Page 17 of Never Broken

It was a real estate title.

2481 Salt River Boulevard in Glendale. That number, that address, looped around in my mind all day and all night. What was it? I knew it wasn’t corporate headquarters—that was One Langer Drive, reprinted on the envelope’s return address. It was something else. Something Wainwright-Phillips thought wasimportant enough to file away in a sealed envelope but not open. Something he didn’t want to know but also didn’t want anybody else to know.

It had to be where Langer was keeping my sister.

I thought about it the next morning while the green-eyed maid sucked me off. Her mouth was even bigger than it had looked, and I closed my eyes and at leasttriedto enjoy the sensation of her full lips working my shaft hungrily, licking and kissing her way up and down with little moans of delight like someone had treated her to a crème brûlée. Of course it didn’t help the mood that my back was pressed up against a bag of rice, the individual grains poking into my skin, and the pantry was hot, cramped, and smelled like stale cereal and old dog food. It was far from the worst place I’d ever tried to get my rocks off, but as much as this girl was trying her best to make things interesting, I couldn’t pretend this wasn’t exactly like most slave sex: rushed, clinical, matter-of-fact. Just a way to release tension—to forget, for a few minutes, that life was shit.

And then all of a sudden,nothingwas shit because it wasn’t her anymore. It was theotherher. Ridiculous reams of curls, huge gray eyes staring up at me, as rapt and dilated as the glossy, pouty, spoiled (virgin?) lips wrapped luxuriously around my shaft, inhaling?—

Fuck.No. Just no.

Shoving the image away violently, I came with a grunt in the maid’s mouth, and she swallowed greedily, continuing to moan her squirrely little moans even as she choked a little. But I wasn’t even seeing her anymore as I zipped up and reached for the door.

“Hey,” she purred, grabbing my raw wrist in a gentle way that sort of broke my heart. “Stay. They won’t be down here for a few minutes.” I turned around. She ran her tongue around the edges of her lips enticingly as if gulping down my entire wad hadstill left her hungry. But I saw the desperation behind it. Briefly, I wondered if Wainwright-Phillips himself was fucking her—it was rare for a slave girl as enticing as she was to go unused by at least one free man, and our master was the only free man currently living there. But that was unlikely since if she were his favorite, she probably wouldn’t be stuck scouring ovens. And if she wasn’t, that meant she hadn’t been laid anytime recently. It wasn’t like she was swimming in options. The valet looked like he hadn’t had sex in decades, if ever, and the gardener was such a perverted creep that the housekeeper had said they’d had to board up the window of the women’s quarters to keep him from peeping in at them from outside. Plus, the property was sprawling; even the closest neighbors were a half-mile away. She was lonely. In other words, she wanted to form an attachment.

Fuck attachments. It was bad enough that I’d been raised with my sister long enough to know her and love her. It was even worse that I’d known my mother long enough to go feral with rage when she died. I knew attachments. Attachments were why I was trying to figure out the best way to get to 2481 Salt River Boulevard without getting hauled in as a runaway. Why part of me just wanted to take off—hitchhike, steal a car, whatever I had to do. But it would be suicide. For one, I didn’t know the area, and removing the metal chain on my wrist was impossible without the right tools, not to mention being a crime in itself. Worst of all, the minute Wainwright-Phillips realized I was gone, he’d trigger the GPS tracker in my microchip. I’d be shackled in the back of a police van by morning. I might not end up in the mines as a first-time runaway, but either way, I’d be fucked, and no closer to finding my sister.

Attachments were what was going to get me killed.

Horny or not, I’d have to keep my distance from the maid from now on. It would hurt her, probably, but not as much as if I led her on further. I needed to get entangled with her like Ineeded more welts on my back, and given what I was planning, it was for her own good, too. In the aftermath, she’d be the first person they’d question, and it would only go downhill for her from there.

Plus, there was Louisa Wainwright-Phillips.

Plus?Pluswhat?An attachment with a slave girl may be stupid, but an attachment with a free girl would be like digging my own grave and jumping into it. So what if the dim-lighting theory didn’t hold up? So what if it had turned out that, despite all my hopes, my new master’s daughter had a body that drank upeverykind of light, a body made entirely of soft lines and slow curves, one of those tiny, sexy moles right under her eye, gray irises that reminded me of a stormy day on the North Sea, and more long, thick cascades of curly hair than a guy—any guy, no one in particular—could ever run his fingers through in a million years?

And the smile. When she deigned to let it blossom over her entire face, it transformed her from daddy’s Type A princess, anxious to do everything proper and correctly, back into the carefree, goofy, gap-toothed girl she must still be, somewhere deep down where for some reason she was determined to never let it show.

Not that I’d been looking at her. That would have been inappropriate.

Plus, she couldn’t hum a George Gershwin tune to save her life, and adorably, still couldn’t decide whether she wanted to screech at me not to look at her or giggle at my jokes, most of which, let’s face it, were B material at best.

And rather than hurt me, she’d been willing to risk her father’s wrath. There had beentearsin those gray eyes over it. Like I hadn’t already experienced 100 times worse than whatever she could possibly do to me.

And absolutely none of this should matter. Fuck, I was here to save my sister, and getting myself flogged and thrown in a mine for touching my master’s daughter would put more than a slight wrinkle in that plan. At this point, it didn’t matter what I planned to use Louisa for, or how good or lucky I was at doing it. The trouble she could get me in outweighed whatever value she offered. I should have shut it all down after the intercom, for fuck’s sake. Not to mention she was dating Douchebag McQueen or whatever his name was, even though she said she wasn’t. I wondered if he’d fucked her yet. I couldn’t imagine that creep would wait—but maybeshewould. Maybe shewasa virgin. Or maybe they both were.

And again, why the hell should I care?

Focus, kid.I needed a computer, or at least a phone. And no, not to watch porn, as much tension as I still needed to blow off.

A computer might be easier to get to. It was illegal for slaves to use the internet—too many dangerous ideas there—but that had never stopped me from sneaking online whenever my old master’s back was turned. In the chemistry lab, it had been easy enough. They had satellite images of almost anywhere in the world. If only they had X-ray images; then I could see into Langer’s building to figure out just what diabolical project he had in the works and whether it included my sister. But where to find a computer?

“Hey, you okay?”

I’d forgotten the maid was even there. But even as she reached up to arc her hands around to touch my broad, solid shoulders, her fingers digging into my back, I couldn’t relax. The massage felt good, and it was clear she wanted me to open up to her. But the only two things on my mind right now—my sister and, fuck it all, Louisa—were impossible to tell her about.

“Tell me,” she murmured. “Can I help?”

“Yeah,” I replied with a sudden burst of inspiration. I was good at those. “Maybe you can. How many computers are in this house?”

As she kneaded, she spewed valuable intel. “The one in the master’s office, of course, and the mistress’s laptop and a tablet. And Miss Louisa has a laptop.”

“Where does she keep it?” I asked casually.

“On her desk. But only when she’s home.”

Damn. “Who usually cleans Miss Louisa’s room, and when?”

“Me,” she said, long fingers magically digging out a knot that had been there for days, while I valiantly tried not to melt too far into the touch because it already wasn’t her hands I was feeling anymore. “At two o’clock.”

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