His voice had dropped down an octave at that last sentence. He let go of my hair and hooked his index finger into the dangling heart at my throat and crooked it, then pulled. I followed the motion and sat up.

He kept pulling with his index finger until my face was an inch from his, “You make me wanna take,” he said this with a rasp to his voice that went straight to my clit.

My body went liquid and hot with arousal. My n*****s were hard, my heart was racing. He was drunk and pissed off and he wanted me.

He jerked the collar again, making me scramble to my knees.

“Stop offering it to me or I’ll have no choice but to f*****g take it.”

“I want you to take it,” I whispered a breath away from his mouth, “Please please take it.”

He lifted my right hand and brought it to his nose and inhaled and then let out a slow breath.

“Were you touching yourself tonight, angel?”

“Yes, Master.”

“God damn,” he g*****d and then his mouth touched my fingertips and he parted his lips and then the tip of his tongue touched them. A hot gush surged between my legs.

All of a sudden he roughly threw me back down to the bed and grabbed me by the calves and then his face was buried between my legs. Oh my f*****g f**k.

His tongue slipped inside me and we both m****d at the exact same instant. He spread my folds apart and then his tongue found its way up to my clit.

“So f*****g sweet,” he m****d.

“Ah!” I was going to explode in record time. It was going to be huge. I wanted it to last, I wanted to savor it but it wouldn’t wait.

His tongue swiped over my swollen clit just a few times before I detonated. I screamed out, “Oh thank you, Master.”

I heard him fumble and his clothes started flying off and then he drove his beautiful c**k into me. Hard. So hard.

He had his fingers between my throat and my collar and he fisted it, using his other hand to brace himself as he rolled his h**s and slammed into me over and over, “Ah f**k, baby, you feel as good as I knew you would. Better.”

“Oh, Master…” I whimpered, feeling a twisting beautiful blissful ache in between my legs and in my chest.

He hammered hard into me, over and over, and over. He let go of my collar and grabbed my wrists and held them over my head. It was like he’d read my mind.

“Yes! Please keep holding me down while you take me. I’m so lucky to be yours.” I was weeping. But I was in ecstasy.

“Mine? F**k.” He was f*****g me harder, his hands gripping my wrists painfully tight. Beautifully tight.

He brought his lips down to mine and kissed me like his life depended on it, plunging his tongue into my mouth, twisting it up with mine. He was an amazing kisser like I knew he would be.

“Yes, I’m yours, Master. All yours. Please keep me,” I said against his mouth and then I licked along his lower l*p.

“Stop f*****g calling me Master!” he shouted, making me lock tight.

“Like I wanna be called some name you’ve called every sick f**k that’s raped you, hurt you!” He sounded pained and he’d stopped.

He was inside me and still had my wrists pinned but he was still.

I replied and did it with confidence, clarity, “No, Drake, you don’t understand. Only you. They were Sir. They were all Sir. I waited 22 months, 19 days and ten hours for my Master, the one who would save me from there, make me his, save me from that hell.

Please don’t see it as a bad thing that I call you that. I’m so happy it’s you that I can call that. You’re my one and only Master.

I don’t even think of you as Sir any longer.”

His body was locked tight. Then he sort of growled and then he let go of my wrists and wrapped his arms right around me and held me tight as he kissed me and pumped into me slowly, an inch at a time, just a few times and then threw his head back and m****d, “Angel,” as he came inside of me.

God, he was perfect.

We were breathless. His hands didn’t have my wrists any longer but now his fingers were woven with mine, still pinning me to the bed. His lips were against my collar bone.

I wrapped my legs around him tight, kind of hugging him with them. He stayed still for about two or three minutes, just connected with me, and then he slid out of me.

He leaned over and flicked the lamp on his desk on, lifted up onto an elbow and looked down at me, the other hand’s fingers still weaved with mine over my head. He caressed my cheek with a graze of his knuckles and said softly, “Too fast,” then his lips were on mine again, kissing sweetly, softly. I melted into the k**s and m****d.

We made out like teenagers for a while, kissing, caressing, panting. And then after a few minutes groping. He slid back into me, hard again.

He started slow, sweet, raining k****s on my face, my ear, my throat, but then he picked up the pace and started f*****g me harder, faster, as I arched my back and rotated my h**s against his.

He was looking down at us, watching his c**k enter me over and over. Wow, that was sexy.

Then he rolled and I was on top. He whipped my red nightie off me and began to knead my breasts as I rode him, the sensual look on his face rocking my world as he looked down again, watching my body sheath him.

I cupped his jaw with both hands, leaned to k**s him, and put more passion into that k**s than I had with kissing anyone in my whole life. I wanted to show him what this meant to me. I wanted him to feel something so beautiful that he’d never want to send me away.

He rolled back and now he was sitting up, feet swung over and on the floor, me straddling him, our connection at the lips and pelvises not breaking. He m****d into my mouth as he picked up his pace and then he grabbed my wrists and put them behind my back and transferred them to one of his hands and held them there.

The other hand grazed up my body to my throat and then he held my collar as we, together, set about a faster, more intense rhythm. Me riding him as hard as I could, him thrusting his h**s at me, both of us staring into one another’s eyes in the lit room.

He let go of the collar and put his thumb between us at my clit. “You f**k me so beautifully,” I whispered, “Thank you, Master.”

He came then, his mouth opening and a big shuddering masculine m**n filling the room and he let go of my wrists and his fingers drove into my hair and pulled my head back and he ran his nose from my throat up to my jaw and then his mouth was on my ear and then my earlobe was between his teeth.

Sensation exploded in me, too. It was a high I never wanted to come down from.

He flopped to his back, taking me with him. He was breathless. I was on top of him. I ran my palms up and down his face and then my fingers slid through his hair and I kissed his throat and nuzzled in and I said, “Thank you for saving me.”

“Yeah,” he said, winded.

“Please keep me,” I whispered, equally as winded but pouring as much emotion into those three words as I would if I were telling him I loved him.

“Don’t tempt me,” was his answer and he said it with a fierceness, like he was angry with me, with himself, maybe. But he didn’t let go of me so we both passed out, me on top of him still, his arms around my waist, my cheek on his chest, a little smile on my face, the light still on.

Drake’s POV

I didn’t get hangovers. Not usually. I drank a f**k of a lot last night and it seemed I’d dodged another hangover bullet. Maybe that was because I’d pretty much sobered up before I fell asleep. Not sober enough to leave this f*****g futon, though.

She was curled into the back of me. One hand on my shoulder blade, the other wrapped around my waist and against my stomach. She was breathing against the spot between my shoulder blades. Her pelvis was against my backside and her legs curved into mine, her knees against the backs of my legs above my knees.

I put my hand on her hand on my belly and her whole body squeezed as she snuggled in closer. I lifted her hand up so I could get out of bed. As I was pulling my underwear on I glanced at her and her eyes were open and on me. I left the room.

I guzzled a bottle of water, dropped two Advils more for my muscles from that f*****g bed than from the booze, and then threw on track pants, sneakers, and a hoodie, grabbed my iPhone and earbuds, phone and keys, then headed out for a run.

Felicia’s POV

I resisted the urge to weep when he left without a word, without barely looking at me.

I fell asleep after the second time we had s*x feeling safe, feeling blissfully sated and happy. I’d had six o*****s. Six! Three on my own and then three that he’d given me.

I knew he was drunk. I knew he’d been beating himself up before we had s*x.

And now?

What would he do now?

Drake’s POVThis material belongs to .

As I was running, earbuds in, hood up, sunglasses on, blocking out the world and rounding back toward the building a block away from home I spotted Uncle’s widow, Lisa. She was walking out of Bianca’s beauty salon and heading toward her car. I sped up and got between her and the car door. She gasped, startled, as my hand came down on her wrist.

“You! We need to have a conversation.”

“Drake! Oh my god. You scared the heck outta me!”

“Gimme the keys,” I demanded.

She handed me her keys and went around to the passenger side.

I saw Bianca open the door to her shop, looking concerned, her phone in her hand. Bianca was practically a cousin to me. I took my hood and sunglasses off and saluted, making sure she saw it was me and not that Lisa was getting abducted.

She waved, looking relieved.

I’d been an a*****e to ghost most of my family during my “exile”.

I backed out. I drove for a few minutes, not talking, trying to rein in my emotions. Finally, I pulled up to a park and parked the car and looked to her. She had been sitting in the passenger seat quietly, just waiting for me to address her.

“Out,” I said, “Leave your bag in the car.” I didn’t know if her car had been bugged. I walked about two or three minutes until the car was out of sight and she followed me. I sat on a bench and put my head in my hands, my elbows on my knees.

“Lisa, I know.” I glanced in her direction.

She frowned as she sat, “You know?”

“I found out where Uncle got you from.”

The color drained out of her face and she clutched at her throat. A familiar vision.

f**k.

“I know this because he arranged for me to have a Kruna slave before he died.”

She gasped.

Yeah, Lisa. Kruna slave. The last one to leave the resort to be married. To my Uncle.

“Her name’s Felicia. At least that’s the name they gave her. Don’t know her real name. Didn’t want her. Didn’t want nothing to do with this s**t but if I didn’t play along it could put all of us in danger so I picked her up and brought her back with every intention of letting her go once I knew there was no more threat.”

“Drake, there will always be that threat,” Lisa replied without waiting a breath, “You’d be better off keeping her. For you and her, for all of us.”

“F**k.” I closed my eyes and put my head in my hands.

We were both quiet for a minute.

At Kruna my head just about imploded when I found out that Uncle procured Lisa from them. It didn’t add up at first because Lisa was friends with my sisters, went to culinary school with Tess. That’s where they’d met. Tess started bringing her around and then a few months after Uncle’s third wife Stacia died Uncle announced he and Lisa were getting married.

Lisa was a terrible cook; no wonder she’d flunked out of school. She never belonged there. She was only there to meet my sister. It was all staged.

Lisa was almost Stacia’s double looks wise. Stacia was a former swimsuit model who died in a suspicious car crash. But Lisa was like Stacia with a personality transplant because while Stacia was a shrew, Lisa was sweet. She seemed totally gaga over Uncle.

But she also had a personality. She and my sisters were tight. She was there for Stacia’s funeral, too, to support Tess and Luciana, or so it seemed at the time.

After the initial shock of the hook-up between Uncle and her, the girls eventually got over it. Then Uncle got his beloved Sunday dinners with the whole family around him.

Uncle clearly installed Lisa at Tess’s school and orchestrated the whole thing so it’d appear natural. But what he had wasn’t just a young and beautiful wife who got along with us but she appeared to worship the ground he walked on, too. The perfect slave.

Perfect outside the bedroom so of course I could only guess that for him she was perfect in it, too. Perfect enough to make Uncle offer me the same thing.

She got out of a life as a s*x slave and she got sold to a wealthy businessman in the states with ties to organized crime so he had power, power to protect her. She’s married to him about a year and a half and then is widowed, left a lot of money to take care of her the rest of her life. She’s in her mid 20’s, still plenty of time to fall in love for real, so it would seem.

But their remarks on the tour about Lisa had almost made me tip my hand. I held it together as I processed the little bit of info that told me the truth.

Gan Chen casually said, “So, given the unfortunate demise of your uncle, I take it you are taking responsibility for Monalisa? Your uncle left that provision, that you and your brother would be responsible.”

It took a second to permeate. I had a good poker face and often had to hold my emotions in check in the business I’d been in so I’d replied, “Of course.”

“Excellent,” was the response, “We need to know that confidentiality continues and so prior to your arrival we’ve have had our eye on that situation. When there’s no suitable surviving family member to take responsibility for a widow in these situations we either take possession of our former asset back or we eliminate the loose end.

From the way your uncle spoke of you and your brother to his friends here and due to the fact he told us you wanted to acquire we suspected all would be well. We were concerned briefly when we found out she left the country a few weeks after Tom was killed but when we discovered you had also gone along, we knew all was well.”

Lisa was together. She was Uncle’s trophy wife without a doubt but she had a personality. She did not come across like his soulless Stepford slave.

I’d never seen her give Uncle any sass or nag him at all but she certainly didn’t seem oppressed. Why didn’t Stan tip me off about Lisa? Did he know?

If Felicia was supposed to be the ‘perfect’ wife-material slave personified, why was she so out of sorts with me?

Maybe because what I brought to her life was outside the norm of what she’d been trained for. Lisa had stepped into a role and knew her part and she fulfilled it.

Felicia was likely off-balance because I told her she wouldn’t be marrying me and that she was no longer a slave.

When I’d told my brother about Lisa on a brief IM conversation from the resort he was as shocked as I was. We agreed on our last webcam call that I needed to talk to Lisa but knew I’d be opening a can of worms so I left it on simmer for the moment.

She was pregnant and widowed but young, beautiful, and wealthy. She hadn’t taken off the minute Uncle died, scared for her life or anxious to move on. She and Tess were living in Uncle’s house and she was helping raise my nephews.

They were best friends and were clinging to one another to heal and move on after all that’d happened. Tess, Lisa, and Luciana were the three amigos. They’d raise their kids together and do their shopping s**t and their yoga and their gossiping and reality tv parties, and scrapbooking s**t, and they’d be happy. It had all worked out for her.

Maybe she could help Felicia heal.

I finally spoke, “I have questions, Leese.”

“I bet you do,” she answered softly.

“When the time comes will you help her? Will you talk to her and help her?”