Enthralled

by Darling, Giana

  He might not have loved me yet and he might not ever be capable of saying the words aloud, but there was no doubt in my mind after watching his awe during the ceremony that he did not cherish me.

  For a poor girl from Naples with a broken, far flung family, that was more than good enough for now.

  I had just finished in the bathroom and was opening the door to the hall when a vicious hand shoved through the gap in the door and tangled in my hair. With a grunt, I tried to squeeze the offending limb out of the room, but whoever was behind it was too strong.

  They burst through the door and were on me in a flash, one hand over my mouth to muffle my screams and the other in my hair so he could begin to drag from the room.

  “Daughter of mine,” Noel said with a serene smile as he hauled me down the hall and then bumping down the steps to the servant’s level. He abandoned his hand around my mouth because my struggles made it impossible for him to subdue me without the use of both. “I think it’s about time we got to know each other a little better.”

  I screamed so loudly my eardrums quaked ominously and my throat felt on fire with agony, but still I screamed.

  Alexander was nowhere in the house, but that didn’t excuse the nearly fifty odd servants that the Davenport’s kept on staff.

  None of them came for me.

  Noel wrenched open the small, warped wooden door beside the kitchen entry that went to the dungeon and wrenched me by the hair so hard my screaming gave way to a whimper of pure hurt.

  He didn’t care about my pain and he never had. The stolen moments where he’d tended to me had only been manipulation, a tool the Davenport men weaponised all too well.

  Two hands pushed in the imprints already left on my back as I was pushed down the steep, narrow steps to the basement. I went tumbling down, this time bracing my arms over my neck so that I wouldn’t hit my head.

  I lay groaning in a pile at the base of the stairs as Noel closed and bolted the door before following me down.

  “I’m so glad we can finally have some private time without anyone else watching,” he told me in his gentile way. “I’ve been waiting so long to have his talk with you.”

  He gently lifted me by the hand so that I was half standing and then brutally punched down into my left side so that agony exploded in my kidney. I crumpled to the ground.

  He repeated the maneuver twice more so that I was weak as I kitten when he finally pulled me by the armpits further into the room. I tried to knee him in the balls and he backhanded me viciously across the face. I tried to scream again and he kicked in the calf so hard, I went down to one knee.

  While I was down, he used the time to pull a pair of cuffs down from a length of chain attached to the ceiling. He secured them around my squirming wrists and then hit a lever so that I went catapulting into onto my tiptoes tying to ease the strain on my shoulders.

  “Let’s take you out of that pretty dress,” Noel murmured almost to himself, moving around me to the buttons along my spine.

  I kicked out with my legs but cried out when the movement nearly wrenched my shoulders out of their sockets.

  “Still,” Noel ordered as he unclipped the last button and my gorgeous wedding dress fell to the ground at my toes, leaving me only in lace white bra and panties.

  He hummed a merry tune as he walked away to a wall covered with impact implements. After careful consideration he chose one that was achingly familiar.

  A black snake whip.

  I whimpered as he moved back to stand in front of me.

  “Why are you doing this? I just became your son’s wife for God’s sake,” I beseeched him.

  “Such a fool to marry a nothing slave girl. At least his Italian bitch mother had money to her name. You have nothing but beauty me and that will fade, trust me, it always does.”

  “He’ll find out you’ve done this,” I warned him. “He’ll kill anyone else who hurts me.”

  “He won’t find out because I cut the CCTV’s. We’ll blame it on a guest.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “You won’t,” he said with a tsk. “You won’t because you won’t be here to do it. I’m going to beat you for your wicked enchanted over my pathetic first born and then you are going to run far away from Pearl Hall and never come back.”

  “Why the fuck would I do that?” I asked, still struggling to slip my damp wrists through the tight bounds.

  There was no way out. At least not physically. If I wanted to leave, I had to manipulate Noel into letting me go.

  “If you don’t leave, I’ll kill him,” Noel suggested simply.

  I gaped at him, wondering how it was possible I had never seen the psychopath lurking within him show his face before.

  “Why would you kill your only heir?” I demanded.

  The door at the top of the stairs pushed open and Noel smiled.

  “Perfect timing,” he said over the sound of two descending pair of shoes. “Because I have a spare.”

  “You disowned Edward and he would never agree to step in if you murdered his brother.”

  “Yes, yes, you’re right of course.” He waited a long beat, long enough for the two bodies to emerge from the shadow of the staircase and into the light.

  My breath crystallized in my body, tiny shards piecing through my lungs and throat until they burned.

  “Love,” Mrs. White greeted me with a shaky, but proud smile as she wrapped her hand around a boy of eight or nine and thrust him forward slightly. “I’d like you to meet our son, Rodger.”

  I blinked at them, my mind working furiously to process the information.

  Mrs. White’s cryptic words about making the most of a bad situation, her crying over Noel’s lap, and finally, her mention of offering the Davenport men something of value when she knew I was pregnant with Alexander’s baby.

  Which meant, obviously, that it was her who had told Noel and who in turn had shown up at the Grammar ball to push me down the stairs so that I couldn’t produce an heir to rival his own.

  “I’ll kill Alexander if you don’t run off like a good little mouse,” Noel sneered as he ran the whip lovingly through his hands. “Because I’m still young yet, at least young enough to train my third son in my image.”

  “He’s a bastard,” I pointed out, desperate to make sense of this horrible situation. My chest burned with the ache to scream even though I knew no one would hear me. “He won’t be able to inherit.”

  “Well,” he drawled as Mrs. White stepped forward to show me the simple gold band on her wedding finger. “You see that isn’t actually true. Mary and I were married nine years ago this past May, a few weeks before Rodger was born.”

  The wheel turned with audible clicks and whirrs in my brain and then, I understood.

  “You killed Chiara so you could marry Mrs. White and ensure you have another spare in case the first two failed you.”

  “Edward was already a lost cause, too much like his mother. I had high hopes for Alexander, especially after Chiara’s death, but then you show up and well… love makes fools out of everyone.”

  I shook with fury in my chains as Noel turned away from me and collect his young son, taking him to the wall so they could pick out his tool of punishment together.

  They were both going to whip.

  Just as Alexander had been forced by this father to whip Yana all those year ago when he was Rodger’s age.

  I looked at Mrs. White. “Please, please, don’t let them do this to me. I truly thought we were friends.”

  She wrung her hands and bit her lip, her eyes trained down on the floor in such an obviously engrained show of submission, I was shocked I hadn’t noticed it before.

  “It’s you or me, sweetheart,” she admitted quietly. “And I’ve suffered enough.”

  “Ready, son?” Noel asked as he circled me behind me.

  I felt the air stir with the lift of his hand and the backward moment of the whip.

  “Let your father show you how it’s done.�
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  The leather landed like hell fire across my back and I screamed.

  I found Alexander looking for me in the narrow corridor between the chapel and the main house. He hadn’t seen me yet, so I fought to straight the limping gait of my walk. I sucked in a deep breath to fill my hollow chest with air so that I might look similar to how I had before. Before Noel had carved out my heart with a serrated knife and beaten my back black and blue.

  I’d found Dante first, lurking at the path to the gardens having a smoke while he flirted with a newer servant I recognized from the house.

  He took one look at me and knew.

  I’d made the excruciating journey up to my bedroom to fix my mascara-stained face and reapply my lipstick, to flatten the dark, tangled curls and clean up my torn back as best I could before I stepped back into my wedding dress.

  Still, Dante saw me across the gravel and knew instantly that I’d been soundly defeated in body, spirit and mind.

  He crushed his cigarette beneath his heel and was at my side in a moment, gently holding my arms because he instinctively knew my back would be bloodied.

  He urged me to leave immediately, but that wasn’t why I’d taken such painstaking lengths to make myself presentable.

  I’d only been married to him for two hours, but I wanted to say goodbye to my husband.

  The sight of him peering into through the church doors then around the side of the building as he so obviously searched for me nearly brought me to my knees. It was nothing next to the crippling pain in my back.

  It was like gasoline of the ragged hole in my chest where Noel had cut out my heart.

  “Xan,” I called, more breathe than voice.

  But he heard me, his head swivelling like predator who’s sensed his prey. His nostrils flared as his eyes pinned me to the wall where I stood and then he was stalking toward me.

  I was happy for the darkness under the awning of the passageway because it helped hide the dead in my eyes and shadow of a bruise already looming on my cheek.

  He didn’t stop before me.

  Instead, he crashed me into the wall so that my sensitive back coursed with fire, but his mouth was over mine before I could scream and so he ate at the noise in my throat until it was a moan.

  His hand fisted in the veil I’d reattached to hide the damaged the peeked out of the top back of my dress. He yanked my hair back at a brutal angle so that he could plunder my mouth exactly the way he loved to, with lush lips and clever teeth, until my legs shook and the only thing holding me up was that hand in my hair and his hips pinned to mine against the wall.

  There was so pain in my body, from the beating and the endless turmoil of my heart breaking, but I clung to the pleasure because I knew it was the last time I’d have it.

  He feasted on my mouth as if he knew this was the last kiss we would ever have, as if he knew, any minute I would leave him never to be seen again.

  But he couldn’t know because I hadn’t planned to run. Not ever.

  I was prepared to live out my days however they came as the new Mistress of Pearl Hall and Master Alexander’s eternal slave.

  Only now the choice had been brutally ripped from my hands as so many other choices had.

  I wondered wildly as I pushed harder into the kiss and sunk further into the pain if I was strong enough to break my own heart in order to save his.

  If he knew what I was planning, he would have flagellated me himself. He would never let me make the sacrifice I was making because he was arrogant enough to trust that he was invincible just because he believed himself to be.

  If he knew, he wouldn’t know me grinding his thick cock against my wedding dress covered center as if he could fuck me through the fabric.

  No, if he knew my plans to abandon him I would be right back where I started, shackled to the ballroom floor like the slave I’d tried for so long to pretend not to be.

  But I would always be a slave.

  I wore his brand on my ass, his metal in my flesh and his name in the debris of my sunken heart.

  “Lord Thornton,” the manservant Dante had paid to interrupt us said from behind my husband.

  My husband.

  I would never even get to call him that.

  “Lord Thornton,” the young chap tried again, louder this time because Alexander only continued to fuck my mouth as thoroughly as he usually fucked my pussy. “Lord Thornton!”

  Finally, he ripped his mouth from me like a wax stripe.

  “What it is? Can you not see I’m kissing my beautiful wife?”

  Wife.

  A sob lodged in my throat like a giant splinter, cutting up my esophagus each time I tried to swallow it down.

  “You’re needed inside, milord, there’s something urgent.”

  Alexander growled low in his throat, his hand tightening on my hip for a moment in a flare of pain.

  I studied his handsome face desperately, eager to memorize every line in his handsome forehead, the way every strand of golden hair waved into the next. I needed the perfect description for the unique colour of his gorgeous eyes so that I would never forget what they liked like through mine.

  But the moment was gone in a flash and my mind was too traumatized to take a proper photo.

  Alexander leaned forward to press a kiss like a flower between the pages of my lips, a promise for more later.

  “Tonight, wife,” he said as he pushed off the wall by my head and turned to follow the servant inside. “Be ready for me.”

  I waited until he rounded the corner to cave into my hollow chest and sob. There was no time to wallow, but I cupped my hands over my eyes to collect my tears for a long precious moment before I dropped them like rain filled clouds to the ground and ran.

  I ran around the back of the building even though each jarring step threw my body into torment because I didn’t want the guests to see the bride fleeing in her blood stained white dress.

  I ran down the gravel drive, the stones biting into my feet as I picked up speed on the decline at a car came into few at the gates. Dante stepped out of the running vehicle and waved.

  I skidded to a miserable halt and caught my brief.

  It felt like I was running constantly from the control of one man into the tyranny of another and I was tired of the cycle.

  It was in that moment of fleeing that I made a decision for the first time in my life that I should have been making the whole way through.

  I decided this.

  I was mine, before I was anyone else’s.

  I was not my family’s breadwinner.

  Not Seamus’s martyred trump card.

  Or Sebastian’s twin.

  Not the mediator between my rival sisters.

  Or Salvatore’s bastard daughter and Dante’s damsel in distress.

  I wasn’t even Alexander’s anything.

  I was just, quite simply and euphorically, my own.

  And moving forward, away from the only dream I’d ever dreamed, about a life at Pearl Hall, I vowed to only ever be mine again.

  Enamoured (The Enslaved Duet, #2) is coming May 31st!

  “Intro”—The xx

  “Ti amo”—Umberto Tozzi

  “Prisoner”—The Weeknd, Lana Del Ray

  “What Kind Of Man”—Florence + The Machine

  “Waiting Game”—BANKS

  “Pleasure This Pain”—Kwamie Liv, Angel Haze

  “Paint it, Black”—Ciara

  “Break It Apart”—Bonobo, Rhye

  “Homesick”—Dua Lipa

  “Transformation”—The Cinematic Orchestra

  “No Control”—Anais

  “All The King’s Men”—The Rigs

  “You Can Run”—Adam Jones

  “Silent Running”—Hidden Citizens

  “Love And the Hunter”—The Chamber Orchestra of London

  “Heart Of The Darkness”—Tommee Profitt, Sam Tinnesz

  “Are You Hurting The One You Love?”—Florence + The Machine

 
“The Limit To Your Love”—Feist

  “Skinny Love”—Bon Ivor

  “Solider”—Fleurie

  “idontwannabeyouanymore”—Billie Eilish

  “For You”—Tusks

  “Promise”—Ben Howard

  The Affair

  (The Evolution of Sin Trilogy, Book 1)

  Excerpt

  Meet Cosima’s sister, Giselle, and her Frenchman in The Affair!

  Is a week of passion enough to warrant changing their lives forever?

  Italian born Giselle Moore is reinventing herself for the second time in her short twenty-four years of life, trading in her bohemian artist’s life in Paris for the grit and glamour of New York City where the family she hasn’t seen in years awaits her. But before beginning her new life, she travels to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico searching for a week of relaxation and reprieve before barreling into her turbulent future.

  She never expected to meet the handsome and enigmatic Frenchman Sinclair on the plane and she certainly never would have imagined herself accepting his proposal for a weeklong, no-strings-attached affair. Giselle has never experienced anything as heady as Sinclair’s controlled seduction and cool yet devastatingly erotic commands and she finds herself powerless to stop the ferocity of their passions, even when she discovers he has a partner back home. The last thing she needs in her life is another complication, yet as the week wears on, she finds it surprisingly easy to relinquish control to Sinclair, a man she knows nearly nothing about. And to her horror, the one thing she promised never to submit, her battered heart, is just as easily captured in the business mogul’s unyielding hands.

  Chapter One

  Rain pounded against the steaming tarmac and the force of the wind slapped each drop against the oval window beside my head so that the grey of the runway, the rolling clouds and the Vancouver skyline blurred into one. The rain calmed my nerves, and I closed my eyes to better hear the tap and whistle of weather outside the tin machine that had —somewhat precariously —carried me from Paris to Vancouver in just fewer than seven and a half hours. We were deplaning a third of the passengers and then refueling to make the last leg of the journey to my final destination, Los Cabos, Mexico.