Never Bound (The Unchained #2)

1. Chapter 1

1

HER

“W ho did this to you?”

I noticed the blistering crater on his palm almost as soon as he entered my room on Monday, mostly because he was trying desperately—and not very gracefully—to hide it. Only one question came to mind, of course. But I didn’t ask it.

“It’s nothing,” he said, awkwardly grabbing a pen in a way that made it clear it wasn’t nothing.

But I did let it go. I hated to, but I did. After all, it wasn’t the first time someone had hurt him, and it wouldn’t be the last. And why the hell was I telling myself that to make myself feel better ?

The burn would simply join the growing list of things I couldn’t ask about, like why he was still convinced Max Langer was the devil incarnate instead of the only guest at that train wreck of a dinner party on Friday who’d treated him with any decency.

And where his sister was. And whether she was okay. And if she wasn’t, whether saving her would in any way involve him running away and leaving me forever. Not that I was trying to be clingy or anything.

Besides, I didn’t want to know the answer. I already knew it. Borrowing more time didn’t make the time any less borrowed. After all, we’d just spent the whole weekend in the same house and hardly saw each other at all.

Sunday usually meant some downtime for the slaves, and I was grateful for it on his behalf, though it hurt that we couldn’t spend it together. However, I’d really outdone myself on Saturday, when I’d reluctantly let Juliette come over to hang by the pool. November in the Valley was still warm enough to lie out during the heat of the day, and flipping through fashion magazines—or my chemistry notes hidden inside a magazine, a certain someone would be pleased to know—was feasible. What was also feasible was choosing a laughably skimpy black-and-white string bikini I’d only ever worn on spring break—far, far away from my parents and the unceremoniously departed gardener. And waiting until my chosen mark passed by the pool on his way to some quite-possibly-fictional chore. Of course I let the strings casually slide off my shoulders as if I’d simply forgotten to tie them.

My only reward for all that feasibility? Watching how fast his head swiveled. But that was more than enough—and what made it especially cute was that the poor guy probably thought he was being subtle about it.

Meanwhile, of course, I was keeping a running mental list of everything I wanted to do to him and for him as soon as we had some unstructured time. The problem was, we never had any. Even when we weren’t being blackmailed, the only hours we ever had together were when we were supposed to be doing something else. Plus, we still had five more chapters to review before the exam and only an hour to spare for each, and if you thought sitting at the desk fighting the unbearable urge to touch each other was awkward, try sitting there knowing you could touch each other at any time, and why the hell weren’t you doing it?

“So I know we’ve gone over elimination reactions a million times,” he began professorially after he entered the room on Monday, after waving off my question about his hand. “But you also have to remember that they look a bit different when it’s a modified alcohol like a methyl group, so I want to look over those with you today, and—fuck, that bikini you were wearing on Saturday could fit in a coin purse.”

He barely glanced up from the book, just shook some hair off his face and gave the tiniest, coyest glance back to check my reaction.

I collapsed on the desk in relief. “I was wondering when you were going to say something.” I glanced longingly at the sunburst-shaped wall clock over my bed. “Ugh, how the hell are we supposed to get by with only an hour a day for studying and everything else?”

“Well, luckily for you, I lived in Germany, where they know a thing or two about time management,” he remarked, glancing at the clock himself before meeting my gaze with an unspoken proposal. “ Also, mach schnell, Fr?ulein. 1 Are you ready for this?”

“Ready? I’ve only been trying to do this for the last three days. And I still prefer French.”

He gave me another teasing half-smile as his hand gently took mine, guiding it the rest of the way over the fabric of his shorts and up his inner thigh. He was already hard.

“With you, it doesn’t take much,” he whispered in response to my little bounce of surprise. “And if you’d ever paid any attention to what was happening under the desk, you’d know that.”

“I was trying to concentrate on chemistry, just like you were supposed to be,” I said indignantly.

“Oh, I was,” he assured me. “I’m just saying, there’s no reason why our approach to the material couldn’t stand to be a bit more … holistic.” He glanced at the clock again and snapped his fingers. “Shit. We’re behind. I should have taken it out thirty seconds ago.”

I giggled as he immediately reached down and took care of that. After some adjusting under the desk—no peeking—I found my fingers curled around the hard, solid length of him. Time seemed to stand still in the silent room as I let it sink in. And he just let me cup it there as if the weight of my fingers was, for now, just enough to make him perfectly happy. As for what came next, though?

“I—”

“Stop.” He put a finger to my lips. He must have sensed something—my hesitance, my performance anxiety, my sexual imposter syndrome. “Is this your first one?”

“Well—” I blushed.

“Yes? No? Sort of?” He tried to help me along.

“Sort of.”

He nodded with finality. “Okay. We can work with that.”

“But I want to make it good for you.”

He folded his hand—his unblistered hand—expertly over both of mine, guiding the movement of my fingers. I flexed and curled them as I brushed up and down that magnificent sculpted shaft that it would be a crime not to touch.

“Lou, your hand is on my dick. To me, even the idea of that is amazing.”

That made me smile, and after he got me started, I began to drum my fingers lightly while pumping, and his entire body seemed to melt deeper into the wicker chair. “Fuck, you look beautiful like that. Do we really have to study today?”

I laughed and twisted lightly as I stroked, brushing my thumb over the tip, pleased by the fluid already trickling out. My hand trailed the wetness up the shaft, encouraged by the strange, beautiful combination of contented sighs and amazed whimpers I was hearing.

“Just a bit more pressure, yeah?” he said through labored breath.

I added my other hand and meditated on the mystery of maybe—if not making up for the blister on his hand—making him feel even half as incredible as he’d made me feel the other day in the basement and pretty much always. We didn’t have time to lie down—hell, we didn’t really have time to do this —but God, he looked happy and that was good enough.

“Oh, that feels so fucking perfect, Lou, you have no idea.” His voice wavered.

“As good as you imagined?”

“So much better. And you were worried ? You’re fucking good at this. Just keep going.”

I shifted to the edge of my chair for a better grip, hand over hand, keeping to the rhythm he was reveling in and that was making me feel … powerful? Beautiful? Not useless? Jesus, who knew a quickie hand job could do all that?

“I’m close,” he choked out. “But I forgot—”

“On it.” Like lightning, I swiveled the desk chair toward the nightstand, just close enough to grab some tissues while still keeping up the strokes. Even as he shuddered, groaned, and exploded into the tissues, my body relaxed. I balled up and tossed the evidence away while he cleanly replaced everything as if none of it had ever happened. I exhaled, cutting the strings of tension in my body. A promise fulfilled.

“What were you so worried about, young lady? You know you always earn your gold star.” He motioned me forward with a blissful, contented sigh, cupping my chin and lightly kissing my forehead, my nose, and finally my lips. As he pulled back and let me fall into his golden eyes, the bedroom melted away. Even the walls of the house seemed to topple, the desert crumbled, and for a second, we stood face-to-face, on a hill of wavering golden grass. Somewhere where we didn’t ever have to look at the clock.

“So,” he said, snapping us both out of the spell. He turned his attention sheepishly back to the desk, scanning the papers and notes spread out all over it before grabbing the chemistry book and frantically flipping through pages. “Should we start studying?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I guess that is why we’re here.”

HIM

It would take a very special kind of asshole to sneak onto the computer of the dirty-minded angel who had just improvised the under-the-desk hand job of my dreams—one I obviously couldn’t turn down, or she’d really know something was wrong.

And I was about to become that asshole. But a douchebag, a cigar, and a broken bourbon bottle had made it clear that my sister’s life may depend on it. And I had to believe it did still depend on it, that I hadn’t failed again. After all, she’d replied to my messages, so she had to have been alive when Corey had arrived at the party with her bracelet. That gave me hope that it wasn’t too late.

But if it was too late, my job was to burn everything and everyone responsible for it. So sneaking onto a laptop shouldn’t seem like much at all.

And it wouldn’t, if it were anyone’s laptop but hers.

There was some good news—other than my orgasm, that is—and that was that so far nobody had demanded to know why I’d been out by the pool all night on Friday with a mop, broom, and headlamp I’d found in a storage closet, cleaning up the liquor and trying to sweep up all the tiny broken shards from every nook and cranny, wondering why continuously splashing my face with pool water wasn’t keeping me from collapsing, closing my eyes, and passing out against the bar. Which I eventually did, of course, only to jerk awake a minute later, startled and disoriented, finding nothing but a vast, silent blanket of stars looking down on me.

When I’d entered her room today, I’d stuck one hand in my pocket, clumsily trying to conceal the massive, throbbing blister, which Louisa’s aloe—and nothing else—was doing its best to help. I’d accepted a gauze wrap from the housekeeper earlier but ripped it off quickly as it made any kind of manual labor impossible instead of merely painful. How clever of Corey to deprive me of the one and only value he thought I had.

Okay, look. The phone had no search function, okay? She told me that when she’d handed it over. And I’d have to get rid of it soon anyway. If Maeve had gotten caught—or worse—and it was somehow tracked, I couldn’t have it on me. And now Louisa was out of the room, caught up in a heated phone conversation with her mom, who had called from the golf course with some incoherent emergency. The laptop was just sitting there. I already had the password. Plus, I’d pored over everything I could find about Max Langer for the past year and found nothing useful except what had gotten me here but now, at least, I had another name to research: Resi. The one who was supposedly saving us all. Typing that name into the search bar—it wasn’t like it was a common name around here—was sure to give me a clue, and it would literally take two seconds. And I could delete the search history in less than that.

I leaned back in the wicker chair casually, tapping a pencil against my chin, unable to make out much of the conversation from the hallway and so naturally deciding to think about Max Langer instead. I felt further away from figuring out what the billionaire’s game was than when I started, or how closely Corey was involved in it. But I was convinced that saving us from the gardener was just one short move in a long, long game. Never assume the queen is safe just because she’s standing still.

And as for that game? Well, kidnapping ambiguously enslaved girls to experiment on them clearly hadn’t worked, so he’d moved on to frightening and manipulating them into enslaving themselves. And then that hadn’t worked, so he—

“Okay, Mom, but is there anyone—”

Grabbing the textbook, I shot up straight in the chair, then relaxed and took a deep breath as Louisa resumed pacing the hallway.

Fuck, I should just tell her. I should whip out the broken, bloody bracelet, the one weighing like a stone in my back pocket, and show her what happened. Throw it on the desk just like Corey had thrown it at me. This is what your kind does. And see how she’d react.

But I knew how she’d react. The same way she’d reacted the last time I’d reminded her what her kind did. Gasp and be horrified and offer to do anything she could to help. Goddamn her, this wasn’t how any of this was supposed to go.

Because whatever help she could offer would lead us straight back to her father. And then where would that leave us?

With a choice. One she shouldn’t have to make. One no one should have to make. But that was the world we were in, even if it was easy to forget while being jacked off by the smoothest, most perfectly manicured hands that had ever touched my dick.

Look, obviously, things had changed. She and I were now inhabiting an entirely different universe than the one we’d met in, one where the impossible had become possible, the untouchable had become touchable. Where strangers had become friends had become … um, well. A universe I really couldn’t bear to contemplate ever leaving, as much as I wanted to be able to.

But other things hadn’t changed. Some things could never change. And as my eyes darted between the hallway and the desk, I knew I’d have to make a decision soon. And not just about the computer.

About everything.

HER

“See you soon, Mom. Bye,” I said, thoroughly embarrassed but grateful that my emergency trip to the country club to pick her up had been called off, thanks to a pitying golf league friend who happened to live in our neighborhood.

I reached for my bedroom door to throw it open but for some reason stopped. Heart pounding, I left it ajar instead, listening for any noise coming from inside, though it was silent except for the ticking clock. I felt sick, but something told me to creep closer to peer through the crack. And when I did, I drew in a sharp breath, my stomach twisting as I spoke.

“What are you doing?”

Startled, he turned immediately away from the window, where he had been standing staring at the mountains.

“Just wondering if it ever snows up there.”

1.

So hurry up, young lady.