by Megan Crane
He was perfect. Hard and crude and dangerous and absolutely perfect.
So she stood on her toes, stretched her way up to his fierce, unsmiling mouth, and kissed him.
* * *
Gunnar had kissed her because he had to—because it was better than hiding or trying to melt off into the shadows with a woman he was worried would be recognized by a pack of dirtbag mercenaries. The kind of bastards who spent time in places like this noticed when people tried to call less attention to themselves. When they tried to sneak off or blend in too quickly. It all suggested that a certain kind of man might want to look a little closer, to see what the hell was going on that required all that avoidance and lurking.
But no one looking at them while Gunnar’s mouth was on Maud’s would see anything but a fierce-looking man laden down with the sort of supplies that suggested a trek plus a bound and collared piece of ass to make that trek a little sweeter. Who would blame that man for taking a taste?
He should have known that nothing with his little nun would be anything but catastrophic.
If he could have inhaled her, he would have. Maybe he did.
She tasted sweet and slick, and he’d lost it. He’d forgotten where the hell they were, which was insanity in its purest form, and he had no idea why one of these smoked-out, low-rent assholes hadn’t sunk a blade in his back while he was obviously not paying any attention to anything but Maud.
Maud, who didn’t know how to kiss. That was instantly obvious. It should have reminded him of who she was and why he was here with her. It should have been far less appealing. Instead, it lit him on fire.
His cock had tried to claw its way out of his trousers, the relentless fuck, and he still didn’t know how he’d managed to keep from throwing her up against the nearest stall and burying himself inside her where they stood. How he’d survived without taking the edge off three or four times at least.
He couldn’t remember the first time he’d kissed a girl, a million years ago. He couldn’t remember the first time he’d kissed Audra, who had taken a circuitous path into his bed and then into his protection. Had it been that wild festival night early one summer, with a farmer’s daughter as their enthusiastic third? Or the taut, erotic night she’d danced for him alone in his bedchamber? Or had it been long before that—when they were all still young and practiced kissing and everything else as often as they’d practiced blade craft and sailing?
Gunnar couldn’t remember. But he knew without a single doubt that he would remember his first taste of Maud for as long as he lived. It wasn’t just the taste of her, half-sugar and all woman. It was the way she trembled against him, her lips so soft against his. It was the way she surrendered so completely, letting him take her and taste her and thrust into her so wildly he forgot where the hell they were.
It was the way she responded, gently and tentatively at first, then with growing confidence and need. He’d guided her with his own rough and greedy hunger and she’d met him. More than met him.
And all the while he’d had no doubt whatsoever that no man had ever had his tongue in her mouth but him.
He’d felt far more strung out than any of these bandit tweakers milling around them in the Nebraska night.
But he’d conquered that. It was the surprising sucker punch of her innocence that had thrown him, briefly. It was far more of a temptation than he’d anticipated, that was all. One he’d given into for a little while, sure, slipping his hands into her jeans and palming that absurdly tight little ass and the tempting edge of her pussy lips, but he’d dealt with that, too.
Maud was a test. He had to keep telling himself that. She was a test, nothing more.
And it didn’t matter how tempting she was, because this was only ending one way.
But that was all before she kissed him.
Because when Gunnar had gotten her mouth beneath his, it had been all about lust. Need. That powerful hunger that was clawing at him and making him crazy. He couldn’t pound himself into her the way he wanted, so he’d done the next best thing, with his mouth. Wet. Hot. Deep.
So slick and so sweet he wasn’t sure he’d ever get over it, but there was no confusion about the way he kissed her. It was about sex. A lot of sex. Long, hard, sweaty sex, with that collar and her wrists tied up so nicely and oh yeah, it had been a long ass time.
He told himself the yearlong dry spell was why this was getting to him in the first place. If he’d fucked his way through the clan’s collection of camp girls all winter the way he’d been urged to do, a kiss with a virgin, no matter how dirty, would never affect him. Gunnar was sure of it.
But Maud didn’t kiss like that. Because Maud didn’t know what the hell she was doing.
Maud’s kiss was a fresh, new catastrophe piled high on all the rest.
Her mouth was soft again, even swollen a little from his. Soft and hesitant—but not too hesitant. She pressed herself against him, her arms folded between them and her mouth on his, and she kissed him heedlessly. Recklessly. Deliriously. As if she were jumping off a cliff and taking him with her.
She kissed him like a mate would.
And the truly messed up thing was that he let her.
It was hushed. Something more than simply sweet. And worse, intimate.
She kissed him the way a much-loved mate did early in a new morning after a very long night spent naked. She kissed him with delight and innocence and that same carefree charm he’d seen in her smile, heard in her laugh.
Maybe it was because she was so warm, so close. Maybe it was because everything surrounding them was desperate and precarious and dark, and she was a column of unexpected light in the center of it all. Maybe it was because he’d been frozen for so long he’d forgotten he could ever be anything else, and that artless, extraordinary kiss of hers was bringing him back to life whether he wanted it or not.
Gunnar didn’t know what it was. But he kissed her back.
Their lips clung together. Her tongue stroked his.
His entire body buzzed, pins and needles and something far darker and more alarming. He felt ripped wide open, broken apart, and she poured herself into him like sunlight.
For a long, reckless moment he let himself bask in the glow.
And then he remembered who the hell he was and what he was doing here, with her.
He thrust her away, almost too hard—catching himself at the last second before he threw her across the damned encampment, no better than one of the fucked up, drunken bandits. He made sure she could stand on her own two feet within the reach of that chain, then he got his traitorous hands off her.
She was breathing hard and her eyes were wide and he didn’t know if he wanted to tear her apart or get his mouth on hers again, and there was a pressure in his chest and a buzzing in his ears, and he was wrecked. She’d wrecked him.
Or she’d reminded him that he hadn’t died on that rainy battlefield in Kentucky with Audra.
It was unforgivable.
He wanted to kill her. Or himself. Or barring that, every pierced, unwashed, toothless bandit within reach of his blade.
Gunnar realized he must have looked something far darker and more frightening than simply ferocious, because Maud didn’t move. She didn’t speak. She stood there quietly, her eyes on his, while her chest heaved.
“Don’t ever do that again.” He sounded like death.
“You kissed me first.”
“Don’t screw around with me, Maud.” His voice was so harsh a bandit woman veered away from them as she walked past, as if he’d shoved her with the sound of it. “This isn’t a game.”
She shook her head and that didn’t help. The way she looked with that scarf covering her hair and her mouth that was so damned wide and perfect and now he knew too well how it tasted and felt. And none of this was supposed to be happening. How had he gotten off track already? What was his problem? Did he want to fail?
“I don’t know what this is,” she said, her voice too careful. Too calm. “You wanted to k
iss me, I assume, so you did. I did the same. It wasn’t a game. I just wanted to. I made a choice and I did it.”
He grabbed a handful of the chain and yanked her back to him, so he could tower over her and remind her that no matter what she called him, he was the master here. That was never in any doubt, no matter that he wanted her a whole lot more than he’d imagined he would when he’d spent a long, lonely winter planning this.
“This isn’t about your choices, dumbass,” he growled at her. “You’re not playing my captive. You are my captive. Why the fuck do you think I was out in that desert in the first place? There’s only one thing out there. A big temple stuffed full of novice nuns. A goddamned virgin buffet.”
A terrible understanding moved over her face and there was no reason he should feel the echo of it, making that heaviness in his chest worse. He ignored it.
“Virgins,” she said, as if she was sounding the word out. As if she couldn’t make sense of it.
“Yeah, virgins,” he continued, brutally. “Any virgin will do, Maud. It only happened to be you.”
He was so far in her face that she couldn’t hide a thing from him. Not the emotion that flooded her face or those eyes like the sky. But instead of giving into it, instead of crumpling, she frowned at him.
“Why are you so obsessed with virgins?”
It wasn’t a secret, despite the fact he hadn’t told anyone. He wasn’t hiding what he was doing, necessarily. He just hadn’t encouraged anyone to come visit him in his far-off cabin to see what he was up to throughout the harsh winter. And a bandit night market where anything and everything was available for a price didn’t seem like the place to turn coy.
“Because,” he told her, trying to keep himself from shouting his business to the whole of the city, “virgins are the key ingredients in any black magic rituals.”
Maud blinked. Then again. “What?”
“You heard me.”
She blinked once more. “Oh, come on. You don’t believe in black magic.”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe. What matters is what I’m going to do.”
He didn’t know what he expected, but it wasn’t her little puff of laughter.
“But black magic is a con.”
When he only glared down at her, she shrugged, making her chain tug against his hand. He let it drop, because that was the exact opposite of what he wanted to do, and it was obvious that he couldn’t trust his own instincts where this woman was concerned.
“My uncle Mikolaj told everyone we encountered that he was a great shaman of the dark arts,” Maud said calmly, with that undercurrent of laughter in her voice. “He claimed he could summon the Storms and all that nonsense, and even though that was obviously insane, people believed him. Some people, anyway.”
Still, Gunnar only scowled at her. She shrugged.
“It’s all a lot of tricks and misdirection. It was how he bartered for winter stores some years. He’d make up people’s fortunes, tell them it was black magic so they wouldn’t dare double-cross him, and we’d eat elk all winter long without having to hunt it ourselves.”
“You need to stop talking, Maud. Now.”
“What rituals can you possibly want to do that require virgins?” she asked, ignoring him. “Wealth and power usually involve more easily obtained items. Like amphibian eyes and those horrible waterfowl livers. And gross bodily fluids.”
“It’s a blood ritual.” He sounded as grudging as he felt. “A resurrection spell. And I didn’t ask your opinion on it.”
They’d been here too long. He was starting to get that itchy, restless feeling between his shoulder blades that always meant bad shit was on its way. He’d let all that kissing get out of hand and now this conversation. And quite aside from whatever the hell was going on with him that some nun was getting under his skin, it wasn’t as if the night market got less dangerous as the night wore on. Krajic and his little band of mercenary circle jerkwads had moved on, and that was about all the good luck he could hope for. Gunnar needed to get the hell out of here and back to his ship.
He didn’t discuss this with Maud. He started walking, telling himself he’d drag her ass behind him if he had to. Some part of him wanted to, he was well aware. And no one here would do anything but point and laugh.
But his little nun didn’t miss a step. She didn’t wait for the chain to haul her along whether she wanted it or not. She fell into step beside him and moved with the exact same smoothness and otherworldly air as she had before, damn her.
She was making him crazy, and to hear his brothers tell it, he hadn’t had all that far to go.
Gunnar stalked back to his truck, his black mood even darker when no one stepped to him. The little bitches. He’d imagined breaking a few faces might lighten him up and ease his mood, but none of the bandits milling around them ventured near.
Of course not.
He wrenched open the door and bared his teeth at the opportunistic couple who’d taken over the bench seat, their piercings gleaming and clattering as the woman energetically pistoned herself up and down on the man’s cock, her back to her partner and her hands braced on the truck’s dashboard for leverage.
“You come in this truck and I’ll make you clean it up with your bitch’s severed head,” Gunnar growled at the man, because the woman neither glanced to see who had entered the truck nor paused in what she was doing.
The couple hissed at him, but detached, and then threw themselves out the side door, with—again—no argument.
Little punk bitches everywhere he looked.
A quick check behind the seat to make sure no one lurked there, then Gunnar hoisted Maud inside and dropped her unceremoniously in the spot the couple had just vacated. He loaded the supplies into the space behind the seats and then swung inside himself, yanking the steering wheel from his harness and reattaching it with a grunt as he shoved the column into place. He slid a look sideways when Maud made a sound, and saw her peering down at the seat with a look of disgust on her face.
How could he want to laugh when he still wanted to strangle her? What the hell was the matter with him?
“Deal with it,” he told her curtly. “We’ll be out at sea soon enough and you can wash yourself off. Every day if you feel like it.”
The look she gave him then was the least friendly he’d seen on her, and there was no reason that should remind him of the sweetness of her kiss. It was the opposite of that kiss, in fact—and yet it made him feel peeled open all over again. Skinned and then left like that, exposed and not in the least bit happy about it.
Alive, a small voice murmured inside of him.
Gunnar told that small voice to go fuck itself.
He started the truck and jammed it into reverse. He hit the horn twice and then pulled back, hard. He heard the shouts and the quick blare of the inevitable gunfire, but he ignored it, spinning the wheel until he got the truck facing forward again. Then he finally slammed his foot on the gas, scattering hissing bandits as he went, and got them the hell out of Lincoln.
They left the signal fires behind, making their way out of the city limits and heading south on a busted-up coastal road that was barely more than a cleared path through old fields no one farmed anymore, this close to the roving bandits of the port city. Maud sat beside him where he’d put her, her gaze trained on the dark sea, and stayed quiet.
Maybe too quiet, Gunnar thought.
“So,” she said after a long while, in that calm, elegant way of hers, as if she wasn’t sitting there in someone else’s wet spot with a chain dangling from the collar around her neck. She was something, his pet nun. She really was. “A resurrection spell?”
“Let me guess. Your douchebag wannabe shaman uncle did ten a day and you’re the reigning expert.”
He didn’t realize he’d expected her to laugh at that in her usual bright and careless way until she didn’t.
“Blood and resurrection doesn’t sound like a lot of fun,” she said instead. Quietly. “My uncle was m
ore into sex and revenge spells. Human nature could always make up the difference between what he promised and what actually happened.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about human nature,” Gunnar grunted at her. “Or any promises, either. I don’t think I’m any kind of bullshit shaman.”
He was desperate. That was the difference.
“I can’t think of any good reason why you’d want a virgin present,” Maud said after the truck jostled along awhile. As if she’d been sitting there paging through a spell book in her head. “Why that would be a necessary part of the whole thing.”
But Gunnar recognized that underlying note in her voice. It should have been there from the start. He told himself it was a good thing she’d finally recognized the reality of the situation she was in, however late.
Even if there was a part of him that hated the fact that what he heard just then was fear, and he’d put it there.
“Yes,” he said, hard and lethal. “You can.”
Maud looked out the window, where the headlights picked up the surf as it crashed against the shore and the ancient grasses waved and danced in the night breeze. There was nothing out here. Just the stars above and the empty coastline, and the woman beside him who he never should have tasted.
It made him ache, he was so pissed.
At her, for being so goddamn tempting. For not cringing and crying and making him wish he could kill her quicker. At the fact they’d had to stop in Lincoln in the first place, though he knew full well he’d had no choice if he wanted to make another ocean crossing.
At himself most of all.
For everything. Everything. His terrible, repeated betrayals of Audra most of all. It had to stop.
“My mate died in a raid a year ago,” he heard himself say, loud in the confines of the truck. “I want her back.”
As if he was explaining himself, no matter how simplistically. To his own captive virgin, who he planned to sacrifice on an altar of black magic.
