by Piper Rayne
“I have seen a woman,” the beast snapped back at me as he opened the front door of his hut. “I know what they are meant to look like. Just never … in the flesh.”
I thought of the village council yesterday, the way Mortas, Fairfront’s horribly manipulative mystic, made it seem imperative that the beast receive a virgin sacrifice in order to please him; what a strange twist to learn that the beast himself was a virgin.
Never before seen a woman. Never before been with a woman either.
I tilted my head, watching him clean his boots of mud on the mat outside his hut’s front door. What an odd development, indeed. So had he been living here alone in the forest for ages? To what end? Did he come to the village often, peer at our little houses, watch us pick apples from our orchards and tend our sheep? Did he care at all about our lives in Fairfront, or did it seem a sleepy, inconsequential existence compared to the way he survived in the forest?
No need to care about such things, I told myself, straightening and shaking my head. Such details didn’t matter; all that mattered was that I was alive.
And now, if it was possible, it was time to go home.
“Well, here I am,” I said to the beast, spreading my arms wide. “Your offering.” The wolves had torn my dress, so my legs were exposed; that and the way the neckline dipped low, showing my cleavage, made me feel practically naked. Just perfect for a virgin sacrifice, I thought wryly, and tried to ignore how my own body pulsed with heat, my chest fluttering.
The beast stopped in his doorway, turning to look at me over his shoulder. I tracked his eyes—he lingered on my breasts, and the way he inspected them truly made me believe he had never seen a woman before. He trailed his sight down to my hips, which spread to create an hourglass silhouette of my slim frame. “Is that why you were tied to the tree?” he finally grumbled. “An offering to the beast?”
“An offering to whatever you are,” I replied. “Beast or man or something in between.” My breathing got deeper; I was practically heaving, the way he was staring at me, almost as hungry as those wolves had been…
“Something in between,” the beast mused, and cocked an eyebrow at me, a tiny smile tugging one corner of his mouth; the very expression made my knees weaken. I instantly knew I liked it when he smiled, though it was also a dangerous prospect; didn’t predators smile right before they attacked their prey?
“You spoke, and the wolves listened,” I answered honestly. “You live out here alone, as far as I can tell, and nothing about this hut resembles the homes in Fairfront. The elders of my village thought they could end an impeding famine by gifting me to you. Surely you are more than merely a man, even if you are not completely a beast.”
The information about the famine seemed to pique his interest; he frowned as I spoke about it, then chuckled to himself. “They tied you to that tree to stop the famine, did they?” I couldn’t read how he felt about it beyond this. Did this delight him? Enrage him? Or was it a completely neutral emotional reaction on his part?
Maybe he had lived parallel to our village for so long it no longer mattered to him what we ridiculous farm folks did. Maybe he, like me, believed the superstitions perpetuated by men like Mortas to be absurd and dangerous.
“They did.” I thought of my father’s face as they guided me away from the only home I’d ever known; I wished now that I had cried out to him one more time, implored him to forbid them from taking me, but I had already made a fool of myself, begging him not to let me go in front of the whole village. Father hadn’t even blinked. “Do you at least have a name?” I asked, more out of curiosity than anything.
He looked thoughtful for a moment, like he was contemplating whether or not to tell me, but something in him must have decided I was worthy of this knowledge. “Gawen,” he said. “At least, that was my name back when I had use of one.”
“Gawen,” I repeated softly. It suited him—it was a very old-fashioned name, a classic, one that would have conjured up images of gentlemen knights to anyone in my village.
“And you?” He nodded at me curtly, pushing back the hair that fell into his eyes. “What do they call you?”
“Rosaline.”
“Rosaline.” My name on his lips almost made me swoon. He said it like it was a song, a spell, a prayer.
I had expected, as the virgin offering to the beast, to be devoured more than I had expected to actually be ravished, but a small part of me now wished that I was still tied to that tree, my dress torn cleanly off my body, and this gorgeous giant man prowling through the trees to take what was rightfully his.
“Well, Rosaline,” Gawen said abruptly, “I have bad news. There is nothing your presence here will do to stave off the famine. I am obviously not the beast of your Fairfront myths. Even if I was, eating delicate young virgins is hardly my idea of a hearty meal.” He glanced down at my bare thighs, almost second-guessing himself, and a flush of warmth flooded me, making me wet.
“I’m afraid your villagers are idiots,” he finished, and he tried to level me with his eyes, challenging me.
But I would not and could not argue with this last sentiment. “I agree,” I told him with a sigh. “The village relies heavily on prophecy and the reading of the bones. Wolves came into our yard and ate all our chickens. Our village mystic thought the appropriate response was to tie me to that tree in the hopes that you might undo your evil famine spell. Although,” I mused now, thinking it through a little more deeply, “perhaps Mortas was just anxious to get rid of me in particular. I do have a tendency to … be a bit of a handful.”
“I can see that,” Gawen said this as he glanced again at my chest, and I felt my cheeks burn pink; embarrassed, he dropped his gaze. “I’m not a beast, like I said, and I have no use for a virgin.”
“All right,” I answered immediately, and gathered what was left of my shredded skirt in my hands so it would stay out of the mud as I walked. “Then I’ll be getting back home and out of your hair.” My chest deflated a bit as I said this—with disappointment? Was that the emotion that panged through me? Why? I was not going to be eaten alive by some horrendous man-beast shapeshifter. Shouldn’t I be happy to return to my old life?
Gawen raised his eyebrows. “You cannot go back,” he said. “What about the periphery magic?”
This was as foreign a concept to me as a chiseled, good-looking stranger making home in the middle of the Fair Forest. “Periphery magic?” I echoed. “What do you mean?”
“Do those elders of your village know nothing?” He shook his head, annoyed. “Once a villager comes into the forest, they cannot go out again. Not without the spells that protect the periphery of the forest shredding you into pieces.”
“Shredding you?” I gasped. “So you’re saying I cannot get back to my village ever? Not ever?”
Gawen shrugged again—his shrugs, to me, were as deadly a weapon as his bow and his knife. They gutted me right in the heart. “You’ll die if you try to return home,” he said. “This forest… Rosaline, there are things here in this forest that you cannot possibly understand. Magics. Spells. Enchantments. Some of them are predictable—step past the periphery, and your flesh is torn to ribbons. Some of them, however…” Gawen’s eyes softened as he stared off into the trees, thinking about something particularly vulnerable until he returned to the present moment, hardening his gaze when he looked at me again. “I don’t care where you choose to go,” he finished, “but you cannot go back home. Not in one piece.”
“If I go back out into the forest, those wolves will find me and eat me,” I calculated. “And if I try to go home, I won’t make it past the trees … so you’re saying I’m stuck here? With you? Forever?” My eyes were filled with tears by the time I was at the end of my queries. The forest itself was lovely enough—green and fragrant and lush, but the thought of never, ever going back to Fairfront? Never again to see my father?
Never gathering eggs at our farm, never running through the fields of lavender, never watching Fairfront chi
ldren splash their feet in the creek or snuggling in my bed with our fat orange barn cat? It was too much to bear.
But it was also too much for Gawen to hear. I had insulted him.
“Don’t worry,” Gawen said through clenched teeth, “you won’t see much of me. I have things to do. You can sit here and decide if you’d rather die than spend the rest of your days in my hut. If I find you gone when I come back home, I’ll consider your choice made and say a prayer over your grave.” His jaw was tight, his fists clenched, and I half expected to see steam blowing out from his nose. It was incredible how, in the flash of a single moment, Gawen could shift from an almost mild-mannered man living alone in the woods to this temper-flared, ready to fight, furious.
Beast.
Gawen seized his bow and quiver, then stomped off through the trees, and before I could call him back, I was alone.
Alone in the hut of a person that was, as I’d said earlier, neither man nor beast, but somewhere in between.
The hut was fine—a little masculine, nothing particularly warm or cozy about it, but it was livable. A table strewn with tools and dishes and fruits, a fireplace stacked with logs, a single bed in the one room.
But it wasn’t my home.
And it never would be.
When I was certain Gawen was out of sight, I took the blanket off his bed and wrapped it around my body as a cloak. I grabbed two of the apples from a basket on the table and a spare knife, just in case.
If I didn’t believe in beasts and bones and prophecies, there was no reason to believe in periphery spells either. And as interesting and gorgeous as Gawen was, I would not stay and let him make a believer of me.
I was going home.
Chapter Four
GAWEN
Such a foolish girl.
Such a breathtaking woman too. Up close, she had an almost pearly sheen to her skin, and her lips were heart-shaped. Her nipples had tightened when she’d been arguing with me outside my hut, her passion making them visible through the front of her dress, and it had been all I could do not to seize her and rip that pathetic shredded fabric off her body.
In all my years, I had only ever dreamed of a woman like this, and now that there was such a woman here, in the Fair Forest, I couldn’t stop thinking about the voluptuous lines of her hips, the alluring way she tugged at her hair when she was making a wry joke, the way she would probably look with her legs wrapped around me as I slid into her…
“Dammit!” I slammed my fist against the nearest tree trunk; a dove, confused by my outburst, fluttered away from her nest, startled.
Rosaline was proving to be more than just a foolish girl, a stunning woman, and a pain in my neck—she was distracting.
Beauty though she was, underneath that sweet exterior, she was stubborn.
And that stubbornness was going to be the death of her.
I stomped through the brush, looking for something to kill.
It was nearly evening. All day I had been making my rounds, patrolling the border trees, watching for any signs of unusual animal behavior, weakened tree roots, browning, crunchy leaves. Even though everything looked normal, there was something in the air that made me uneasy.
Something eerie, something ominous. I didn’t know what was happening in the Fair Forest, but as its protector, it was my job to find out.
Every tree I passed, I imagined Rosaline tied to its trunk, her hair streaming down her shoulders, her dress torn, her bare legs poking out, that look on her face of absolute resistance. Even when she wasn’t standing directly in front of me, I couldn’t get her out of my mind.
I needed to kill something.
I had food back at the hut, plenty of it. Dried meat, potatoes, and root vegetables for stew, a couple of birds in the yard waiting to be cleaned and cooked.
And I shouldn’t be hunting for more food if the game was truly as scarce as those wolves had made it seem. But I suddenly needed to use my knife. I needed to slaughter. To kill.
I needed to believe that everything could still be as balanced as it was before Rosaline had arrived. I needed to feel like it was just me again, alone in the forest, the only human here, capable of ruling over all the creatures in the Fair Forest as long as the enchantment held.
But Rosaline popped up in my mind, looking up at me from under those eyelashes. “Virgin offering,” I imagined her saying again. “For the beast.”
I could be the beast for her.
I could be just about anything if it meant she parted those soft pink lips of hers, taking me in her mouth, letting me slide my cock deep—
A partridge flapped dumbly beside me, shaking me out of my lustful reverie.
I thought of how I had, in the last few years, started to be curious about the village, curious about the world outside the Fair Forest.
I had been placed here as a very young child, and my entire existence had centered around protecting this forest. I had never before wondered what life in the villages was like, but in the past few years, I had craved human companionship.
Women.
On more than one occasion, I had considered seeing if there was some sort of spell I could use, a loophole in the periphery that would allow me to be part of Fairfront as well as my station in the forest.
But Rosaline’s reaction to the periphery spell made me happy that I had not chosen to leave.
She was just like the rest of them. She may have glowed like a princess, but she had grown up with the typical tales of the Fair Forest beast.
She’d heard the ridiculous stories about how the beast drank the raw blood of the deer he downed, how he could fell a tree with a single swipe of his paw, how he terrified the wolves and the foxes, how the birds flew away as soon as he approached, and all the other nonsense rumors.
Rosaline had not, however, grown up hearing the truth of the matter—that the enchantment on the Fair Forest was serious, and that the periphery spell was not to be disregarded or disrespected.
The mystic of Fairfront had told Rosaline and the rest of the village that the famine would end with a virgin sacrifice? Hogwash.
But if they were seeing the effects of the forest’s weakening enchantment too…
I thought of the wolves, how mangy they’d looked, how hungrily they’d snapped their jaws at Rosaline.
There was something going on. Something wrong.
And it was up to me to figure it out.
The partridge beside me bobbed its head, pecking into the damp soil for a bug, and I let the tension leave my limbs.
It would be so easy to kill this partridge.
Grab it with my hands, slit its throat with my knife. Shoot an arrow through it, bring it home for the pot.
Rosaline stirred me up, making me desperate to reach down into my pants and bring my hardened cock out for her to touch…
But I did not want to kill needlessly.
I did not want to be that kind of man.
I did not want to hurt Rosaline, though I did want to push her against the outside of my hut, her arms splayed out to either side, like she had leaned against that tree trunk. I wanted to see what was under that flimsy gown of hers, and I wanted to lick her and kiss her until I heard her moan like an animal.
What the devil?
A figure moved across my sightline.
Rosaline—that foolish, foolish girl! She’d left my hut and was making a run for it, darting across the deepest, thickest part of the forest, trying to get back to her village.
I had already warned her about the periphery spell. and yet she obviously didn’t believe me. She didn’t believe that the spell that guarded the border of the Fair Forest could split a grown man in half—I’d seen it with my own eyes—and so her stubbornness and her lack of faith was going to cost her.
Fine, I thought, sinking back on my heels, trying not to let that tension rise up within me again. Let her go.
Let her run to her death. My hands would be washed of all guilt if she shred herself into pieces.
&
nbsp; “Ouch!” Rosaline’s cry was sharp, and I spun around, finding her through the dim shadows of the falling evening.
She had stepped on a thorn and was yanking it out of her foot. Good, I thought. Take it as a sign. Stay here—stay where you are safe.
Stay near me, I added silently, and then chided myself for even hoping for such a thing.
But a thorn in the toe was not enough to deter her. She bent herself in half, her back creating a line against the dark foliage that made my loins stir, and picked the thorn out with nimble fingers. Licking the blood off her thumb, she put her weight on the foot, testing it, and though she grimaced with pain, she kept right on walking.
Stubborn, stubborn girl.
My heart started pounding, its rhythm finding a way up into my throat. She was going to do it. She was going to cross through the periphery, and I couldn’t let her go through with it. I couldn’t stand here and watch such a beautiful creature be destroyed.
“Rosaline!” I shouted, and started running toward her.
But it was too late. She’d taken the last step on safe soil and was crossing past the pond that marked the border. Any minute now it would happen. Any minute—
I slowed, stopped in my tracks. My eyes were blinking, trying to make sense of what I was seeing—I couldn’t believe it.
But it was real.
Rosaline had passed right beyond the pond, and nothing had happened. She was making a break for it. From this angle, the lights of the farmhouses and village roads were visible through the leaves.
The spell hadn’t destroyed her. In all my years inside the Fair Forest, I’d never heard of the periphery magic letting someone freely leave the bounds of the trees.
So that was it, then. Disappointment flooded my limbs. For one brief moment, I’d had a real woman in my hut—a gorgeous woman, to be specific, and now she was gone.
“Gawen?” Rosaline’s voice was like a bell ringing through the darkness. “Gawen, help! Help me, please, help!”
