Page 7 of The Captive

Volkov took my valise from my arms without asking and tossed it to a rider, who caught it one-handed and lashed it behind his saddle in the same motion. Then my captor turned back to me, put both hands on my waist, and lifted me onto one of the shaggy little steppe horses as though I weighed nothing at all.

“I will ride my own mare,” I informed him.

He chuckled and swung up behind me.

The horse—barely fourteen hands, thick-necked, smelling of dust and sheepskin—took our combined weight without complaint. The saddle had a high wooden pommel and a fleece thrown over it, and there was nowhere to sit except astride, which meant my nightgown rucked up over my calves, and I was forced to lean back against him.

Juno was on a lead line behind a wiry young rider who sat quietly and kept slack in the rope. Hector followed, ears up, already flirting with the strange horses like the shameless creature he was. My babies were frightened but unhurt, and better handled than I had any right to expect.

That was the last thing I checked.

I did not look back at the camp, at Hobbs, at the crumpled shape of my old life being folded up behind me. Looking back has never once improved a woman’s seat.

We rode south as the sun rose on our left.

The Cossacks grew loud as the light did—calling across the column, laughing, one of them singing a few bars until another threw something at him. Volkov answered rarely, a word here, a grunt there, and every word out of him made the men around us grin.

Beneath the fear running through me like a low fever, I understood that these men were happy. The raid had gone well, no one had died, and they were going home.

By mid-morning I was sweating under the fur.

He noticed before I considered how to remove it. The coat came off my shoulders from behind—no request—and he passed it to the nearest rider, who tied it behind his saddle, and just like that I was crossing the open steppe in a nightgown and a silk robe, in daylight, in front of a dozen men.

The sun on my shoulders felt indecent.

His breath on my neck was…even more so.

I shivered and tried to ease forward, away from the wall of him at my back. A bare forearm came around my middle—corded, brown, dark-haired, seamed with an old white scar near the wrist—and drew me back until I fit against his chest again.

It felt like a show of ownership, but I couldn’t deny that he hadn’t hurt me, despite his crudeness.

One of the men called out something. Laughter went down the column, and Volkov chuckled behind me, low, and I felt it in my spine more than I heard it.

I hated not knowing.

I had spent my whole life in rooms where I understood every word, including the ones people didn’t say, and now the conversation was happening on all sides of me in a language that ran past my few phrases of Russian like water past a boulder.

Volkov shifted. His hand left my waist and traveled up my body, unhurried, steel over silk. I was holding my breath before he even began to speak.

“My men are giving me suggestions, krasivaya.” His accented French was warm against my ear. He pushed my robe off one shoulder, and the morning air went straight through the lawn beneath. “They remind me that you are mine now. Spoils of the raid. They say I may do as I like with you.”

His palm closed over my breast.

Nothing shielded me from him but one thin, damp layer of fabric. His hand was enormous and hard-skinned, and he weighed my breast in it the way a man weighs a purse. My whole body clenched in response to that casual claiming—thighs, belly, the muscles of my cunny drawing tight around nothing.

“I could use you here,” he went on, conversational, filthy, his beard grazing my ear. “Plow your belly until I am satisfied and let the column watch. They would like that; they are simple men.”

He squeezed, slow, and wetness slicked my thighs where they gripped the saddle. My moan of humiliation was stuck in my throat.

Instead of allowing him to see what his touch—his crude words—did to me, I stared straight ahead at the horse’s ears, my face burning with shame and anger.

I was a duchess. I had presided over dinners for forty and dressed down a bishop at one of them, and I was sitting in an outlaw’s lap growing wet through my nightgown while he discussed owning me.

Except…my body wouldn’t allow my mind to lie to myself. That was why I was so ashamed; the feel of Volkov’s hands, the easy, unbothered strength of his hold on me, the way my cunny had flooded with need… It told the truth.

I wanted to belong to him.

He plucked my nipple through the lawn. Caught it between two rough fingertips and tugged, and the gasp came out of me before I could kill it.