Her Beast (Beauty and the Captor 1)

He chuckled as if he found my obedience humorous after my recent tirade. But he still reached down and stroked my cheek.

No part of me wanted to pull away. The sensations, the comfort—as much as I needed distance, I needed this too, after he’d ripped the only stability I’d ever known out from under my feet. I didn’t want him to move, or talk—I just wanted to feel his hand on my face. Nothing else.

But he withdrew after a moment. “You are a slave. I don’t owe you an explanation,” he said, his voice harsh, which contrasted sharply with how gentle his hand had been. “I had no choice. I still don’t,” he said, offering what sounded an awful lot like an explanation after telling me he didn’t owe me one. “Your father needs to pay for what he did. He will pay,” he said succinctly as if that somehow explained everything.

My father? What the hell did my father have to do with anything? Pay?—for what? And how the hell did that have anything to do with what Derek had done to me?

“I-I don’t understand,” I whispered, still finding my throat too sore to do much more.

He scoffed. “You don’t know that your father murdered my parents in cold blood?”

My eyes shot up to his. This had to be some sort of sick joke.

“You didn’t know?” he said, not quite disbelievingly. “You don’t remember the gunshots the night he took you?”

No. No, I really didn’t. I’d woken up to a man’s arms around me, yanking me out of bed. And I remembered what he’d said, “I promised your mother I’d take care of you, so here I am. And now, he won’t have any chance to get his hands on you,” he’d sneered, though I’d had no idea what he’d meant. I’d kicked and fought, but it had made no difference. And then we were in a car, driving away.

I shook my head. “What happened…Master?” I croaked, wanting to think it impossible of the man who’d taken me, but knowing it wasn’t.

I could feel his eyes on me for a long time, so long I’d given up on him answering me, but then he retrieved the chair, pulled it in front of me and sat down.

“Your father would never have been allowed to leave with you,” he said as he brushed his finger across my cheek. “He was a criminal. No court would have granted him custody. So, he took you and eliminated the obstacles in his way.”

My heart ached, imagining the boy he’d been, suddenly orphaned. Alone. But as horrible as that was, it didn’t explain what Derek had become. “What happened then,” I whispered, rubbing my cheek against his hand, hoping my complacency would keep him here and keep him talking.

He shrugged. “All the kids there—including me—were sent to new foster homes.” He spoke so easily it was clear he was covering something.

My fingers were trembling as I lifted them to cover his on my cheek. He could just as easily punish me for the move as accept it. But I wanted to know. I needed to understand. “And then what?” I asked when he didn’t bat my hand away.

“You are suddenly full of questions, aren’t you, Pet?” he said, obviously trying to brush it off.

“Yes, Master,” I said, hoping to keep this side of him here.

“My foster parents were…less than ideal parents,” he replied.

That’s what had happened. I remembered the scars I’d seen on his back. I’d been in the midst of my screaming fit and had thought nothing of it. They did nothing to mar the physical beauty of his body, but thinking about them now…there must have been hundreds of them—thin scars, long-healed, that crisscrossed the entire expanse of his back.

I thought of the boy he’d been, and what violence must have been done to him to leave so many scars…

I choked back a sob. It didn’t excuse what he’d become, but it did help to explain it. He’d become cold, unfeeling—at least, most of the time—but what other choice had there been for him? I knew from my own brief experience with him how much a person could be affected by circumstance.

I still hated him for what he’d done to me, but I also didn’t. It was the most conflicted I’d ever felt. But I couldn’t deny how natural it felt when I moved closer to his thighs and I stretched up higher. On my knees, I couldn’t quite reach, so I wrapped my arms around his neck and drew him down to my mouth.

And then I kissed him. My lips touched his, and I waited for him to pull away, to chastise me for my behavior.

He didn’t.

He let me kiss him, and when I glided my tongue across the seam of his lips, he parted for me, letting me in while he took possession of my mouth at the same time. It was like a first kiss—the kind that dreams and fantasies were made of—and I closed my mind to everything but the man in front of me.