Read Online Shattered by Alexia Foxx - Free Book Online

as she came back before him. 
    She took up his hand in hers an d pushed it to the lacing at her side.  “Loosen this for me.”
    Nathan felt along the flare of her hips as he traced the crisscrossed ribbon up her side.  He barely touched her but it was enough.  It made him feel warm and connected.  On the rare occasions that his fingertips glanced her skin he smiled, mostly inwardly, sometimes not.  He lost track of his progress in his sightlessness until the tight leather dress slacked around her body.  Robin moved to accommodate him and he loosened the last cross section, just beneath her arm.  The whole thing fell to the ground.
    He had no idea why she was getting undressed but he knew better than to question it.  Robin didn’t give him much time to.  She stripped away his clothing much more quickly and the sudden friction against his skin reignited pain.  Nathan just barely managed to bite back his reaction and despite it he was hard.
    Robin mov ed around behind him and touched his backside next.  The fierce sting there blurred the line her finger traced.  “These are really going to hurt when you get in the water…,” she warned him.  “Come on.”
    Tension on the rope again and Nathan moved forward, but lost to the ambient sound of the water was its location.  Two steps was all it took before warmth flowed over his feet.  He wasn’t expecting that at all and froze, but an insistent tug from Robin got him moving again.
    Water lapped at his legs and up, just past his knees, before the first current washed over his tattered backside.  The shock caught him off guard, despite Robin’s warning and his own common sense, and his legs buckled beneath him.  Pain shot up his back and he lost his balance.
    Fully submerging was like taking the entire beating a second time, all at once, and he fell to all fours in the water as he cried out.  He grasped futilely at the smoothed stone with his hands in an attempt to banish some of that pain, but his fingers found only frustration instead.
    “If you r aim is to drown yourself you should wait until we’re deeper,” Robin said, once the echoes of his voice were again overtaken by water, and Nathan could hear the smirk behind her words.
    He couldn’t tell if he was crying or if it was just warm water soaked into the blindfold that made tracks down his face.  The loose end of the rope, the side he had lost when he fell, was laid out for him across his shoulder.  Nathan took it and stood, fighting back the second wave of pain as those welts broke the tension of the water and sat in air once more.  The muscles in his legs trembled, but he ground his teeth together and took another step.  He was determined to survive this with a strength he hadn’t felt since being brought here.
    Nath an submerged up to his waist before Robin stopped him.  Or, more appropriately, before the end of the pool she led him to stopped him.
    “Hands flat against the wall prince,” she said, tapping him on the back with the coarse sponge she held in hand.
    Robin set to work cleaning him.  She started at his shoulders first, then down across his shoulder blades in two large circles.  She wasn’t as strong as his handlers but persistence in the same spot soon had his skin tingling just the same.  That heat spread across his lower back as she worked down his body, stopping just shy of the first raised welt on his ass.
    “ You’d never guess how close we are to the castle,” Robin said, almost as idle conversation as she worked.  And when he didn’t guess she went on, “It’s not even a full day’s walk from here.  I hear the King has posted a substantial reward for information regarding your disappearance, but so far it has not been paid out. They’ll never find you here.”
    She paused then, giving him a chance to r eact to her provocations, but Nathan knew better.  Not that his mind was on her words anyway.  The image of her body that his hands had traced lingered