Page 298 of Coal Hearts

A world past.

Tipping my face into the heavy stream, I sighed.

Did that Q guy hear me clearly enough? Had he found my father and told him what’d happened? Was he on his way to find me and the other slaves?

Three days was a long time.

Three days could be the difference between sexual servitude and freedom.

My skin prickled with awareness.

I jumped as I looked to my left and spotted Henri watching me. His grey eyes sharp and savage, no longer hazy with sleep.

Instinct made me raise my arms and cup my breasts, turning my hips so he couldn’t see. But then remembrance made me flinch, and I let my hands fall.

He’d seen everything. Touched everything.

The fact that I’d fallen for his falsehoods—lies that left me with a horrible aftertaste—didn’t change the fact that he’d kept me from the grasp of others and I’d been given a blessed honeymoon in this place.

Unlike wedded couples who went at it like deviants and consummated their marriage with love and joy, this wedding had been cemented without a single touch. Three nights of nothing but sleep. In our dreams, I’d become his. In our nightmares, he’d bought me.

I hate him.

Ignore him.

Running my fingers under my awful collar, I choked down claustrophobia as I rinsed away any dirt beneath. Repeating the process with my cuffs, I managed to ignore him during my entire wash.

Only once I’d sluiced off the soap and had nothing else to do but get out did I gather my courage and face him.

I froze.

Ever so slowly, he stripped off his underwear, kicked them into the corner, and entered the shower. The large, black-tiled space with its massive rain head and bench seat had seemed cavernous with just me inside.

Now, it felt like the tiniest prison.

My skin prickled as he reached around me and gathered a handful of soap from the dispenser.

A whiff of honeysuckle and jojoba fragranced the steamy hot air as he ran his hands under his arms, over the scant hair on his sculptured chest, and down, down to his hardening cock.

Look away, Ily.

Look away now.

I tried.

I really did.

But my eyes glued themselves to his fist. My breath turned thin as he worked himself. My heart floundered like a dying thing as any sign of flaccidity turned into velvet-wrapped steel.

Nudging me out of the way, he stepped under the stream, hissed at the hot temperature, then turned it down until icicles dripped from the showerhead.

I gasped and dashed to the glass door.

Only, his hand lashed out, snapping around my cuffed wrist.

I flinched as his fingers tightened, pressing against my pounding pulse.

Yet he didn’t say a word.