Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
I swallowed hard, because I suddenly remembered that I would be whipped again. And then…
The lift opened into a private garage. A dark sedan waited with a driver beside it. The Sicilian sunlight beyond the ramp made my eyes narrow. After the stone and the office and the lift, the real day looked almost fictional, as if the world outside ought to have paused while all this happened and had inconsiderately continued instead.
The driver opened the rear door. Giovanna gestured me in first.
I slid onto the leather seat with an involuntary wince as the welts met the upholstery. Henrik got in beside me. Giovanna and her nymphobus—Mateo, she had called him, I remembered suddenly—took the facing seat, and then the door shut, sealing us into cool air, expensive leather, and the faint smell of cologne.
The car began to move.
CHAPTER 29
Henrik
The drive to Capo Zafferano took forty minutes. I spent most of it watching Ilsa.
The sedan’s tinted windows made the Sicilian morning seem slightly unreal, the coast passing in bright fragments: stone walls, flashes of sea, scrub, terra cotta-roofed villas set back from the road. Giovanna sat opposite me with the composure of a woman attending a board meeting. Mateo looked as though he had slept little, which I suspected meant he had slept not at all.
Ilsa sat beside me in her sundress with her hands folded in her lap, back very straight, as if posture might save her from feeling the welts on her bottom or the fact of what waited at the journey’s end.
It didn’t, of course. I could see that in the tiny adjustments she made against the leather seat. In the way her thighs remained close together. In the occasional swallow, the movement of her slim throat above the sundress’s neckline.
I let the silence work upon her.
At one point she glanced at me. Only briefly, and through the reflection in the darkened glass rather than directly. I met her eyes there and watched her drop them at once.
Good girl.
My own body had begun to answer the proximity of the cavern long before the road bent inland. I felt it first not as lust, though lust was certainly present, but as something like a returning alignment. The cave under Capo Zafferano had become, in my mind, a kind of balance sheet written in stone: ancient assets, long undervalued, suddenly called back into circulation by the right girl, the right vision, the right convergence of time and blood. Ilsa had found it. She had seen from the rowing bench and the bride saddle what a bed thrall without a Herra should not see.
That did something to me… and so did the dress.
Another man might have preferred her naked. I found the cotton far more provocative. Civilization laid lightly over submission had always struck me as a more dangerous sight than exposed flesh. Her pale hair had been retied. The little flowers on the dress made her look as if her innocence had returned.
Perhaps it showed that I had traveled far from the shores of medieval Denmark, but my sweet bed thrall with her intimate charms presented in pink lingerie and a flowered sundress swelled my manhood even more intensely than she would have without a stitch of clothing allowed her.
When we turned off the main road, Giovanna crossed one leg over the other and looked at me. “Your expression has changed, Henrik.”
I smiled a little. “Has it?”
“Yes.” She looked toward Ilsa, then back to me. “You look less like a businessman.”
Mateo made a small sound through his nose that might have been amusement.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said.
“You should,” Giovanna replied. “In my experience, men become more honest when they stop pretending commerce is their native language.”
“Commerce is everyone’s native language,” I said. “Most people are simply not fluent in it.”
Ilsa went very still beside me. I felt certain she understood what I meant. From one point of view, as wrong as it might well seem to someone of less intelligence, she knew she was a trade good, just as the naked bed thralls on the longships had been, long ago.
A very valuable trade good—one with whom I had no intention of parting.
When the car finally stopped, I got out first.
The air carried salt and pine. Capo Zafferano stretched before us in hard Sicilian light, the sea below immense and brilliantly indifferent. The driver opened the other doors. Giovanna emerged with sleek urban poise intact, her heels entirely unsuited to the rough ground. Mateo followed, narrow and watchful. Then Ilsa stepped out.
For a moment she simply stood there, the light on her hair almost too bright to look at directly.
I watched the place touch her.
I saw the change at once. Her breathing altered. Her eyes moved past the visible landscape, not unfocused exactly, but focused at a depth beyond the ordinary one. A small shiver went through her that certainly hadn’t come from any physical chill; it could only, I thought, have come from recognition.