Page 28 of Captive Heart

She nodded and simply crawled between his legs, resuming her ministrations, widening her lips around his generous member until she’d engulfed him all in her hot mouth and he hit the back of her throat. As she fought against the automatic gag reflex, she swallowed around his thickness again and again until a deep groan of pleasure was torn from him.

Damn, she was good at this. Her hand fondled his balls and one of her questing fingers rubbed at his perineum, massaging him until he could feel the semen pooling and his scrotum tightening.

Micah felt the sizzle in the base of his spine and sank his fingers into her hair so he could pull her off, but before he could warn her, she had grasped his buttocks tight and pulled him to her so that her nose pressed right into the wiry hairs at his groin.

She drank him down, hollowing out her cheeks and sucking him dry like he was some kind of lollipop, and all the while, she looked up at him from beneath her lashes, her wide, violet eyes locked with his. An expression of deep satisfaction evident in them.

Micah collapsed back into the water, his legs feeling strangely weak. He said nothing as he scooped her up and pulled her into a tender embrace. He'd be damned if she was going to selflessly get him off without at least the smallest ounce of affection from him in return.

Snuggling trustingly against him, she never once broke eye contact.

The moment was poignant, even as much as it had hurt him to allow it, but it wasn't until very much later that Micah realised just how significantly it had bound them together. How it was the turning point for his own emotions.

20

They'd done a lot of talking over the course of the day, but things were quiet after Micah dressed, and helped Melody into a comfortable chair in front of the ornate mirror in the French boudoir playroom and started to dry her hair with a blow dryer borrowed from the ladies' locker room.

"I could do that myself, you know," she offered quietly, studying him with a serious look.

"I know." He offered a small smile. The truth was he needed something to do with his hands, and the hum of the dryer drowned his turbulent thoughts.

The silence was companionable enough. They each had their own slew of thoughts, he guessed.

As he drew a brush through the length of her damp locks, he was startled once again by the length of it.

"I don't think I've ever seen someone with hair as long as this," he told her. It cascaded down her back all the way past her butt until it brushed against the backs of her thighs.

"Daddy liked it long. He used to put it in pigtails," she explained then faltered. "After Daddy, there was no such thing as haircuts, so it just grew and grew. I'm surprised he didn't cut it off just to spite me… except he used to like to use it like a rope…"

She trailed off and Micah found himself talking to take her mind away from whatever bad memory was skittering across her mind.

"I've never seen hair this colour, either." Micah examined the locks as he dried them, a frown drawing his brows together. He really hadn't seen hair this colour before. At least not on anyone as young as Melody.

As her hair dried, the colour lightened significantly until Micah realised that what he had assumed was pale blonde underneath all the matt and dirt was actually a silvery platinum. The kind women paid a fortune to have.

Melody ducked her head, refusing to meet his eyes in the ornate, gilt mirror as if she was embarrassed.

"It didn't used to be this colour," she admitted softly. "A few years ago, it just seemed to change. Not exactly overnight, although it seemed like it since I rarely got to look in a mirror. It was quite a shock when I first saw it, and now, it's even worse."

And it was shock that had likely caused it. Shock and trauma.

It hadn't gone unnoticed that there was a raw, bald area on her scalp where her hair seemed to have been deliberately torn out. His lips thinned, but to Melody, he said, "It's beautiful, truly. Quite unique."

He meant it, too, and was pleased at the way she peered at him from beneath those exquisitely long eyelashes which, he realised in that moment, were dark, while a tiny smile played at the corner of her lips.

"Do you know how old you are, Melody?"

Her face became pensive. "I don't remember a time when I ever celebrated my true birthday," she disclosed matter of factly. "But I know I was almost eighteen when I went to live with Daddy, because I was about to age out of the system."

"You left before you were eighteen?" Micah clarified.

"Yes, Daddy went to see the manager at the group home and told them he was offering me a place to live, and they let me go early."

Micah kept quiet about his suspicions on that account but made a mental note to ask Andy Storer to look into children's homes in the area to see if he could turn up any information that might prove useful.

"I celebrated birthdays with Daddy," she continued. "But they weren't really birthdays, even though he called them that. They were anniversaries of the day I went to live with him. I was five on the last birthday I spent with Daddy, but it wasn't near my next birthday when the brute came and took me away."

"So, you must have been twenty-three… when you left Daddy." If she noticed his pause as he chose his words, then she didn't allude to it. "And you said you thought another three summers had passed after that, which would make you twenty-six," Micah calculated.

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