“You dance for his pleasure,” she said sourly.

“Yes,” the servant responded, meeting her gaze. “And for my own. I am a dancer, Jessica. That is what I was when Lord Mason and Enrique found me. Dancing allows me to connect more deeply to my own sensuality. When I surrender to it, it also becomes my lord’s pleasure.”

It gave Jessica an unbidden image, of Amara dancing for Lord Mason as he sat in the shadows. Opening his robe to stroke himself while watching her made her so wet and needy for him that her thighs were glistening when done. She came to her knees before him, begging for the privilege of him spilling his seed on her breasts.

Jess viciously shrugged off the image. What was the matter with her? Amara would do that. Not her.

Allah has blessed him. With no sisters or friends to giggle with about such things or explore her wonder about them, Farida had made her diary her confidant for her innocent reactions. Thick, long and beautiful, his organ is a pillar that makes a woman’s body grateful to clasp it.

Amara rose after adjusting the skirt and ankle manacles and turned Jess toward a mirror. She affixed a choker of small jade stones around her throat, the hold of the collar making Jessica shiver, shadows in her mind shifting, uncertain.

“You are beautiful, Jessica.”

But when Amara’s hand trailed over Jess’s back scars, Jess jerked away from her touch, avoiding her gaze in the mirror. “If I’d been smart, I’d have stolen Raithe’s blood and scarred up my face, so he’d have killed me to avoid looking at me.”

“Jess.” Amara took hold of her shoulders, brought her back to the mirror. “I know our words mean nothing to you. Only time will prove the truth of it. But I swear to you that Lord Mason is not a vampire like that.”

“You’re saying he wouldn’t throw me down and fuck me, if I showed even a second of willingness?” Jessica’s gaze shot up, met hers in the mirror. “What about if I got in his face and pissed him off? They all have a limit on what they’ll let us dish out. But none at all on what they’ll take away from us.”

Amara held her eyes. While there was no censure in her expression, her voice was even, firm. “Then test him, Jessica. Make him angry, the man who let you live even after you desecrated the tomb of his lover, who brought you here to help you heal.” Jess shrugged her off again and moved away from the mirror. Since she’d been used to shuffling for a while, walking with the manacles was much the same movement. But she wasn’t that sick person anymore, so having to do so now because of her hobbles made her even angrier. She was going to lose her mind. “You know what? He told you to take care of me. That doesn’t include talking. Dress up the demented little psych patient, sit her in a chair in the corner and stop feeding me bullshit about Lord Mason being a touchy-feely vampire.”

“I did not say he was that. I was saying—”

“I don’t give a shit,” Jessica snarled. “Shut up, shut up, shut up. You can’t be trusted. You’re his. You’ll say anything for him, do anything for him. I’m not falling for it. Dress me up for him. Keep me manacled, so when he comes to hurt me, I can’t fight him. I’d say he can’t do more to me than’s already been done, but vampires always can. There’s always something more they can do.

And . . . let . . . me . . . loose. ”

The last words were a screech as she threw herself at the wall. Not because it made any sense, but because the energy was screaming through her muscles. Now she understood why a wild animal would fight a trap until he tore off a limb to get free. She had to be free. She couldn’t tolerate this.

Enrique had apparently decided to watch over his wife more closely, for before Amara could act, he’d reentered the room. Moving swiftly, he caught Jess before she could rear back and slam herself against the plaster again. As he grabbed her around the waist and chest and pulled her back, his arms became many arms, his scent suffocating her, a stench of male lust closing in over her head like sewage water, drowning her. “Let me go.”

As she shrieked, he sat her on the floor, going down with her. She writhed, biting, doing her best to get away, vaguely cognizant of Amara saying something and him releasing her, moving back as she flopped back and forth like a fish on the sand. Helpless. She was so fucking helpless . . .

Habiba , stop it.

When the thunderous command exploded in her head, it stilled her, as much as she didn’t want it to do so. She stopped thrashing, but she couldn’t stop the nervous rock of her body, back and forth, back and forth. I’m not hurting them.

You are trying to hurt yourself. That is unacceptable.

Why? Want the privilege of doing it yourself? Take these fucking things off . I can’t think. I can’t . . . breathe, with them on. Please . . . take them off . . . I’ ll do anything . . . Just don’t trap me, please please please . . .

She pressed her forehead hard into the wood of the floor and the adjacent stippled edge of the Persian rug. Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to shut it all off. In control for so long, and now she couldn’t find the switch to get a grip on herself again, as if the manacles had unleashed a beast inside. If she had some control over herself, maybe she could find the control on her mind. She couldn’t bear this; she couldn’t handle the jagged ache in her chest that threatened to shut off her breath. Every escape route gone.

God, what had she done to deserve Hell? It was a question she’d stopped asking herself long ago, realizing that there was something worse. No Hell, no Heaven, nothing but random chaos. Her life meaningless to anyone but herself, and she wanted to stop caring about that.

Silence. She realized Enrique and Amara were gone, but she wasn’t alone. She could feel him watching her from the doorway.

Managing to roll over, she made it to her knees, not wanting to face him from her back.

“You know, a vampire who doesn’t get his full eight hours of sleep can be very cranky,” he observed mildly.

Jessica kept her head down, her breath rasping in her throat. More tears had squeezed out of her eyes during her tirade, and she turned her face into her shoulder, trying to get rid of them. One had rolled down the side of her nose and itched.

When he went to one knee beside her, she noted he was wearing a pair of jeans and only that, versus the embroidered tunic he’d had belted over it earlier. The pants had been pulled on hastily, because the top button was still undone. Her vision filled with the expanse of broad chest, the planes of a flat, hard stomach, the stretch of denim over groin and thigh.

Those things shouldn’t distract her, shouldn’t mean anything to her. Rocking back, she tried to duck under his grip, but it came to rest on the side of her face, the back of her neck, controlling her head. He made a soothing noise and wiped away the tears with his thumb, then rubbed her nose where the itch was. When she teetered precariously, he steadied her.

“Stop this,” she quavered. “Stop being nice to me.”

His amber gaze rose from the track of his thumbs to lock with hers. “Is that what you want, habiba? Or would you rather see how I punish a disobedient servant, so you can stop worrying about it?”

Jessica swallowed and found herself unable to speak, to even think under his gaze. She was so very tired. Emotionally, physically, even down to whatever kind of exhaustion could inflict the soul. But, in contrast, her nerves were stretched tight as lightning-charged wire, and the panic of those bonds was choking her.

He stared at her a long time, and she had the oddest thought he was struggling with some decision inside himself. Then he touched the manacle on her right wrist, and it clicked, unlocking. He did the same to the left and freed her of the ankle hobbles as well. The restraints dropped from her body.

She was on her knees to him, and that was unacceptable, his own words. She tried to pull away, to rise. Instead he turned her deftly to swing her up in his arms.

“What are you—”

“Be silent.” He carried her back into the bedroom, to a wing-backed chair. When he sat down, he flipped her so she was on her stomach on his lap, her upper body teetering over the edge, his denim-clad calves under her grasping fingers. While she struggled to move, he of course held her down with little effort as he pulled up the back of the skirt, exposing her buttocks to the air. “Jessica, I do not wish to be woken again today. You’ll let Amara and Enrique care for you, with no more tantrums or interruptions.” Whap!

She’d had skin peeled from her back. She’d been flogged, burned, stabbed, electrocuted . . . Hell, name any torture that had been devised in creative human history and she’d probably experienced some form of it. One part of her had started to shut down as soon as she realized she’d been right, that he was going to hurt her. And this did hurt, but not the way Raithe had hurt her. This was . . . he was simply spanking her. With a strong, open palm that made her buttocks wobble and tingle. As she squirmed, he put his hand on the back of her neck, holding her there with a firm but gentle hand, and kept doing it. When she struggled, her movements rubbed her clit on his hard thigh, and damn if she wasn’t getting . . . No. She tried to shut her mind down and couldn’t, because what he was rousing in her was cutting through the fear.

She tried to push it back, preferring fear, but he kept up the spanking, alternating cheeks, sometimes striking both at once with a thrum of sensation. Then he put a hand between her legs, and exposed the shame that she’d gotten wet. He dragged that moisture up between her cleft and stroked her rim, making her writhe and cry out more.

Just a teasing touch, and then he spanked her some more, until she was gasping. She’d abandoned the flailing of her arms in favor of gripping his denim cuffs, squeezing down on her reaction, fighting her traitorous body as hard as she could. Unable to face herself, she pressed her face into his calf. Her sex was throbbing, her backside aching, and she needed release. She shied from that like a startled horse. Had she lost her mind?

Then he slid her down between his spread thighs, onto her knees on the floor, and opened the jeans. Holy God. Yes, all vampires were beautiful, but now she understood why Farida had felt as she had. From her position on his lap, she knew he was hard and erect, but seeing it stretch forth to graze his flat belly, his testicles temptingly outlined by the stretch of denim . . .