Captive Prince: Volume One

Keep the slave restrained here in the harem. The Prince’s orders. No one is to come in or out of the room. The Prince’s orders. Two guards at the door at all times. The Prince’s orders. Don’t let him off the chain. The Prince’s orders.

Laurent was on the reclining couch, his feet tucked up under him in a relaxed, boyish posture. A book of scrollworked pages was open before him. There was a goblet on the small table beside him. At some point during the night, a servant must have spent the requisite half hour unlacing his austere outer garments, for Laurent wore only pants and a white shirt, the material so fine it did not require embroidery to declaim its expense. The room was lamp lit. Laurent’s body was a series of graceful lines under the shirt’s soft folds. Damen’s eyes lifted to the white column of his throat, and above that the golden hair, parting around the shell cup of an unjewelled ear. The image was damascened, as beaten metal. He was reading.

Laurent was not the type to smuggle men into his rooms for midnight assignations.

“Not quite,” said Damen.

Erasmus bit his lip, and all his burnished curls fell over his forehead. “You’re—in love with him?”

The court sounds were muted, as though they were very distant. Louder and more intimate were the sounds of insects in the gardens below, and the slow back-and-forth of greenery.

except for the ones he had recently been staring into.

“You may hand me the leash,” said a pleasant voice, very close.

Damen looked up into a pair of limpid blue eyes.

Their loyalty apparently did not prohibit the fantasy of fucking the Prince taking on mythic proportions.

The slaves knelt in demonstration of their willing submissiveness.