by Megan Crane
And here she was.
Everything Helena had ever heard about the much-feared raiders was that they were little better than the wolves that roamed all over the mainland these days. The same kind of animals, wild and untamed, made of brute strength and a certain primitive cunning. Save for the sex, that was. The endless, creative, totally noncompliant sex that decent people only whispered about to trusted friends in private and pretended to find horrifying.
Helena had to shove that part away, or she didn’t think she’d be able to keep walking. The raw thing that rocked around inside of her might knock her down instead.
Wolves, she thought fiercely. Think about wolves, not sex.
This one certainly seemed more wolf than man. He even had that same predatory golden gaze she’d seen a time or two on one of the watchful, snarling beasts from a safe distance high on the compound’s walls. She didn’t understand why the raiders had come into the compound tonight and it hadn’t mattered, out there in the summer rain. Because they weren’t Krajic. Thank god, they weren’t Krajic.
She’d had exactly one chance to get the hell out of that compound before Krajic found her or Ferranti winter-married her as a second wife to her own sister and she’d taken it. Who cared about the wolves?
“You’re an idiot,” she muttered at herself, and as if the forest thought she was calling it names, her feet went right out from underneath her.
There was nothing graceful in it. Nothing smooth. She pitched forward, wheeled her arms around, which did nothing but remind her how wet her shirt was, and then she did a header straight into the mud. A thud and then a long, slick slide.
At least she didn’t hit a rock. Or a tree.
Or the raider himself.
It was wet and cold and still raining. And still so dark, this far from anything resembling a generator. And she hurt—or maybe it was so humiliating she wanted to punch something or die right where she was—so Helena didn’t move. One shuddering, muddy breath, then another. She did nothing but lie there in a crumpled heap of this was so stupid.
Even when his boots appeared before her, and one nudged at her shoulder. Not hard or cruel, she noted, as if that was a gift and she should be happy about it. As if the scary barbarian with the steel-toed boot against her body was being kind.
“Did you knock yourself out?”
He didn’t sound particularly concerned by that possibility.
“Yes,” Helena gritted out. She almost told him to get the hell away from her, but thought better of it at the last moment. This wasn’t a blood-maddened killer like Krajic, but this was a raider—not a regular man. A wolf, for all intents and purposes. She needed to remember that.
“I’m not into pussy playing dead.” As if, she thought with a lurch in her stomach, he knew plenty of others who were completely into it. “That bores the crap out of me. But you better get up before I change my mind.” He shifted, his foot sliding away from her in the spongy ground. “I get lonely in the woods.”
Was that … a joke? Helena scraped the tangled, matted horror that had once been her hair back from her face and peered up at him. Way, way up, from all the way down where she was, facedown in the mud.
But he was merciless.
Not a hint of humor anywhere on him, as if she’d imagined that last comment. Maybe she had. He gazed back at her, ruthless and entirely calm, as if he could press her farther into the dirt with the force of his will. As if it was as inexorable as a booted foot on her back. He was carved from stone and terror against the rain and the dark, and she definitely questioned every last one of the choices that had led her to this moment: sprawled out in the mud in the middle of nowhere in the clutches of the walking nightmare she’d imagined, for some reason, would be better than the known quantity of Ferranti’s tender mercies or the inevitability of the coming horror that was Krajic. Not to mention the other equally nightmarish raiders out here tonight who she could hear in the dark all along this grim march, but who she knew, somehow, wouldn’t lift a single finger to interfere no matter what this man did to her.
Still better than Krajic, she snapped at herself.
This one—Tyr, she reminded herself; that’s what they’d called him back there—was in charge. Or he had been in Ferranti’s ugly concrete courtyard, anyway. All the other raiders, who until tonight Helena had half believed were just made-up stories men told to keep the women and children in line and obedient, had looked to him.
She didn’t know why she swallowed hard. Or why it almost … hurt to look at his fierce, uncompromising face on top of that body of his, sculpted hard for battle and wreathed in his warrior’s braids. Or that gunshot wound that had tracked blood down his impressive arm but didn’t seem to bother him at all.
Or why her mouth was suddenly so dry.
“You keep lying there like that,” Tyr said in a low growl of a voice that shuddered through her, that strange heat clawing at her and then wrapping itself into a hard knot deep in her belly and a pulsing ache between her legs. “I’ll take it as an invitation. My dick doesn’t give a shit. Dirt doesn’t bother me, little girl.”
Helena did not want to think about his dick. She struggled to get back on her feet, her jeans so stiff against her legs they were almost painful, pulling herself up as far as her knees with the help of the nearest tree, which was a whole lot more friendly than he was.
“Thank you,” she said, and she automatically used that tone Melyssa had called her princess voice. Ferranti had called it snotty. She tilted her chin up and went with it anyway. “That’s the highest compliment I’ve ever received, I’m sure.”
She heard him laugh. She didn’t see him move.
One moment he was looming above her, a hulking dark thing no matter how her eyes tried to adjust and really see him, and the next Tyr was crouched down in front of her—hauling her off the ground and up against him with a fistful of her wet, muddy shirt.
She made a sound that could only be described as a squeak as he dragged her face to his. She arched back, but there was no evading him, and he was surrounding her again. Too big, too hard, too damned strong. He bent her backward until she was off balance—deliberately, a voice in her head shrieked—and if he let go, Helena knew, she’d topple over on her back.
But he didn’t let go.
He moved closer. And that was much, much worse.
“You need to watch that mouth,” Tyr growled, and it was a lot scarier up close. He was.
She tried to squirm away from him, but it was no use. “Let go of me.”
He laughed again, and it was a dark thing, thicker and more dangerous than the night all around them or even the mud she still knelt in that didn’t seem to affect him at all.
“Maybe you’re not getting this.”
He shifted, and Helena’s breath deserted her when his other hand moved beneath her shirt to smooth over her exposed abdomen, flooding her with more of that knotted heat. Making her shake. Making her wonder what the hell was happening to her.
She tried to bat his hands away. He simply ignored it, as if she were nothing but an annoying fly.
“You don’t tell me what to do. You don’t use that mouth for talking shit or copping an attitude.” He slid that hard, hard hand of his beneath the waistband of her jeans and his voice got almost soft. She might have believed that softness if she hadn’t been held like this, completely under his command and helpless to do a single thing about it. His wolf eyes gleamed in the warm, wet dark. “I took you because I felt like it. You’re nothing but a piece of ass to me.”
The fist in her shirt, big and hard, tightened and hauled her even closer to his pitiless face and that cruelly fascinating mouth of his, his dark braids and dark beard making him seem that much more savage. At the same time, he tugged down below and she felt the buttons of her jeans give way before him and no. No. This couldn’t be happening.
“You said … you said you don’t…” Helena didn’t recognize her own voice.
Tyr grinned, even darker tha
n his laughter, this giant wolf of a man who she should never have tried to push or manipulate or handle. It made a terrible wave roll over her, making her feel tight and needy and wildly confused by her own reaction. Making her squirm against that impossibly hard body of his and the hands that held her where he wanted her, as if he really were made of stone and was as impervious to the weather as he was to the bullet that had left his arm bloody. All those tattoos and scars and the black wheel of mysterious symbols over his heart, as if he was daring anyone who looked at him to read the truth about him right there, stamped deep into his skin.
It was almost as if he was inviting her to look at him. To really take a good, long look at the man she’d challenged so foolishly. His hair was thick and dark, long the way the raiders all wore it, and braided out of his way. The better to fight, she knew. His beard was a dark triangle that made his golden gaze seem even brighter and more dangerous. More wolfish. His face was brutal and harsh, and then there was that lethal grin of his that she could feel ricocheting inside of her, like a kick to the gut.
A molten sort of kick that seemed to hum between her legs, hot and wet and astonishing, and his scarred and callused hand rested just above, an unspoken threat.
Or a promise, something whispered deep inside of her, like a lick of searing flame.
She was in so much trouble.
“I told you I don’t do cold pussy,” Tyr agreed, huge and hard with his merciless hands all over her, and her entire body seemed to go liquid and hot and weak everywhere. She couldn’t even try to fight him, no matter how useless the attempt might have been. “But I don’t have to worry about that with you, do I?”
And then he hauled her up by her shirt just that little bit farther, so close she could see the way his eyes glittered dark gold and raw—
“Wait,” she whispered, too panicked to guard her tongue. “I don’t think—”
And Tyr laughed again, dark and wholly wild and somehow thrilling, and then he slammed his mouth down on hers.
And everything inside of her, that knot of heat and the ache below, ignited.
Then simply … blew up.
He thrust into her mouth with absolutely no hesitation or restraint, as if his mouth were another weapon and he dominated her the way he had back in Ferranti’s courtyard, his lethal moves a kind of dark poetry. He bent her back and ate at her mouth, urgent and demanding. Possessive and dangerous and lush.
And absolutely sure of her response.
Helena couldn’t do anything but surrender to the way he took her over, openmouthed and hot, as if he’d tasted her exactly like this a thousand times before. As if he knew exactly what poured through her, the fire and the need, and that knot deep within her that burned white hot. As if he had no doubt at all.
She couldn’t even call this a kiss—the word was too tame, too small, too silly next to all this power, this terrible hunger that roared through her like a chain reaction. It couldn’t encompass the rawness, the strength, the way he owned her, completely and so easily. His fist tightened against her chest and he hauled her mouth where he wanted it, angling his head to get wetter, deeper, wilder.
And she didn’t care that she was doing exactly what he wanted, what his ruthless kiss demanded, what she’d have imagined five minutes ago she’d never, ever do at all with anyone, much less him. It was a carnal taking, a mad tangle of tongues. Her nipples were hot and hard and actually hurt her as they dragged against the stiff, wet material of her soaked shirt—and still she wished she could rub herself against him, relieve the ache of them. His other hand moved lower, skimming down over her belly with no hint of a pause or a doubt, shoving between her legs with a certain blunt assurance that made her shiver. Then he was holding her slippery folds, so hot and so wet, in his hard, battle-worn palm.
Tyr pulled back slightly, only slightly, and muttered something against her mouth but there was too much wild ringing in her ears and that insane clamor all through her body for her to understand. Helena shuddered against him. She felt small and lit up and electric in that space between his harsh mouth, his hard fist, and that impossibly hard hand thrust deep in her pants.
She felt something far more than that, equal parts craving and raw hunger. Something a whole lot like exhilarated. Or maybe alive.
Tyr studied her face for a hot, panting second that felt like another lifetime or two. His hard mouth curved. Then he twisted his wrist and plunged two fingers deep into her pussy, claiming her mouth again at the same time as he thrust hard.
And Helena didn’t know what happened.
She … broke.
She thought, No no no—
Or maybe she yelled it into his harshly demanding mouth instead. And then she was lost in that dark, lustrous wave of sensation that swept over her, making her buck and shake in his arms, sending her spinning out wildly like she was part of the night. Then she simply shattered into pieces.
Still he worked those fingers deep into her, hard and sure and determined, using the heel of his palm against her clit, until he threw her straight back into that same fire, then over the same cliff all over again.
And when Helena jolted against him a final time and then went limp, Tyr laughed again. It was an impossibly masculine sound, dark and proud and fully aware of his own power. It should have been like a bucket of ice water all over her—but it was the opposite. It sunk into her like too much heat, a brand-new blaze. And she was soft and wet and scalding hot and he still had his fingers deep inside of her. He still worked them in and out in that same intense rhythm.
“You’re riding me pretty hard, Helena,” he said, his mouth against hers, and he was right, she realized in a daze. She was. She was rocking against that hand of his without even meaning to do it, her fingers digging deep into his wide, impervious shoulders. And that hot, knowing triumph in his gaze made something pulse in her, a burst of heat and light, right there against that hand still buried deep inside her. She felt burned alive, flooded with wildfire, and she knew he felt it, too, when his hard mouth curved. “Nothing cold about this pussy.”
She flinched at that and tried to shove him off her, but he didn’t let her move. He held her suspended there, one hand fisted in her shirt and the other cupped hard over her pussy, like he could do it forever.
One shuddering beat of her heart. Then another. So hard and so fierce she almost imagined it would tear straight out of her chest.
Tyr waited.
And only when Helena stopped fighting him, however inadequately, did he relent. She knew it was a lesson, but she couldn’t concentrate on anything just then but his mastery of her body, whether she liked it or not. He pulled that wicked hand of his from her pussy and she couldn’t help the small sound she made at its loss. A tiny little whimper that horrified her, betrayed her utterly, and made that hard curve of his fierce mouth deepen.
He stood in a single movement, with a terrible kind of male grace that shouldn’t have worked on her like that, like another sweet lick of that wildfire directly over her pussy—especially when he hauled her up with him, that fist still in her shirt. And she was pathetically grateful that he still held her upright, as she suspected her knees might not bear her weight, they felt so rubbery and useless. As if whatever he’d just done to her had weakened her that much. That thoroughly.
Helena wasn’t sure she could breathe. And for the first time in a very, very long time, she felt a horrible weight inside her ribs she was terribly afraid would tip over into tears.
Don’t you dare cry in front of a man like this, she ordered herself, in something that was half panic, half rage. Don’t give him the satisfaction.
“Do your feet hurt?”
She didn’t understand the question, thrown at her in his gruff, unfriendly way, and she frowned at him. And Helena already felt too weak and exposed to admit anything further. “No.”
The dark did nothing to conceal that searing golden gaze of his as it hammered into her, worse than a wolf from this close because a wolf would simpl
y eat her without ruining her like this, and she thought he knew perfectly well she was lying.
“Listen up,” Tyr told her softly, and that was even scarier, somehow. That hint of a softness that he had nowhere else in him. “The next time you feel the need to throw that attitude at me, you better think of a more creative way to use that mouth instead. Or I will. And I’ll enjoy it.”
Helena didn’t understand why she felt hollow when he let go of her. When he inched back and allowed the slightest bit of space between them. Sure enough, she staggered back slightly, the mud beneath her as slippery as her legs were wobbly.
But she couldn’t let herself think too closely about what had just happened here. About the wet heat she could still feel pulsing hard between her legs as she buttoned up her fly. About the way her nipples were still in those greedy points, a searing little agony against her cold shirt.
And she definitely couldn’t let herself think about what it meant now that he’d discovered she wasn’t cold for him at all. Her mind danced away from it, as if completing the obvious thought—and the images that went with it, and the fact that she’d just had noncompliant sexual contact with a man for the first time in her life—might take her feet out from under her all over again.
She still couldn’t breathe. And he must have taken that as some kind of rebellion on her part, because he took her jaw in that same hand that had just made her lose herself so completely. His hard palm was warm and she could smell herself, sex and need, and him, too.
And that hard knot blazed to life again, low in her belly, and kicked at her.
Helena had no idea what was happening to her. Only that he was doing it. He was doing it, and that meant she was in some very serious trouble.
“I don’t care what your problem is, girl,” Tyr told her, harsh and ruthless, worse somehow than one of his blades, and the controlled, matter-of-fact way he held her chin and her mouth in his grip made her shake. Everywhere. “I don’t care who you are as a person or what you dreamed about last night or what you thought you were doing back there, getting in my face and putting your hands on me. I’m not interested in your reasons. I’m not looking for a mate or a wife and if you don’t want to be a camp girl, you have one job. It’s simple. Keep me happy.”
