“You are taken with it,” Noel said with a smile like a proud father. “I knew you would be.”
“There are not enough words in English or Italian to say how very much I love it,” I told him honestly as I ran my fingers over a large globe set in a wooden stand. My index finger trailed unerringly to the small spot on the map that read “Naples.”
“You might be wondering why Alexander barricaded you.” It wasn’t a question, but I could feel the lure flashing in the light spilling through the warped glass windows.
He wanted to go fishing, and I was the prized trout he meant to catch.
“To be quite honest, Duke, I’ve come to realize wondering why Master Alexander does anything is a fruitless endeavour.”
He chuckled and clasped his hands behind his back, cutting the perfect image of a well-bred English gentleman in his expensive suit.
“Be that as it may, let me pierce the shrouded veil for a moment.”
I trailed him across the long length of the library to the chairs clustered around the fireplace and followed his gaze up to an oil painting that hung above it.
The woman depicted there was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen, but that wasn’t what took my breath away.
No, it was the startlingly clear fact that she was Italian.
It was in her warm olive complexion, though her skin was fair from spending some time in England, and the almond set of her dark lashed eyes. She had the thick, black hair and brows of a Sicilian woman and the body too, high, pointed breasts and wide hips after a neatly tucked waist.
“My wife,” Noel explained, his voice carefully devoid of all feeling. “Chiara passed away nine years ago. I believe I overheard Mr. O’Shea explain so in the kitchens when we first met.”
I nodded, my voice trapped deep within my throat. There was a wealth of condolences and questions I wanted to gift him, but I didn’t think they would be well received.
“I want to tell you a bit of the story myself, so you can better understand what you are doing here at Pearl Hall.”
My mouth opened in shock, and my hand flew to cover it.
Noel was offering me answers to some of the many questions that had haunted me since my arrival, and I didn’t want to say or do anything that might retract his generosity.
“Sit please,” he told me, and then waited until I sank into one of the mahogany chairs before he too took one. I watched as he settled in, crossing one leg over the other and steepling his fingers as he prepared to tell his story.
“I met Chiara when I was doing my modern pilgrimage of the Grand Tour. She was this gorgeous thing I spotted leading a tour in the Roman Colosseum and being the young, arrogant lord I was, I marched right up to her and demanded she allow me to buy her a gelato.” He smiled at the memory. “It was love from that first day.”
My romantic heart sighed in my chest. I curled up my feet onto the seat and sank further into the soft cushions.
“When it was time to go home, I took her with me. She had no family back in Italy, and I was more than happy to provide for her as my wife. Over the years, she became one of the crown jewels of British society even if it took a while for her to smooth over her Latin edges.” He smiled at me encouragingly, so I gave him a small laugh even though I quite liked my Latin edges.
“She had a… a friend, though, who was determined to visit over the years. I thought nothing of it at first, and this man, Amedeo, become like a brother to me, like an uncle to my children.” I frowned at his use of the plural, and his lips thinned in response. “Yes, Cosima, I will get to it.”
“You see, I trusted this man to care for my family. I thought nothing of it when my wife began to increase her visits back to Amedeo’s home in Italy, but then my youngest son, Edward, began to follow her. They would spend long stretches of time there and return sullen, broken in spirit. I began to get worried, but they wouldn’t tell me anything. Chiara and I had rather a row about it before her last trip there because I told her she was forbidden to go.
“Two days after she left with Edward, who was a strong, beautiful lad, four years younger than Alexander, Edward called home. It was Alexander who picked up, and it was Alexander who was first told his mother had been killed.”
I gasped. “Killed? I thought she had an accident?”
He waved the words away. “That fabrication only came later. At first, Edward himself acknowledged that she has been killed, that he had heard her scream, and then a moment later, the sound of her death against the ground. The police got involved, but nothing was found. If someone pushed her, it had to have been someone in the house.”
I blinked at him, imagining the scene, destroyed by the obvious truth. “You think it was Amedeo?”
“I know it was Amedeo,” Noel confirmed. “But that is not all. You see, Edward never came home after that. He stayed in Italy with the murderer and pledged to the police that Amedeo had not pushed Chiara over the ledge. I begged him to come home, to speak to us and explain, at the very least, to attend the funeral, but he didn’t, and he hasn’t returned since.” He turned from looking at the cold stone hearth into my eyes, and his were dark as empty coffins. “That is why we do not speak of the death of Duchess Greythorn and why the name of Edward Davenport has been scrubbed from our minds.”
“But how? I mean, why in the world would Edward stand up for his uncle when it’s so obvious he committed the crime?” I just couldn’t wrap my mind around it. “You must be missing some details of the story.”
“I am missing nothing, but Amedeo’s confirmation of his crime. Since then, I’ve done research into the man with the help of some very powerful friends, and I’ve learned that he is a member of the Camorra.”
Shock stoppered by breath.
“In fact, you might know Amedeo as Capo Salvatore. I see you know him,” Noel said with a small, enigmatic smile. “I take it he has rather a powerful hold on Napoli and the surrounding regions.”
“He does,” I admitted as my stomach cramped and my heart stuttered.
I felt like a flailing engine.
“Haven’t you wondered why Alexander chose you when he could have had any woman worth buying in the entire world?” Noel taunted.
“Yes,” I whispered, my hand going up to massage the great stone mass suddenly obstructing my throat.
I had wondered and wondered, and now that I was faced with the ugly truth of it, I didn’t want to know.
“He wants to use you to infiltrate the Camorra. To get close to Amedeo Salvatore and end him.”
The words thrust through my mind like a bullet, tearing apart my brain and spewing everything I was across the beautiful library like lost grey matter.
How had Alexander known my connection to Salvatore? Had he known the day I saved his life and spoken my name aloud or even before that?
How could he expect an eighteen-year-old girl to infiltrate anything, let alone one of the most notorious mafia outfits in the entire world?
I’d been so curious, but now that Pandora’s Box was spilled open at my feet, I wanted to stuff the answers inside because they only led to more questions.
I woke up sometime in the night when the sky was at its darkest and everything felt too close, like ink spilled from the black bowl of the atmosphere and dropped between every crevice. It took me a moment to orient myself because it was immediately obvious I wasn’t on the cold, hard ground of the ballroom as I’d grown accustomed to.
I shifted slightly, and my hands caught, jerking back against some invisible bonds. I pulled again and unwittingly kicked out my legs to find that they too were bound.
I was spread open and apart in a giant X across the bed, my limbs tied off at each post.
My mouth opened to scream, but a hand clamped down over my mouth before I could emit a sound.
“Hush, my beauty,” Alexander’s crisp words rustled like papers in the still air. “It’s late and the whole house is sleeping.”
I tried to protest behind his hand, but he ke
pt it firmly banded over my lips.
His warm breath fanned over my cheek as he leaned closer to run his nose over my ear and whisper, “There is no need to struggle, topolina. I have you pinned like a butterfly to this bed, and I mean to treat you thusly. With reverence and tenderness, like the beautiful and fragile creature you are.”
I moaned, and he seemed to perfectly translate the words I wasn’t given permission to speak aloud.
“This isn’t about what my father so wrongly told you this afternoon. It was not his place to unlock the doors and secrets in his house. We will talk about the lies he told later. This isn’t an act of forgiveness for my roughness with you last night or the one before that. I will never ask your forgiveness for the things I do to your body.” He shifted in the dark, a great looming monster of shadow like a demon summoned up from hell. The wet tip of his hard cock smeared over my hip as he straightened and reached for something on the bedside table. A shudder of rampant desire went through me at the knowledge that he was naked.
“This is about the other side of BDSM,” he continued in the bland tones of a professor reciting a lecture to a group of inane students. “Our relationship is about control and submission. This means if I want to fuck you until it hurts, I will, and you will let me. It also means, if I want to eat the honey between your thighs for hours until you are an incoherent mass of quivering flesh barely able to think past the pleasure, I will. I do not need to hurt you or threaten you to own you. There is dominance in pleasure too.”
“Does it matter that I don’t want your touch right now? Do you care that I feel torn apart by what Noel told me? You… you want me to put my life in danger for you, and I barely know you, let alone like you!”
“Hush, my beauty,” he coaxed, pressing a finger to my mouth. “I will make this deal with you. If you play with me now, I will answer your questions after.”
“Why does it have to be like this? Why can’t we just talk?” I asked, squirming against the cuffs.
“Because many times in our relationship, you will not want to do something, and I will. You must learn that the only person’s desires that need be met are mine. Lesson three, bella. Now, do we have a deal?”
I wanted to fight him for the right to talk. To take my fists to him the way he was teaching me to do in our sparring sessions and make him bleed for being so pugnacious, but I was immobile and at his mercy, so I nodded tersely.
“Yes?” he prompted.
“Yes, Master,” I hissed.
There was a laugh in his dark voice as he said, “Good little mouse.”
I stayed quiet as he brought something soft as kitten fur against my chest and ran it down between my breasts and over my tummy to the apex of my thighs.
“As I was saying, this scene isn’t about pain. It’s about discovering all the delicious ways you can be made to come. I’m going to flog you, and then I’m going to do just that, settle between your thighs and feast until you orgasm on my tongue.”
“That sounds painful,” I whispered hoarsely around the instinctive fear in my throat. “Haven’t you taken enough from me?”
“It will make your skin sing for me,” he promised silkily as he ran the tendrils over my limbs in feather-light passes. “If you can stay quiet for me, I may let you have another phone call next week.”
“Manipulation and orgasms won’t endear me to you,” I snapped at him even as my nipples pebbled with unfurling lust.
“That would be a first,” he commented drily and then smack.
The flogger landed like hundreds of bee stings against my breasts.
I gasped like a woman possessed, and I felt it as he continued to bring the flogger down onto my flesh, as if a mindless spirit made for sin had overtaken my mind.
I loved it.
The soft swish of air as the leather came down on my skin and the gentle snap like the sound of sparklers as it set fire to my skin.
Before long, I was writhing, my mouth panting.
Every inch of my skin felt alive with sensation, and my mind felt bright in my head. If I hadn’t been tied down, I would have floated off the bed.
“Look at all that gorgeous skin turning rose gold for me,” Alexander murmured an interminable amount of time after he started.
There was a thump as he dropped the flogger to the ground and then one of his hands was pressing hard into my breast bone as the other hooked firmly inside my sex and unerringly found that knot of nerves on my front wall.
He curled his fingers hard into my flesh, and it felt like a key entering a lock.
I burst open, my cum crashing against his fingers, my spirit colliding with magnetic force to the potency of his hold over me, the pillar of strength he represented at that moment when everything else about me, around me, was lost.
His name was on my tongue and caught between my teeth, looped like a broken record in my voice box. I loved the taste of it, curling my lips over the vowels and biting hard into the consonances. It was as erotic and dangerous as Eve’s forbidden fruit.
Even as I reeled with sensation, the rational part of my brain recognized that now I’d had a taste for such dark delights, there might not be any going back.
“Such a good slave,” Alexander praised as he played his fingers in the wet pool between my thighs, the sucking, slippery sounds completely obscene in the midnight silence. “I’ll give you a pass on speaking because you say my name so beautifully.”
I panted softly as he ducked below my line of sight and returned with something that glinted dully in the low light.
“This will hurt,” he said and then his fingers were pinching my clit.
A growl of pain wedged itself into my throat as he clamped my swollen sex, already so sensitive from one orgasm. The flash of bright pain grew roots that curved around my inner thighs, arrowing into my sex and my buttocks where they throbbed and spasmed with constant life.
I wriggled and moaned against the cuffs, but they didn’t yield.
“This is your fourth lesson, topolina,” Alexander said over the rush of blood in my ears. “How to take your pleasure from the pain.”
He stood, looming for me as he looped a shimmering strand of metal between his hands. “These are nipple clamps. Are you ready for them?”
“You sadistic bastard,” I ground out.
A flash of light in the dark that was his wolfish grin. “I am a sadist. Just as you are a masochist.”
“A fanabla.” I cursed him to hell, and the devil laughed like it was a blessing.
“If you come in less than five minutes with these vicious clamps on those sinful breasts, I will make a liar of you yet,” he promised darkly.
I watched his shadowed head as he leaned over, biting at one nipple while his fingers plucked at the other as if it was a flower. When the tips of my breasts were red as poppies, he clamped those metal teeth over each point and kissed away my groans of pain.
He stepped away from the bed to survey his work, the soft pad of his bare feet against the floor my only indication that he had stepped away from the bed.
The lights flipped on and dimmed immediately.
I blinked away the spots in my vision, panting around the everblooming pleasure in my body and watched as he carried an ornate gold full length mirror to the bottom left side of the bed.
“There,” he purred, angling it just so. “Now you can see my masterpiece, and I can watch your beautiful cunt as I make you come again and again for me.”
He was right.
I could see the entire length of my body in the reflection. I looked obscene, my outrageous curves swollen red from the flogger, my skin limbs pulled taut by the thick, leather cuffs securing me to the scarlet bed. My hair was a pool of ink beneath my glowing face, my lips parted and plump from his kisses.
I looked wanton, elemental, and deliciously wrong. Lilith, the first woman created by God, but too willful, too full of passions that sent her plummeting straight to hell.
The sight of myself like that, bound and
at Alexander’s mercy, shouldn’t have run me through with longing, but it did.
I was tied down, but I was not helpless. I was following orders, but I was not meek.
There was power in the eyes of the woman staring back at me from the mirror.
I only had to shift my eyes to Alexander to know where the power stemmed from.
He seemed carved from marble, Michelangelo’s David built to four times the scale. Every one of his muscles was clenched with longing and clamped off from movement by his ironclad willpower, but his eyes were savage. His pupil had blown them wide open so that the ferocity of his desire spilled forth, writing dirty words filled with his intentions across my red dyed skin.
“Please, Master,” I said without deciding to. “Please, fuck me.”
His entire big body shuddered, and then he was climbing onto the bed, adjusting the cuffs on my ankles so that there was more slack between my feet and the posts. I shivered at the feeling of his rough hands sliding under my ass to tip it up into the air and then he ducked his head and clasped his lips around my swollen pussy.
I could see him feast on me from where I lay and also from looking over at the mirror. His proud shoulder bunched with strength as he held me aloft, his strong feet curled into the bed so that he could loom over me and drill down into me with his tongue.
He fucked me like that with his lips, his teeth against my clit in a way that hurt so beautifully is made my skin feel as if it was going to tear apart atom by atom. I humped against his mouth wantonly, senseless noises of pleasure streaming out of my mouth. He used two fingers to stretch me wide, working brutally in and out of my cunt until he could add a third and then, even though I screamed, a fourth.
I wanted to be filled to the brim by him, used until I had nothing left to give him. As if heeding my thoughts, he braced my thighs on his shoulders and used his other hand on my asshole, brushing his fingers around the sex dampened bud before twisting his thumb inside with a pain bright pop.
The light in my head exploded through my body like a super nova, drenching me in golden oblivion. I came so hard I only existed as burst particles, loosely held together in Alexander’s exacting hands and by his talented mouth.
Enthralled Page 15
