The Captive by Grace Burrowes

Author:Grace Burrowes [Grace Burrowes]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: England, Historical Romance, Love Story, Regency Romance, Romance
ISBN: 9781402278785
Amazon: 1402278780
Barnesnoble: 1402278780
Goodreads: 18487090
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Published: 2014-06-30T14:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

Torture bore an intimacy, similar to that of a bad marriage. Only the tormenter and his victim knew the exact, awful course of the misery suffered. Those two participated in the dark duet of pain and manipulation to the exclusion of any spectators or seconds.

Though to be fair, Girard had eschewed physical pain as his preferred means of extracting information from Christian. With scientific precision, Girard tried to induce compliance by alternating pain and pleasure, abuse and care, setting himself up as the god of both dungeon and daylight.

More than anything, Christian had feared coming to love his captor. In a calculus known only to the captive, such a thing was possible, even inevitable. The bonds formed outside captivity faded to improbable memories, leaving only the relationship based on deprivation and hurt, balanced with an equally insidious appearance of mercy and generosity.

The prisoner, in an effort to maintain his sanity, lost his connection with a universe created by a just and loving God, where questions had rational answers, and pain was expected to be productive of some end. He existed, cast out of all light, all reason, save what kept breath soughing in and out of a battered body and a despairing spirit.

Girard had offered women at various points, and Christian had been relieved to his bones to feel no reaction. Not to the vacant-eyed slatterns recruited from the French army camp, not to the apple-cheeked dairymaids, and not—thank a merciful Deity—to the rare women taken prisoner and thrust into the dungeon to share Christian’s fate.

Early in his captivity, he’d noted the occasional morning salute resulting from a need to heed nature’s call. Even those responses had been reassuring, initially, but then they’d faded, and indifference to everything—sexual functioning included—had become a necessity.

And then, the circumcision as St. Just so baldly pronounced it, a surgical Latin term for what Christian privately regarded as intimate mutilation.

Anduvoir’s wielding of the knife had felt like the mutilation of Christian’s soul, but in an odd way had given him back his life. Thereafter, he’d truly stopped caring, truly stopped wanting to speak, to scream, to rail against his fate. He’d become stronger for the absence of any emotion save the will to live, and even that…

The countess shifted in his arms, making a sound that suggested she was descending into sleep as she cuddled against him on the sofa.

He let her drift away.

Napping had been one means by which he’d coped with the long, uncomfortable nights, and just at that moment, he needed to hold her. He’d been convinced until recently he could not be an adequate husband to her. If his scars didn’t scare her witless—and apparently they did not—then there had been the continuing lack of animal stirrings from his base urges.

Until recently.

And then he’d discounted what he felt as mere biological habit, not enough to sustain a wedding night, until St. Just, with a soldier’s blunt kindness, had made his little comment about a full complement of Hebrew children throughout history.

The man was right.

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