Free Hope Restrained (Estate Series) by M.S. Willis Page A

center of
her throat.
    His grin was crooked and cruel. “God, you are a treasure. It’s
a shame we’re not better friends.”
    She blinked the drops from her lashes.
    The heat from the bath was making her light headed, the
steam stealing the oxygen from the air, leading her down a tunnel, making her
mind groggy and her body loose. He spoke again, the words disjointed and
distant, but the tug on the chain brought her forward, her legs cooperating
only to keep him from pulling her forward and into the water.
    Her vision fogged over, the details of the room being lost
within a blanket of steam. The illumination of the flames fought against the
heated gossamer clouds. Reaching the stairs, she looked up into a perfectly
blank expression, Xander’s thoughts hidden behind eyes that flashed blue from
the light that was able to penetrate. Her head felt heavy and her knees buckled
beneath her weight. He reached out to grasp her arms, just as blackness overtook
her.

Chapter Nine
    He caught her just as her body collapsed. Her skin was pink
from the heat of the water and his hands slid along the soft and dripping wet
surface of her body. Picking her up, he laughed to himself thinking that she’d
been a bit too high to handle the temperature of the bath.
    While carrying her to his bed, he couldn’t stop thinking
about the view of her body when she’d stepped in the bath. He’d watched
intently when she’d descended, noting the way her body shook when her wounds were
touched. It took all he had not to rip off his clothes and climb in behind her.
Her ass was perfectly toned, the contour formed by hours of running, walking,
fighting. When she dipped beneath and when her body broke the surface, he
groaned at the way her ebony hair plastered itself with sweat across her
shoulders and down her back. But even these intense moments were eclipsed when
she looked down to find her skin prickled and flushed while her breasts
tightened around achingly aroused nipples. Slashes of battle scars draped heavy
and white across her tan skin — prideful reminders of the men she’d
fought. She was decadence hidden within a recalcitrant package, a force to be
conquered and a predator to be tamed.
    Laying her body atop the silk comforter, he instantly
noticed how her skin glowed against the blinding white of the fabric. His mouth
salivating, his teeth aching to bite down into the smooth flesh of her body, he
retrieved a key from his pants, unlocked the shackles at her wrists and pulled
the belt from her limp body. He pondered the convenience that she’d passed out
again, but brushed it from his thoughts, sliding her body up the bed, securing
her arms and legs. He hated to continue using the sharp metallic rings on her
wrists and ankles, but anything less and he knew she’d find a way to escape her
binds.
    He looked over her body, completely bare except for a scrap
of material between her thighs. It would be so easy to take her right then and
there, but he didn’t want to simply fuck her body. No. He wanted to warp her
mind so that she begged him to fuck her, so that she believed him as necessary
to her as breathing. He regretted that he’d have to fight her, but she was the
type who needed to be truly dominated, the type who needed to be defeated in order
to be owned.
    Moving up the bed, he ran his fingertip across the center of
her abdomen, his eyes fixed on the way the muscle flexed beneath his touch. He
increased the pressure of his path up through the center of her breasts and
over her neck, his other fingers brushing against the slow pulse below the
skin.
    “Wake up, Sunshine. Don’t leave me yet.” He tapped her cheek
playfully and her eyes moved beneath her lids, eventually fluttering open to
reveal a groggy cloud within the gold. She looked sated and satisfied,
completely lost to a sea of obscurity.
    “Come back, beautiful. We were just getting started.”
    She blinked up at him, attempting to move her arm to rub the
sleep from her