Enamoured Read online

  Enamoured

  Copyright 2019 Giana Darling

  Published by Giana Darling

  Edited by Jenny Sims

  Proofed by Ellie McLove

  Cover Design by Najla Qamber

  Cover Model Santi Wane

  Cover Photographer Wong Sim

  Formatting by Stacey at Champagne Book Design

  License Notes

  This Book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This Book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to your favourite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Playlist

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Part Four

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Part Five

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Epilogue

  Preview of The Affair

  Thanks Etc.

  Other Books By Giana

  About Giana Darling

  To Damma.

  For raising me, loving me, and supporting all of my dreams.v

  “How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole.”

  —C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

  “Hurts Like Hell”—Fleurie

  “Castle”—Halsey

  “Nocturne”—Blanco White

  “Don’t Forget About Me”—CLOVES

  “Wasting My Young Years”—London Grammar

  “Waiting Game”—BANKS

  “La Traviata / Act 1: Libiamo ne’lieti calici”—Verdi

  “Killer + The Sound”—Phoebe Bridgers & Noah Gundersen

  “Primavera”—Ludovico Edinaudi

  “Addicted”—Jon Vinyl

  “Go Fuck Yourself”—Two Feet

  “The Night We Met”—Lord Huron

  “Start A War”—Klergy & Valerie Broussard

  “To Build A Home”—Cinematic Orchestra

  “Bad Guy”—Billie Eilish

  “The Devil Within”—Digital Daggers

  “Control”—Halsey

  “Smother”—Daughter

  “If I had A Heart”—Fever Ray

  “Chains”—Nick Jonas

  “To Be Alone With You”—Sufjan Stevens

  “Everybody Wants to Rule The World”—Lorde

  “Let Me Love You”—Ariana Grande & Lil Wayne

  “Siegfried Idyll” (Cosima’s symphony)—Richard Wagner

  Alexander

  Everyone who was anyone in British society was at my wedding. Even the royals had sent Prince Alasdair as their representative. It was the event of the season, of the fucking decade, and everyone worth their salt was in attendance. Everyone, that was, except for my bride.

  “What do you mean?” I ground out. “Where the bloody hell is she?”

  Riddick blinked, his hands locked behind his back, his feet braced apart like a soldier before his general. “She’s gone, milord. No one has seen her for the past hour. I had Rupert check the cameras, and they went haywire half an hour before that. He’s only just got them back online.”

  “Can he recover the footage?” I asked around the swell of rage rising tidal strong in my chest.

  Someone had done something to Cosima.

  To my wife.

  I was seized by the primal urge to stalk around the crowded gardens and crush the pastel-clad guests littered across the grass like flowers under my foot until they confessed who’d taken her. I wanted to read their confessions in their blood, spilled from the hammer of my fists and the weight of my fury.

  I wanted each one of them to die for even existing at the wedding when my bride did not.

  “We…we can’t be sure. Whoever tampered with them knew what they were doing,” Riddick admitted, his eyes cold with his own fury.

  My implacable manservant had developed his own obsession with Cosima.

  I didn’t blame him. How could I when I felt savage with longing for her at every hour of the day, even in those minutes when I was buried deep inside her.

  I could never get close enough, fuck her long enough, plant myself deep enough.

  In her head, in her heart, and in her sweet, tight cunt.

  And now she was gone.

  “That doesn’t exactly narrow down the list of suspects, Riddick,” I growled lowly. “It could be anyone in the Order, a disgruntled ex-employee even.”

  “You want it to be Dante,” Riddick noted because he knew me well.

  I wasn’t a man who had friends, but if I had been, Riddick would be the best of them.

  “Yes,” I seethed, my hands flexing so hard I could feel the tendons pinch with strain. The pain grounded me. “Everything in me believes it’s him, but I will not be ruled by emotion. If he is the one who took her, she shouldn’t be in any danger. If it’s someone else, if it’s someone from the Order lashing out at me for some imaginary infraction, she could be dying as we speak.”

  I ignored the way my heart tripped over the notion of anyone causing her pain but me. It had been foolish to marry her, but I’d been foolish enough before that to believe marriage was the only way to protect her from the monsters I’d brought into her world.

  Sherwood was somewhere in the crowd, no doubt ready to read me the riot act for going against The Code.

  I didn’t give a flying fuck. I’d given Cosima my name in marriage because there were more forces than the Order at work against us. The name Davenport was a shield, the titles of Greythorn and Thornton a lance and sword. I’d caved in to the compulsion to make sure she was armed for battle even when I couldn’t be there to protect her.

  Sherwood wouldn’t kill me. He couldn’t afford to. I was one of the wealthiest, most influential men in Great Britain. The Davenports had been founding members of the Order of Dionysus, and each generation had sat on its council.

  So they wouldn’t kill me.

  Blackmail, harass, and maim me, potentially.

  But any of those were less objectionable than the idea of Cosima being exposed to the harsh elements of my world. I’d dragged her into hell with me, but I would not leave her alone in the dark.

  My stomach cramped at the idea of her alone there now, somewhere dank and black where even her considerable light couldn’t keep her mind safe from its taint.
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  “Alexander.”

  I whipped around to glare at my father as he strolled toward me, adjusting the cuff on his impeccable white dress shirt as if it wasn’t already perfectly aligned by his valet.

  Years of latent bitterness sank roots in my gut and gave birth to fury.

  I stormed up to him before he could freeze and slammed my fist across the strong line of his nose hard enough to feel the bones break like eggshells under my knuckles. Blood erupted from his nostrils and sluiced down the fine linen of his suit. Before he could recover, I banded my fingers around his throat and pushed him brutally against the wall of the house.

  I hefted him into the air so that my hand was an iron bar holding him aloft. His face went pink, then mauve, and shifted into a satisfying shade of purple.

  I still had the taste of my wife on my tongue, sweat on my face, and my father’s blood on my fist. Fury had turned me heathen, and I didn’t give a single fuck.

  “Where in the bloody hell is she?” I seethed in Noel’s purpling face.

  He blinked at me, dispassionate even as I squeezed my fingers tighter around his neck.

  “Tell me, or so help me, I will rip you apart with my bare hands where you fucking stand,” I seethed, wishing each hard-bitten word was a bullet in his diabolical brain.

  “So”—he wheezed—“dramatic.”

  My hand pulsed tighter against his neck. I wanted to snap his spine like a biscuit between my fingers and watch the bone crumble to dust at my feet.

  But another stronger instinct urged me to let him breathe.

  I spent my entire thirty-plus years being fashioned into my father’s son. I was born, built, and programmed to operate under his system. Despite the abominable way he treated his slaves, the hurt he’d doled out to my mother with his various affairs, and the unethical way he ran his businesses, I felt bound to him elementally, vitally. If I was a great tree, he was the earth that bound my roots. I could never escape him, and to hope for release was to hope for death.

  Without consciously deciding to do so, my fingers uncurled from his hot throat.

  “You will tell me where my wife is,” I said with my voice in my burning gut. “You will tell me now.”

  “You always were impulsive,” Noel scolded calmly as if we were sitting in his office, and I was just a young lad. “I never could find a way to beat it out of you.”

  “You never could find a way to do many things. This estate was mortgaged to the gills when I graduated from Cambridge. Your marriage was a sham from its inception. You are a man with a title, but little wealth or real political power.”

  “I am a member of the most powerful society in the land,” Noel said, his eyes finally flashing.

  I fed off his anger, letting it stoke the flames of my own. “The Order is the most corrupt power in the fucking land, as you well know. In large part because of your influence over it.”

  Noel went still in a way that was dangerous. I’d always found that stillness could be considerably more threatening than action. It was the fear of the unknown that made the potential energy coiled in stillness so much more frightening than the kinetic.

  “Watch how you speak of the Order, son,” he said quietly. “It is not the type of organization that takes lightly to slander, nor is it one that accepts defectors.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him and stepped forward to loom over him with my excess three inches of height. “And I am not the type of man who takes rejection or evasion for an answer, especially when loyalty is called into question. I’ll ask you once more, Noel, where the fuck is my wife?”

  “I told you not to do this. I told you your enemies would smell your blood in the water if you were so weak to take a slave as your wife.”

  “And I told you,” I growled, feeling the frenzy of panicked rage erode my iron shields. “Our name would make Cosima safer than anything else could, even keeping her in the relative security of slavery. It was too late to keep her from their notice.”

  I knew the way the Order of Dionysus worked because I’d been pledged to the secret society since birth without my contest, my will signed over by my father in a binding, eternal contract.

  They wanted Cosima for themselves, or they wanted her destroyed.

  She was a poor choice for a slave, in the end.

  I’d wanted her to end Salvatore and my turncoat excuse for a brother, but I should have known she was too glorious not to glint brightly from the shadows. She drew covetous glances, inspired lustful aspirations, and turned me from a player without weakness to a king constantly in check.

  To see her was to want her, to know her at all was to be enamoured by her.

  I’d bought her as a weapon to use against my enemies, and she’d become the ultimate tool for my destruction.

  To mitigate the disaster, I’d married her.

  It was against the rules of the Order. They expressly forbade intimate relationships with slaves. They were property. Livestock. Nothing more, and maybe something even less. To marry a slave was to marry the cow you sought to slaughter. It was the worst of all sins and punished mercilessly by the society. A chap I’d gone to Eton with had been castrated for the crime of loving his slave over a decade ago, but it was punishment no one would soon forget.

  “If they’d done away with her, you’d know, son. The Order wants you to know why you are paying a price for your disobedience. I will say, Sherwood was just speaking with Willows and Canby about your insolence. I believe there was talk of punishment. If not for you,” he said with a slow, sly smile that spread poison as an oil slick across the otherwise placid cast of his face, “then for her. Maybe it’s a good thing she’s run away.”

  “She hasn’t fucking run,” I snapped.

  Cosima never would.

  I’d broken her the way God had broken his fallen angels, tearing the wings from their backs and blinding them to the light of heaven. But she had endured. More than that, she’d bloody well thrived, taking to my sinful explorations and tainted lifestyle as if she had been born for it.

  She was the bravest person I knew. No brand of adversity would take her from my side. Not unless she didn’t want to be there.

  And she did.

  At least, some voice in my chest that I’d never listened to before whispered to me that she did. That she was made for me in a way that had to be cosmic.

  It was appropriate that her name meant beauty of the cosmos because, to me, that was exactly what she embodied.

  The beauty of all living things.

  My chest ached and burned as I thought about all the times I’d wanted to say something like that to her but refrained. Poetry and emotion were for the poor and the uneducated, my father and tutors had always preached.

  It was only with Cosima that the idea of being impoverished and stripped of my massive wealth and considerable influence seemed almost preferable if it meant I’d be free to… to be with her.

  “She wouldn’t run,” I repeated, stepping up to my father again and pushing my hand against his heartless chest to keep him pinned. “Not unless someone made her.”

  “Women are weak. You think she could handle the kind of man you are? Women are for using, Alexander, not cherishing. Have I taught you nothing?” Noel sneered.

  “You taught me everything about the kind of person I don’t want to be,” I said through my gritted teeth. “If you think your manipulations will keep me from finding out who took my wife from me, you’re sadly mistaken. Not only will I find them, but I will also end them with my bare hands.”

  To highlight my point, I wrapped my hands once more around his throat, squeezing so tightly that I could feel the bones in his vertebrae grind together.

  He let me.

  Ominous premonition rolled down my spine.

  For my entire life, my father had always been one step ahead. I’d seen him put into impossible positions with his creditors as a boy, with testing, power-hungry members of the Order as I grew old, and somehow, each time, when it seemed the end w
as near, he’d slipped out of their hold and come out on top.

  If he was letting me punish him now, it was because it served his purpose.

  Disgusted, I let him drop to his feet, then kicked them out from under him with a lazy sideswipe so that he fell to the grass against the house.

  He glared up at me, more disturbed by the effect of the dirt on his Spencer Hart suit than by any violence I’d done to him.

  “It’s pathetic how much you’ve let this woman get under your skin.” He sneered at me as he adjusted his cuff links. “No son of mine should be so affected by a woman, even if she is comely.”

  Comely?

  The word was entirely too meek to describe her. She was magnificent from the ends of her midnight black hair to the tips of her thick, dark lashes. She was the most beautiful creature anyone in her life had ever had the good fortune to clap eyes on, and all of that, that considerable glory, was mine.

  Not just because I owned, broke her, and used her.

  But because intrinsically, fucking elementally, she belonged with me.

  I growled low in my chest. “You’re clearly no help to me. I’ll find out who took her if I have to threaten every person of influence at this wedding.”

  “This sham wedding,” he reminded me. “You only married her in a misguided effort to dig yourself out of the deep, dark hole you’d gotten the both of you into, correct?”

  I gritted my teeth and gave him a terse nod.

  He didn’t deserve to know how I felt about my slave.

  My topolina.

  My wife.

  “They’ll kill you for loving her,” he told me as he languidly gained his feet and flicked a piece of grass off his grey bespoke suit. “They’ll kill you, and you know it, so do us both a favour and don’t get the heir of Greythorn killed for something so idiotic. Stalking around like an enraged bull in a china shop will only get you murdered and your precious slave lost for good. They’re just looking for a reason to take you down a peg or take you out entirely. Ever since you took that beating for Ruthie, they’ve been watching and waiting.”

  “Her name is Cosima,” I corrected pointlessly.