Enthralled (The Enslaved Duet 1)

“Bathing you?” I asked incredulously as he stepped away and prowled over to the enormous walk-in shower to turn it on. “Only children need help bathing.”

His face was set in stone when he turned to look at me. “Clearly, that’s untrue as I am a grown man and I require your assistance. I’m surprised you forgot, I also promised you a shower. Two birds one stone, bella.”

I watched as the grown man in question turned to enter the shower, revealing his perfectly sculpted behind topped with deep dimples at the base of his back.

My mouth watered as he stepped under the rain shower. I couldn’t help but watch as the water turned his hair to tarnished gold and every inch of his lightly tanned skin to bronze.

“Slave,” he called out. “Tend to me.”

I shuddered as I fought back my animal desire for him.

I was no animal, and I would not give in to such base instincts even though I knew myself well enough to understand I’d always been too much of a hedonist to resist gorging myself on various delights for any length of time.

And Master Alexander’s body was certainly a delight.

I pushed through the glass door into the quickly steaming shower. Without speaking, Alexander handed me a bar of soap that smelled of pine trees and presented me with the broad, muscle swathed expanse of his back.

I watched my hand lift to rub the soap over his skin, how it trembled as I moved in broad circles over the topography of his spine.

I had never washed a man before.

It was a silly observation. I was a woman and a virgin, so obviously, I’d never been in a similar situation before. But this intimacy seemed to extend beyond sexuality into the realm of real intimacy.

I could feel the satiny texture of his skin under my fingers, the strength of his muscles tensed beneath the flesh, and the heat of his body as he absorbed the temperature of the steamy shower. There was a triangle of small brown moles high on his left shoulder and a faint, nearly indecipherable collection of thin, criss-crossing scars in the valley below his shoulder blades. I traced their edges with my thumb and wondered who had done that to him.

His muscles bunched with tension, and I realized that I had spoken aloud.

“As I’ve told you, every predator is prey to someone.”

“I can’t imagine a beast more terrifying than you,” I told him honestly.

It wasn’t just that he was ruthless or crueler than a starving wolf. Something in his manner spoke of the colossal effort of his restraint, as if one wrong moment would unleash that ravenous beast chained to the floor of his soul on whomever was unwise enough to be in its path.

“Some monsters are made, and some are born. You could say that I’m the worst of both worlds,” he said cryptically.

I chewed my lip as I puzzled over his words, aware that the mystery of Alexander Davenport was dangerous to a woman like me. A woman who enjoyed the riddles of the human brain, and the strange complexities of a single personality. I wanted to sit cross-legged on the ground and assemble the facets of Alexander’s mind like a ten-thousand-piece puzzle.

In my experience, if you could understand someone, it was nearly impossible to hate them.

And truthfully, I didn’t want to hate this man. Not because he deserved warmer feelings, but because that hatred was just as corrosive to my mental health as my two-week stint in the dark. I couldn’t imagine hating someone with all my heart and seeing them every single day for the next five years.

What kind of person would I be at the end of that?

How could I go from half a decade of hatred to a future reunited with my family? How could I find love in my heart, how would I know how to express it?

The answer, I feared, was that I wouldn’t be able to.

If I allowed the horrible unjustness of my situation to disband my ability to love, I’d lose an elemental facet of who I was and the very reason I was even doing this.

For the love of my family.

Alexander interrupted my thoughts to hand me a shampoo bottle.

I sucked in a deep breath and poured the gel into my hands before working it into the thick strands of his hair. His scent bloomed in the humid air, so that I felt he was surrounding me.

He turned to face me when I was done, tipping his head back into the steam of water so that bubbles went sliding down over his chiseled chest. His eyes popped open to stare at me as I popped a big bubble over his left nipple.

Caught like a little girl, I giggled before I could clamp my mouth shut with both hands.