eyes. It was the soulful search of a man who had been too long parted from a lover.

It was a look that made me want to cry.

He caught my expression, and his face turned fierce as he dropped his bag inside the door and stalked across the room for me, walking over the top of the coffee table to get to me faster.

The second he snagged me around the middle and carted me into his arms, the tears I’d been battling won out, and I burst into sobs.

Alexander squeezed me tightly for a moment and then used a hand in my hair to yank my head back. His eyes were darker than I’d ever seen them, pewter tarnished with regret and rusty with agony.

“Fuck,” he rasped. “I missed you more than I could manage.”

And then his mouth was sealed over mine, his tongue sliding against my own in a sensual glide that had me moaning and fisting my own hands in his hair.

“Don’t ever make me leave again,” I begged before I could remember that it wasn’t part of the plan.

“Never,” he swore, the word so filled with promise it felt as final as his brand against my ass. “Never again.”

He kissed me again, so fiercely it bruised my lips, but I didn’t care. I wanted to wear the blue of his passion and the purple of his possession on my mouth like lipstick.

“Where’s your bag?” he muttered against my lips. “As much as I want to fuck you right here on the floor, I want to get you out of the godforsaken country even more.”