He ate at me ruthlessly, nibbling on my lips, sucking hard, smacking kisses against my clit, then tunneling his tongue deep inside me. It pulled my focus to the apex of my sex so that the wet slide of his mouth against my flooded entrance was all I could hear and all I could be was sensation.
Normally, when I came for him, I splintered apart, undone by his touch. This time was different.
As I climaxed, fire flooded over my jagged, broken edges, melding them back together, soothing the connections away until they were seamless, and I was whole in his arms again. I cried out at the oddity of the sensation, and the overwhelming rightness of the pleasure, my shouts magnified by the room until they echoed throughout the house.
I wanted them to hear.
I wanted the servants to know I was Alexander’s so that they would stop their lecherous gazes. I wanted Ashcroft to know that even as he was impaled on a chair of spikes and beaten by Riddick’s meaty fists that I was experiencing pleasure from my rightful owner, expunging his mark on me as easily as wiping a whiteboard clean.
When I finally came down from the height of my climax, I found myself slumped over Alexander, my fingers carding through his beautiful hair in a way that brought us both comfort. He pressed a kiss to the damp inside of my thigh but otherwise didn’t move, letting me take my time to recover.
I realized that it was the gentle intimacy that I so loved about our sexual dynamic. Alexander could fold me in half, break me into weapon-sharp edges of pleasure with his scenes and his demands, but he always, always brought me back to earth with the gentle touch of his hands.
His tenderness was my undoing. Even realizing it, I knew nothing would change. He had been slowly unravelling the great length of me from the moment I’d arrived and even before that when he’d set his sights on me in Milano and grew determined to take me.
I was a goner before I even realized I’d gone.
I sighed heavily, and Alexander took it as the cue it was. He slumped slightly so that my legs slid off his shoulders, and I fell into his lap, his arms binding around me in sweet bondage.
“Who knew something so strong could be so heartbreakingly beautiful,” he whispered as he studied my face and dragged his rough-edged thumb down the line of my jaw.
I wanted to duck my head and hide behind my hair because a compliment had never felt so profound before, but he wouldn’t let me escape his scrutiny.
“He took nothing from you because he is worth nothing, do you understand?” he continued in the hushed voice he always used when dealing with me. As if he didn’t even want the air between us to know our secrets.
My lip trembled, and he pressed it steady with the pad of his thumb.
“Say it to me,” he demanded.
I sucked in a deep breath that burned down my throat and fortified me like strong brandy. “He took nothing from me because he is worth nothing.”
“I am going to give you everything because you are worth everything,” he said in a way that made it a vow, and to seal it, he closed his mouth over mine in a firm, hard kiss that felt like a wax seal stamped with his crest.
“I don’t understand you,” I told him shakily. “You want to destroy me one minute and worship me in the next.”
He closed his eyes, looking so very tired for the first time since I’d met him. I didn’t curb my impulse to reach up and smooth the lines in his puckered forehead with my fingers.
“You aren’t English, and you aren’t a peer, so how can you understand? I was born into something that I cannot change, and I must carry the burdens of my ancestors.”
“Nothing is irrevocable,” I told him, but the words felt like a lie as I sat in the cradle of his arms because I knew there was nothing changeable about the way he had altered the composition of my mind.
“Some things are. There are secrets with roots that stem back into the 1500s in a family as old as mine, and there are some that are as recent as my lifetime that are too egregious to ever lay down.”
“And these secrets explain why you bought me?”
He pulled back to consider me, idly wrapping one of his fingers in a lock of my inky hair. “I think perhaps I would have acquired you even if I hadn’t needed you. The moment you saved my life was the moment you unwittingly became mine.”
“A strange way to repay a debt,” I noted because even though I was soft from my orgasm, there were still thorns at the edges of my thoughts from the trauma of it all, each memory a prick of pain against my psyche.