Page 2 of Never Bound

“Lou, your hand is on my dick. To me, even theideaof 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 wereallyhave 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 dothis—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 wereworried? 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 thatiswhy 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’dreallyknow 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 itwastoo 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 thenthathadn’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, andshowher 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. Oneno oneshould 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.

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