Lust pooled between my legs like hot sand.
He hummed in approval as he shifted to twist his torso farther over the lip of the tub and reach for the shampoo on the other side of me. I watched with a dry mouth as his big, capable hands squeezed out the gel and lathered it between his palms. My eyes were already closing as they landed on my scalp, smoothing through the thick pelt of my hair to knead firmly at my head. My sigh curled into the steam licking off the surface of the hot water and floated to the ceiling.
“And how does this feel, bella?” he asked again, ducking down to plant the words warmly in my ear before trailing his lips over my cheek. He placed a kiss on each of my closed lids like coins in offering to Charon.
My throat ached with the sudden desire to cry at his tenderness, but I swallowed it down, and whispered thickly, “Like I’m yours.”
“And isn’t that the truth?”
It was a real question, not his usual statements masquerading poorly as inquiries. I loved that he needed the words from me, that even though he had decided to reclaim me, I actually had some kind of say in it this time.
I tipped my head back into his softly churning hands in my hair so that I could latch gold to silver, so that he could read the truth in my melted butter eyes.
“I won’t ever belong to someone if they don’t also belong to me.”
He blinked, and somehow, in that small expression, there was a flash of proud, gentle humour. Heedless of his suit pants, Alexander swung his socked feet into the tub on either side of me and leaned down so that I was almost entirely surrounded by the impossible width of him.
“Wherever you are, however far away for whatever length of time, I’m yours.”
My heart clenched into a twisted mass, searing hot and throbbing like a wound. I couldn’t believe him, not the way I desperately wanted to. I’d invested too much in the past four years, reconditioning myself to believe that my love for Alexander was bad, wrong, impossible. That he had never loved me, couldn’t love me, was incapable of loving me.
Four years was a long time to have invested in the wrong option.
I could feel my seams bloat and threaten to rupture around the staples I’d haphazardly used to hold myself together. Faced with change, like any human, I battled against it.
“You don’t even know me. Not really.”
Alexander surprised me by not immediately offering a rebuttal. Instead, he used a pitcher I hadn’t notice he’d brought in from the kitchen to pour clean, tepid water over my sudsy hair, careful to cup his other hand over my forehead so soap didn’t get into my eyes.
Only once I was clean did he cant my chin up with his palm under my jaw, and admit, “You’ve changed since I last knew you, that’s true.”
I snorted so hard it hurt my throat. “I’ve been killed and reborn so many times in my life, it’s a wonder I have any authenticity at all.”
“You’ve changed,” he said calmly, sternly like a parent who would not bear being interrupted by an unruly child. “But you are still fundamentally the woman you let me know in England.”
“I’m not sure it was a matter of letting you know me. Since when have you needed permission for anything?”
He shrugged in the elegant, bored manner of a man who was very wealthy and had never known a moment of doubt in his life. It was almost a condescending gesture; one I shouldn’t have found so very attractive.
“No person is ever wholly under another’s control. You still have free will, Cosima. Yes, I curtailed it, but it was you and you alone who gave me insight into your heart. Every rebellion, every capitulation, every orgasm was a window into your darkly beautiful soul. Do not doubt for one instant that I didn’t take advantage of every single one of those opportunities to know you. Even when it went against my greater plan.”
“To use me against Salvatore,” I filled in, reminded that if I wanted to continue with Xan, I would eventually have to tell him that I’d helped to fake my father’s death.
“Yes, among other things. Truthfully, I think a part of me just wanted to own something that was wholly mine and not Noel’s also,” he admitted with a wry twist of his full mouth. “I could never have known just how much owning you would change my life. That you would so beautifully fill all the empty places in my life until I realized that before you, I had none.”
“You didn’t tell me any of this when I was with you at Pearl Hall,” I accused.
Another shrug limned with ennui. “There were too many things in the way of the truth for me to see it clearly.”
“What changed?”
For me, the answer was simple. I knew I loved Alexander the moment he’d dismissed me in the field of poppies to go to Italy to enact his revenge of Salvatore. I knew I would never be free of the chains from that love the moment he dismissed me on the rooftop of the Milanese Duomo and told me never to set eyes on him again.
It seemed the death of something was when we realized just how much it meant to us when it was alive.
“Someone took you from me.” I noted with a shiver that he hadn’t said I’d run away, that he trusted in my total enslavement to him enough to know I would never have voluntarily fled. His conviction felt like my weakness, a vulnerability I wanted to wrench away from him and protect. “I realized that it wasn’t the betrayal that was driving me mad as it normally would have been. It was the sheer, absolute loss of you that haunted me. I realized, as you must now, that if you were completely and utterly enamoured by me, I was just as powerless to the feeling as you were. You see, my little mouse, somehow over that tumultuous year of ownership, we became a closed loop. What you feel, I feel. Your weakness in wanting me is exactly my weakness in reverse.”
A closed loop.
I could feel it even then, the circle of energy moving through the pressed points of our skin, cycling through him and into me and back. It was how he seemed to always read my thoughts, how I craved his pleasure because his satisfaction was my own. It was Master and slave in perfect harmony.
And it seemed one could not exist, at least not contentedly, without the other.
Alexander brushed his thumb over the cut curve of my cheekbone, patiently waiting as I digested his rich, meaty words.
“I meant what I said. I’m here to reinstall you at my side for good. The only thing I need from you is your permission.”
“I thought you never asked for permission for anything?” I countered because the small acidic fear I still felt in my gut needed an outlet.
Wasn’t this too good to be true?
“Usually,” he agreed. “But for this, I’m afraid, it’s a necessity.”
“If I say yes, what then?” I hedged. “Nothing has really changed.”
“Not yet, but it will,” he promised as he lowered himself fully into the bath, sloshing water over the sides while soaking his beautiful silk shirt and destroying his trousers. He gathered me up in his arms until I was wrapped around him like vines. “I stayed away from you for the past four years for a reason, and that reason was to take down the Order so we could be free of them forever.”
My eyebrows punctured the top of my hairline. “Is that even possible?”
“It is,” he promised with the sly, coy look of a predator about to stalk and corner his prey. “Let me explain it to you.”
Alexander
My earliest memory of my father was learning to play chess against him in the second library before the vast black marble hearth. I remembered how large he seemed sitting in the highbacked tufted leather chair, his broad shoulders pressed to either side of the wingback, his head crowning the top like a golden circlet. A cigar curled smoke into the air from the gold ashtray on the side table, resting beside a crystal cut glass sweating from the cold of the iced whiskey within. Everything was so adult and sophisticated. My childhood brain was seduced by the atmosphere and my father’s own elegant aura of power.
I wanted with everything I had to be exactly like him when I grew up.
It was the natur
al inclination of a boy to admire and aspire to be his father, but looking back on my boyhood, it was obvious Noel had taken particular pains to create a sense of divinity around himself. He succeeded. For years, I worshipped at his altar, studied his philosophies like scripture so that I could recite them verbatim when asked (which he did), and believed wholeheartedly that he had been blessed by a higher power.
I wouldn’t learn until later that the higher power was no God or sacred charter, but the Order of Dionysus.
At that moment, though—no more than four years of age and still the kind of blond only small children can claim, sitting in the twin wing-backed chair to my father’s and struggling not to swing my legs because it would make him angry—I simply loved Noel Davenport.
I loved him so innocently that when he set about to teach me the ways of chess, I took the lessons somberly, as seriously as a monk his vows. I read books by Bobby Fischer and Yasser Seriawan, followed the meteoric climb of Magnus Carlsen, and went to bed with the golden queen from my father’s chess set clutched in my fist instead of the stuffed bear my mother had given me.
Chess was my father’s game, and learning its strategies was our primary form of bonding.
Edward Dante didn’t like the game. He had no patience for hours of thought and subtle manipulations. He was a child of action, grass-stained jumpers and ripped trousers, bruises from roughhousing with the servant’s kids, and bloody lips from altercations with older boys who tried to bully the young ones at school. His bonding time with Noel was spent with a cane and his open palms, a beating each time he rebelled from our father’s teachings.
I didn’t rebel. I was not inclined to be different from my father. It was both natural to love the things he loved and beneficial.
My mother loved me deeply, but I didn’t have to do anything to warrant that love, and somehow, it meant more to me that my father’s affections had to be earned.
It became my childhood and adolescent mission to deserve it.
For years, I did. So well, in fact, that on my ninth birthday, Noel began my introduction to the Order.
To this day, I remember every moment of Yana’s beating in the dungeon of Pearl Hall. The wet scent of cold stone and subterranean earth, the heaviness of the damp air, and the creak of the old wood steps beneath my feet as I followed my father into the dark.
Yana herself was cemented in my memory like a headstone memorializing the death of my childhood, a marble angel weeping over the grave of the love for my father.
She was so young, eighteen as Cosima had been when I acquired her, but without any of the Latin passion and fire that made my wife blaze from the inside out. She was as thin as the waifs Edward and I imagined wandered the moors of the Peak District at night in white nightgowns, their mouths wide in eternal screams, their eyes dark with nightmares. I was terrified by the sight of her, slim and wan as she was kneeling on the ground in the middle of the chamber with her head bent and her hands clasped.
She was so fragile I worried the very vibration of our foot strikes against the floor would shatter her into millions of porcelain pieces.
Noel, it became clear, had no such compunction.
“This is Yana, Alexander, but formally, she is known as slave Davenport. You see, our family has been an established member of a very prestigious society since its inception in 1655. We are the wealthiest, most powerful men in the United Kingdom, and together, we run the country from the shadows. We also participate in a game of wits and domination. It is the practice of the Order of Dionysus to acquire a slave to break them and train them to be the best. We have annual gatherings to assess which lord has the best pet.”
His words rolled over me like the morning mist on the hills, cold and opaque. My child’s mind could not begin to comprehend what he was trying to explain to me. I knew the history of England and of the Greythorn dukedom inside and out, but I had never heard of the Order, only of the Greek god Dionysus, the deity of revelry, wine, and a certain kind of madness.
Noel moved with the undulating, feline gait I’d tried to emulate my entire life to the shelves and hooks of bizarre tools lining the stone walls and retrieved a long, coiled rope like the one I’d once seen in an Indiana Jones film.
My mild confusion and unease shattered just the way I’d imagined Yana doing as he stood behind her, cocked the whip, and smiled at me.
“This, son,” he’d said with the paternal, warm grin, “is how you beat your slave.”
What followed was too graphic to put into words. It was the dissolution of my childhood and any purity I might have inherently retained because of my age.
Noel ruined me in that dungeon just as assuredly as he ruined Yana.
My mother noticed the abuse done to my back, of course. She was a caring woman and also an Italian one—she had eyes on the back of her head and a sense for everything that went wrong with her children. She tried to tend to the open wounds, but Noel found her and forbade her from nursing me.
I’d earned the punishment. In fact, I’d asked for it to spare the girl I’d been sure would break apart like a human vase on the cold stone floor of my father’s favourite room in Pearl Hall.
Noel would not see me coddled. There were consequences to every action, and I had to learn that, in order to avoid the consequences, I had to be the driving force behind every action.
It was the first lesson he taught me that I wasn’t happy to know, but in the end, it turned out to be the most powerful.
I was reminded of the gravity of that lesson the day Noel finally discovered I was working against the Order.
It was the same day I had irrefutable evidence that Amadeo Salvatore did not kill my mother.
It was just over a year since Cosima had been taken from me, and I’d never been colder, inside or out. My father took it as he was meant to, as a sign that I had moved onward and upward from my fleeting mistake with an Italian slave girl. He involved me in his business dealings once more, happily plying his sudden access to my influence to make rash, ill-advised business dealings across Great Britain.
Normally, he might have questioned my pliancy, but he was too relieved by my financial and political backing to study my motivation too closely. He made his moves across the board, and I—as I had for most of my life just as he trained me to—followed.
I had just finished an important call with the COO of Davenport Media Holdings when Noel appeared in the doorway to my office, his handsome face folded into a smug smile.
“Son,” he greeted. “I believe it’s time for the next stage.”
“Of your master plan?” I asked without inflection. The words could have been sarcastic or sincere, but if I made my tone empty, Noel was always ready to fill my intent in for himself.
I focused on the numbers on my screen instead of my father as he took a seat on the arm of the red leather chair before my desk, but I noticed in my periphery that his smile was particularly curled that day, in the way of a cartoon villain’s mustache.
Foreboding played my vertebrae like piano keys.
“For both of our gains, I should think. The Howard girl is ready to be wed, and I believe you are just the man to do the deed.”
I wasn’t surprised by his proclamation. Martin Howard, Noel, and Sherwood had been pressing Agatha Howard into my arms as soon as I’d dropped the knife after castrating Simon Wentworth. It was understandable. She was beautiful and highborn, but more than that, the Howards were one of the Order’s most dynastic families just as the Davenports were. It was a political marriage made in secret society heaven.
“Do you indeed?” I asked blandly as an email for Willa Percy appeared in my inbox labeled Bulgari Fashion Week Party.
My heart kicked brutally at the door of my ribcage, restless and wild in the face of possible information about my estranged wife. Willa and Jensen both kept me in the loop about Cosima through her work with St. Aubyn, ostensibly reporting on her life because she was the face of the fashion house I owned but didn’t operate.
It wasn’t enough to satisfy my burning need to know everything about her every day, but it was mild enough, clever enough to slide by without notice because the Order never thought to check deeply into my dealings with St. Aubyn.
My gaze cut to Noel who sat patiently with his cat ate the canary smirk.
“She’s here now in the antechamber waiting for you to call on her. I took the liberty of having O’Shea prepare a tea service. You and Agatha will have much to discuss.”
“Perhaps you’ve forgotten, but technically, I’m already married.”
I hadn’t forgotten, neither of us had. Noel still watched my every move looking for the weakness I’d exposed by my dealings with Cosima, and I still worked tirelessly every day to move closer to the termination of the Order so that I could live with her as my wife once more.
“Pish posh, we can annul that sham of a marriage even if we didn’t have the Archbishop of Canterbury in our back pocket. You don’t worry about that. Focus on Agatha.”
“Why?” I asked, finally giving my father the attention he wanted.
I sat back in my chair, crossing my legs and casually adjusting the coat of arms cufflinks at my wrists. They were too diminutive to read the writing, but I took heart from the family motto as I sat there playing the grandest game of chess I ever would against my father.
Non decor, deco.
I am not led, I lead.
“Martin owns the rights for Falmouth Port, and we need to secure him to bring in the shipments from Africa.” The illegal shipments of blood diamonds my father had invested much of his fortune into.
He had everything set up—a seller, a warehouse, and a way to funnel the money so that it would end up in his hands as clean as money like that could be.
He was excited.
In fact, I hadn’t seen my father that excited in years.
That was good. I needed him distracted while I worked carefully, relentlessly in the shadows. He was astute, a worthy adversary that had beat me back all my life. I needed him distracted, and this was almost too good a distraction to be true because it was also illegal in the extreme.
Enamoured Page 21
