She pulled back just enough to look at me. “I—I’m?—”
“Because when you hold me like that ... it’s enough for me to believe that maybe you could. Enough for me to believe in you, in me, in souls, in God, in anything at all. In other words, woman,” I said, “You just made a miracle.”
The brave little smile she gave was everything. “I love you, you know,” she whispered fiercely. “I love you, I love you, I love you, and I don’t care who hears it.”
I closed my eyes and swallowed the lump in my throat. My arms locked around her on instinct, my face buried in her hair, breathing her in, memorizing every single thing about her because after this, there would benothing. “I love you, too.”
And over her head, I met my master’s eyes dead-on. Kept them there. So Keith knew what I was asking—no, not asking.
Ordering.
Take care of her.
28
HIM
EIGHT MONTHS LATER
Every slave dealer on both sides of the Atlantic knew that I,Sébastien Pomerleau, accepted only the best. However, the girl I had just bought, sight unseen, was far from that.
But the dealer had no choice but to sell her if he wanted to stay in business. If word got out that Arnold Flamm had refused me—even once—Aurum Luxury Slaves risked never again making a sale to any member of my elite circles. Spoiled Eurotrash brats like me had that kind of pull, and everyone knew it.
So when my personal assistant called Aurum with the request for the French girl, only freshly added to the listings, Flamm quoted an outrageous price, clearly hoping I’d change my mind. But when I got on the line myself, even the dealer, with his oily superciliousness, folded.
“Let me be the judge of what’s inferior and what’s not, Monsieur Flamm,” I said with a light laugh. “I put my trust in afine establishment like Aurum to ensure she’s at her best by the time I receive her. After all, when it comes to slaves, this isn’t, as they say on this continent, my first rodeo.”
Who could argue with that? Not Flamm, especially after I wired the obscene dollar amount he’d quoted into escrow within the hour, pending inspection of the girl at a cocktail party I was throwing that Friday afternoon. And, I added, I wanted her delivered. By the dealer.Personally.
None of this was exactly normal, but it wasn’t Arnold Flamm’s place to question the eccentric tastes of the rich.
And that’s exactly what I was counting on.
Now, as the sleek black transport van with its discreet logo pulled up next to the other luxury vehicles parked in my manicured, circular drive, there was no way Flamm didn’t know that the scrawny, scowling French girl in the back—complete with scoliosis and rickets and the tendency to bite—wasn’t up to my standards. He must have been ruing his inability to convince me to opt for one of the curvy, peachy, eager-to-please specimens he’d imported from Belgium last month. But I had told him I wouldn’t hear of buying any other slave. I wantedthisone, 974312, and that’s all there was to it.
So it was no surprise to me that Flamm—a short, stout, overly tanned man in a gold-crested suit jacket and too much product in his black hair—was sweating like he’d just run a marathon as he stood in the drive, motioning to the uniformed handler who’d accompanied him. To my dismay, I was sweating, too—recently relocated, I wasn’t yet used to all this goddamn humidity—but I hoped the swipe of patchy but artfully tousled golden hair off my face looked at least semi-effortless as, hiding a slight limp, I emerged in a crisp white linen suit on the marble steps above the manicured lawn of my brand-new Greek Revival home in a gated community on the outskirts of D.C., with a glass of bourbon one of my uniformed slaves had handed me. Behind the house, in thesprawling back gardens, a live jazz combo played as chic guests sipped mint juleps beside the marble fountain or snapped selfies under the trellis.
We’d better make this quick. My ice was melting.
Partially so no one would examine it too closely, I stuck my other hand casually in my pocket, watching impassively as the rear doors of the van swung open. A female handler stuffed into tight black uniform trousers tugged the girl down by a chain lead, wearing a muzzle and the standard khaki clothing of the Aurum dealership slaves, its plainness meant to imply neutrality, a blank slate, a slave who could serve in any way her master might require.
The scrawny, hollow-cheeked girl twisting at the end of the chain might disagree. Which was unsurprising, considering that as recently as two years ago—if my theory proved correct—she’d been French supermarket heiress Delphine Bisset, living with her parents in a house outside Paris about the size of this one, with slaves of her own. Her life had been a powder-pink whirl of pool parties and shopping sprees and Riviera holidays.
But I knew about all of that, of course.Wewere one and the same, she and I.
Didsheknow it? Maybe. She watched me out of the corner of her large brown eyes, exhausted but still unmistakably engaged as she blinked against the bright sunlight, even as the handler tugged her forward with such a violent jerk that she almost face-planted on the lawn.
I drew in a sharp breath, louder than I’d meant to. “Go easy on the girl, please, yeah?” I said lightly. “I have guests, monsieur. I can’t bring in a filthy, grass-stainedgamineto greet them.”
The female handler looked at me askance. I eyed her back, lazily savoring the rich caramel bouquet of my drink, the remaining ice clinking against the crystal.
I wasn’t concerned. We both knew who had the power here, after all.
The handler wrangled the girl the rest of the way through the portico and shoved her to her knees on the rock-hard, polished floor before the marble columns, in front ofme.Her new owner.
“If she’d just comply, it would go easier for her,” the handler remarked.
That’s what they always said. They lied.
