The Prince's Slave Read online

  “If I make beautiful women lose their minds,” he said, “or at least this beautiful woman, then I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  She glanced up, meeting his eyes again. His expression was hard to read, but not unkind. There was something in his eyes that seemed to understand, but it was there and gone almost too quickly to credit. And then the insolent look was back. “And however rude you are,” he continued, “it’s my wish to take you to dinner.”

  “Oh.”

  “Since you are, as you’re fond of pointing out, my captive, I’m afraid that I’ll be doing so in the dining room rather than somewhere more glamorous. Perhaps,” he added, offering her his arm, “after you’ve become more acclimatized to your situation, I’ll take you into the city.”

  She hesitated, and then extended her hand. Taking it gently in his own, he tucked it into the crook of his arm. He was standing very close. He was wearing the same cologne that she remembered from earlier, although not much of it. There was just the faintest whiff of—something. Sandalwood, perhaps. Or bergamot. She blushed, feeling flustered at being aware of him like this. As another human being. A man.

  She tried to pull back, but her hand was trapped. She stilled. Reaching out, over the few inches between them, he trailed his fingertips down the side of her face. Luna had pinned her hair up, and her neck was bare. He traced the curve behind the hollow of her ear.

  He looked as if he were about to say something, but then abruptly he turned and led her out of the room.

  TWENTY-TWO

  He brought her, not to the banquet hall where the original regnant had entertained his guests, but to a far more intimate space: the private dining room designed for family gatherings. It was still large by Belle’s standards, but almost small in comparison to the rest of the castle. She felt dwarfed in most of the rooms, lost. But this room, with its walnut paneling and fire crackling cheerfully in the fireplace, felt almost like part of a real home.

  The table, which was ornate, sat twelve. Belle recognized it as an antique, but she couldn’t place the period. She didn’t know much about furniture. But she bet that Ash did. He seemed like the type who, despite his protestations to the contrary, knew the contents of his house down to the last candy dish. As much as he pretended to be one kind of person, Belle wasn’t naïve enough to think that a bored aristocrat who did nothing but have sex and feel sorry for himself could have amassed this kind of an empire.

  He, like the feeling that she’d traveled through the portal, was an illusion.

  If she’d had visions of sitting at opposite ends of the table, staring at each other over the candelabra like in the movies, they were dispelled when he pulled out the chair next to that at the head of the table.

  “Normally I let my servants do this,” he said, somewhat apologetically, “but you deserve my personal attention.”

  He waited. She sat. He pushed in her chair and then sat down next to her, sprawling artlessly yet somehow gracefully like the sultan he seemed to think he was. Minutes later, a servant appeared with wine. He poured two glasses, and left.

  “Do you drink?” Ash asked.

  “No.” Belle stared at the dark liquid. “Not much.”

  It looked like blood.

  She wondered if she should feel flattered. His personal attention. She felt naked under his gaze. She examined her forks, her spoons, the rim of the charger, anything to avoid meeting it. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do, what she was supposed to pretend was happening here. She’d seen television shows, on one popular crime drama in particular, where serial killers did things like abduct prostitutes and force them to act like girlfriends. And kill them, when they didn’t. A vision of Scheherazade flashed through her mind again. But Scheherazade, at least in some versions of the story, had volunteered.

  The first course was served: a single piece of duck breast, artfully presented over an equally painstakingly shaped cake of barley risotto. Belle didn’t like duck. The wine tasted like dirt.

  “What?” he asked. He sounded bemused. “Not a fan of duck?”

  “Actually, no.” She steeled herself, forcing herself to look up and meet his gaze. Finally. “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

  “Eating dinner?” He was toying with her. “I do it every night.”

  She waited.

  He grew serious. And, she thought, irritated. “Would you prefer to dine on gruel, in the dungeon?” he asked, an edge to his voice. “Because that can be arranged.”

  If he’d meant to intimidate her, he hadn’t. “Yes,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “It would be more honest.”

  He sipped his wine. “And this isn’t honest?”

  “You’re treating me like a guest.”

  He was thoughtful for a time, eating his duck and sipping his wine. He finished and the plates were cleared. She hadn’t touched hers, more than a few bites. The next course appeared: some kind of fish. Ash had perfect table manners. Belle found the fish a little more palatable, but could still only eat a few bites. She didn’t know how she was supposed to eat in these circumstances. There were no sounds except the clinking of glasses and silverware, and occasionally a faint hiss from one of the candles.

  And then he spoke again. She’d grown so used to the silence that he startled her. “Some men keep their slaves, willing and otherwise, in dungeons. Although dungeon is a misnomer, in those cases. They’re plush, padded rooms filled with all manner of erotic delights that even the Marquis de Sade couldn’t have dreamed up.

  “For people with no imagination,” he said witheringly. “They rely on props.”

  “Willingly?” she asked. She didn’t understand why anyone would want that.

  “Yes. A life of boredom, punctuated by moments of pleasure. Saturated fully in the erotic arts….” He finished his wine. “Surrounded by all the best that the world has to offer.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know.” The statement was oblique. He put down his fork. “They keep a list of elaborate, often pointless rules that they make their slaves follow and call this sadism. When in reality they’re not so different from the average tax collector. A tin pot god, deriving all his self-esteem from his knowledge of an obscure code that no one else knows and, by virtue of his position, his ability to control others with it. Because outside of that tiny domain, he has no control. I’ve heard men,” he continued, “brag about their little schemes: use this name on this day, or wait for permission to speak. They derive great pleasure from trying to trick their slaves, or submissives as the case may be, into fucking up.”

  “Oh,” Belle said.

  “No real goal is furthered,” he told her, “other than to give them a false sense of control. Whereas a real dominant—inside the bedroom or out—needs no such props to assert his authority. Because true authority doesn’t lie in tying someone up, or forcing them to wear some ridiculous outfit, but in making them want to obey you.”

  The whole way he said it was terrifying: make them want to obey you. As though it were easy. He was as calm as if he’d been sharing his thoughts on the stock market. Belle had read once that the truest sign of a good negotiator was his—or her—willingness to walk away from the bargaining table. The French term was sang froid: cold blood. And Ash had ice in his veins. She wondered if he’d ever cared, truly cared about another person.

  “I’ve had paid submissives,” he said casually. “It was boring.”

  “Why?” she asked. She was curious in spite of herself. He was so…open about things that growing up she’d never heard anyone mention. And yet, at the same time, he was so closed about the things that mattered. She was sitting here, a captive in his castle, and she hadn’t the first clue what he wanted from her. Even the obvious answer…didn’t seem so obvious now. Nothing did, anymore, and she found herself growing more and more confused with each passing minute.

  “Expectations. They’ve read too many cheap novels. I don’t know. But there’s no chall
enge. They give me what they think I want, because it’s their job.”

  “And you don’t like that?”

  His expression was unreadable. “No.”

  Belle had heard something of the world he was discussing: it mainly seemed to consist of women who pranced around with no underwear because they weren’t allowed to wear any. And strange buzzing devices. And people with a level of sexual stamina that didn’t seem achievable in real life—at least not without chemical intervention.

  According to Charlotte, who should know, the average sexual encounter lasted no more than five minutes. A marathon, as she put it, lasted fifteen. So how was it, in the books, that people had sex for hours? What were they doing all that time?

  She studied her plate.

  Would he want her to do…things like that? She’d never been entranced by anything…unusual. She was the girl who thrilled to every single one of Disney’s happy endings. Not…whips and chains. She’d grown up believing that good sex was loving one another.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, “why regular things aren’t, um, what you want. And why people agreeing, and wanting the same thing, is bad.”

  “It’s not that their wanting the same thing is bad,” he said, surprising her. “Quite the opposite. But they don’t really want the same thing, you see. They’re pretending, and for reasons of their own. Usually money-related. And sometimes because they’re just as jaded as I am, and have nothing better to do. They don’t want me, as an individual, any more than I want them. They just want someone to play a part.”

  The silence stretched. Belle could almost feel bad for him, until she remembered what a monster he was. He was like an overgrown child, who kidnapped people to play with him.

  Abruptly, he stood up. “We don’t need dessert,” he said.

  She started, surprised.

  “Let’s go for a walk.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  A few minutes later, she found herself in the garden. The air raised gooseflesh on her skin. Removing his jacket, he settled it on her shoulders. An oddly courtly gesture, in light of their present circumstances.

  “Thank you,” she said reflexively. It was the second time in as many days that he’d dressed her in his own clothing.

  “You’re welcome.”

  A series of small lights lined the path, glowing from underneath the undergrowth, illuminating the ground just enough for safety without being obtrusive. They looked to Belle like fairy lights. Above them, a billion stars were scattered across a sky like black velvet. The perfect, enveloping dark made the night seem warmer than it was.

  Belle picked her way carefully. She wasn’t used to wearing heels. It wasn’t lost on her that, in other circumstances, this tableau might be romantic. She felt oddly like she’d just been to prom. And beside her was a man she barely knew, whom she was fairly certain she hated, but who nonetheless had been the target of more honesty than she’d shared in the previous five years. With anyone.

  “The correct term,” he said, “is the hedonic treadmill.” His hands were in his pockets, his hair falling forward over his forehead as he, too, studied the ground. He’d rolled up his shirtsleeves and in this moment he looked oddly young. Not so much like the domineering ogre she’d come to expect during their short acquaintance but like the British schoolchild he must once have been. “Which rather stuffy sounding expression contains within it the answer to your earlier question.”

  Their eyes met. She said nothing. She wondered if he was cold.

  They kept walking. Somewhere, an owl screeched. The sudden noise sent a chill up Belle’s spine. “The word hedonic refers to pleasant—or unpleasant—sensations. The latter can, as it turns out, be equally addicting.” He barked a short, bitter laugh and Belle, who didn’t understand the reaction she was having, listened.

  “Growing up as I did…combine the normal amount of presents that children are apt to get, just for being cute, with the amount of presents lavished on a royal and you have a recipe for disaster. Even the scion of a house that hasn’t been relevant since the fall of the British Raj in 1947 is raised to believe that he is somehow special. Different. Set apart, and better than others. And rarely, even though his family lives in penury, does anything happen to change that.” He made a small, dismissive gesture. “I, of course, did not grow up in penury. But I have friends who did and to be honest I can’t say whose lot was worse.”

  “Because their reality never matched their expectations,” she said.

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “Whereas yours did.”

  Although he didn’t realize, apparently, that not all children were showered with presents. Some people, however much they would have liked to, simply couldn’t afford them. Belle’s parents had done their best, but she’d never had much in the way of material possessions. She would have liked to say that she’d been so enlightened as to not have missed them, but that wasn’t true. She’d been jealous of her friends whose parents could afford to buy them American Girl dolls, and all the various Barbie dream houses.

  “But that’s the thing,” he said. “It never does.” And then, “as for the treadmill, a man named Campbell coined the term in 1971. His and his research partner’s, Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society, is required reading in almost every business school curriculum in the world.

  “According to them, regardless of the stimulus, human beings quickly adapt and return to a relatively stable level of happiness. In other words, if a man makes more money, his expectations and desires rise in tandem. He isn’t any happier than he was before. Even people who have the best of everything quickly become used to it,” he added. “Once they start wanting more, they don’t know how to stop; the thrill of having new experiences, of acquiring new things, wears off. And they’re back to where they were before the cars, the parties, the sex: bored.”

  They’d been walking through the now dormant rose bushes, side by side, but abruptly he stopped and turned. “You’ve no idea what I’m talking about at all, do you.”

  “Yes,” she said honestly, “I do. I’m just—I’m surprised that you’re educated,” she confessed in a rush of words.

  “Why?”

  “I wouldn’t have—figured you as the type.”

  “And all this?” He sounded angry. “I didn’t earn it with my fabulous figure.”

  “I supposed you’d inherited it,” she said quietly.

  He shook his head. “Fair enough.” He ran his hand through his hair, pushing it back, the first truly unpracticed gesture she’d seen him make. “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m worried I’ve kidnapped a child.”

  “Would it make a difference?”

  He sighed. “To be honest, no.”

  She decided to repay his honesty in kind. Or perhaps she’d just been taken off guard by this sudden and unexpected authenticity. “I’m twenty,” she said, “as of last week.”

  “God, you are a child.”

  Belle knew she looked young. She always had, and years of dancing had meant a punishing physical discipline that kept her from developing entirely normally. Many of the gymnasts she’d known had suffered from the same problem. But, chronological age aside, compared to Ash she was young. He’d been older at her age, she suspected, than she’d ever be.

  He seemed to regain control of himself. “As a matter of fact,” he informed her, resuming their walk, “after I graduated from Oxford I attended the London Business School.” Which, Belle knew, was prestigious. He must have gotten excellent grades at Oxford. Somehow. “I could tell you stories about my aristocratic peers…one of them, a cousin of ours, lives in a five hundred year old royal hunting lodge that’s disintegrated into little more than a shack. There’s no power, and no sanitation, but she refuses to get a job.”

  “Refuses?” This mode of thinking was utterly alien to Belle, who’d grown up in one working class community after another, surrounded by people for whom steady employment was
a source of pride.

  “Pools of black mold grow on the ceiling, and weeds sprout from the roof. But its illustrious resident dislikes even mingling with commoners. She says that ordinariness is a sin.”

  “A sin?”

  “We’re not like the British, with their House of Windsor, or the Americans with the Kennedy family. There are 565 royal families in India, each of whom feels that they are superior to all the rest and all of whom are unused to the idea that they might have to earn something in order to succeed. For years, those who survived did so under British sufferance; stripped of any real power, they turned inward to amuse themselves.

  “The Maharajah of Bharatpur had twenty two Rolls-Royce garbage trucks.”

  “Well no wonder you were deposed,” Belle blurted, then raised her fingertips to her mouth as though she could take back the words. But Ash only nodded thoughtfully. He, apparently, agreed. And the notion that any country’s royal family—or families—should live off the state was an antiquated one. The Spanish royal family had supported itself for years, with virtually all but those closest to the king holding actual jobs.

  “A handful have become powerful politicians. Some have found their paths in the business world. And some have turned their palaces into glorified bed and breakfasts that sell hazy dreams of the past. Still others are self-styled celebrities, supporting themselves by making appearances at clubs and polo tournaments.

  “The Princess of Jaipur, whom magazines once called the most beautiful woman in the world, pitches jewelry from some line I’ve never heard of. But the others…being a god is too much of a privilege to let go.” That sad smile had returned, the faintest ghost of an expression as he contemplated something only he could see. “The rest sell off piles of jewelry, fleets of Rolls-Royces and veritable armories of the same antique hunting rifles they used to defend their British friends during the uprising in 1857.”