Viking's Orders

by Marsh, Anne

  Vikar swung off the bike and reached for her. His big hands wrapped around her waist, and he removed her effortlessly from the back of the bike. She wasn’t a small woman—Odin’s fighters never were—but he made her feel tiny. Delicate. No man had ever touched her, except in the heat of battle, but now he had his hands everywhere.

  Yet he didn’t seem to be in any rush. When her stomach rumbled, he sat her down beside the new-made fire, and she passed the next hour learning that these big, raw fighters bickered endlessly over how much pepper to add to their Campbell’s. Then, once the night’s cook, a broad-shouldered, shaggy-haired Viking with a scar cutting across his right cheek, declared open season on the soup, the lot of them sprawled on the ground around the fire, trading stories.

  Naughty stories, outrageous stories, patently untrue stories—there was nothing these Vikings didn’t meet with a roar of approval and a generous gulp of beer. Var had just finished explaining the mechanics of fucking the better half of a Vegas show line, when Vikar dropped down beside her again. He’d disappeared to check on the men standing guard—or some other, all-important warrior activity—without even a grunt of farewell.

  That big hand discovered her knee and slipped upward a few heated inches. She held her breath, but he went no further, and she should have been glad. Instead, she was nervous and curious, when she was supposed to be none of those things.

  He eyed her bowl. “Eat more,” he said, and she wondered what he was thinking.

  He was still too big and too well-muscled. All the soup in the world couldn’t change that or what rode on tonight’s outcome. He was merely a means to an end. His thumb stroked firmly, rubbing the muscle of her inner thigh.

  “Tell me more about your ship.”

  “My ship?” Hel. She hadn’t anticipated the need to provide details.

  “Yes,” he said patiently. “The one you offered up so sweetly when we were in Vegas. That ship.”

  “I didn’t trade a ship.” She looked around the fire. Vikar’s men were surrounded by the things they’d taken from the Hell’s Angels. They’d collected a veritable mountain of knives and throwing stars. There were handguns and ammo, in addition to an impressive collection of switchblades, plus a substantial pile of sparkly things and enough motorcycle gear to stock a small store. If Vikar was in the market for a new longship, he could certainly afford one.

  “Pirates, baby.” Var winked at her. “You tell a Viking you have something he doesn’t, and that’s an invitation, isn’t it?”

  She wet her lips nervously, and Vikar just grinned before saying, “Tell me about her.”

  “She’s a ship. My ship.” She smoothed her jacket over her knees. She didn’t need him lusting after a longship she couldn’t produce. “Sixty feet. Made out of wood. Pretty much like any other longship out there.”

  “No, baby. She’ll be different. They all are. How they handle, how she steers beneath a man’s hand.” He met her glare innocently. “Does she go fast and hard when she’s riding the waves before the wind, or is she all pretend, liking to trick a man and sail down, taking her crew with her?”

  “If she doesn’t take on water, why would you care?”

  “She’ll be mine. I take care of what’s mine.”

  She drew the line at arguing over an imaginary ship.

  “My longship is big,” she improvised, feeding him the details he wanted, and the lusty groans from her audience said they appreciated the effort. Faces turned toward her.

  Var snorted. “Long is only half the battle. More requires a good captain.”

  “Or crew!” shouted another, prompting gales of laughter.

  “Well-built,” volunteered a third.

  “And well-tended.” Vikar’s hand moved higher. “A man took his time with her, got all her bits in the right place.”

  Two could play this game.

  “What happened to your last longship?”

  His face darkened. “I sailed her down. You want me to tell you how cold the water felt washing over the bow or about the killing tear of the waves?”

  He was no skald, hammering out polished verse for his liege, but Vikar’s story had a dark, harsh poetry of its own. He saw the disaster clearly, like it had happened yesterday, making it too easy to imagine the big men in little boats that lost to the ocean’s power no matter how beautiful the boats or how determined their pilots. “Good men die all the time on the water.”

  He’d be a fierce sailor, she knew that instinctively, as happy battling the elements on the open seas as he was lifting a blade on land. He’d never quit, just turn his face to the wind and laugh. Let the air and the water pull at him until they’d vanquished him and he had no more choices, no more waves to run and nothing but the rock bottom with the water closing overhead.

  No, it was all too easy to imagine the longship sailing down. The prow pointed towards the sea floor and the waves rising up and over, crashing over the wooden deck until the sheer weight of all that water pushed the longship to the bottom and she turned, staves splitting. It was a miracle he’d lived.

  “But you survived.”

  He gritted his teeth before acknowledging her firm grasp of the obvious. “Yeah. I did. We did. Only to be seized for that that gods-cursed pit.”

  The bearded Viking closest to the fire spat loudly. Pure was suddenly grateful he hadn’t been the one popping tops on the night’s Campbell's. “Cowardly bastard drugged us. Chickenshit wouldn’t take us on face-to-face.”

  “You lost men.” She couldn’t believe she had the urge to lay a hand on that strong forearm and stroke. Already, even before he’d taken her virginity, she was changing. These were feelings—and she wasn’t sure she enjoyed them. No, she did not. These sensations made her…vulnerable.

  “Yes.” He stared morosely at the fire, all teasing gone. “Good men.”

  Would his loss have been any easier if the men had not been good? Somehow, she doubted it. Those men had been his—and he was fiercely possessive. Even she understood those sentiments.

  He’d lost men. She’d lost Eira.

  Eira had been all icy perfection. Pure suspected her Valkyrie sister had absolutely no understanding of the heat and passion missing from their shared life in Odin’s hall—and that Eira hadn’t minded. No, when they’d gone out on a job for Odin and had accidentally surprised a dragon in his lair, her sister hadn’t minded anything. After the pair of them had slipped from the ledge and hung there for hours over the fiery pit while the gods-cursed serpent laughed at them, Eira had finally announced that she was tired, released her hold on the stones and tumbled into the flames. It had been Pure who had refused to give up her own death grip and who’d hung on, nails bleeding, to the stones until the rest of the Valkyrie had arrived and pulled her back to safety.

  Eira was immortal, which meant her sister had spent the last hundred years burning. In excruciating pain, even if she couldn’t die. Eira might have let go, but Pure was sure Eira’s blue eyes had widened when she finished falling and started burning as the flames surrounded her.

  The berserker didn’t want to hear about Pure’s family woes, and Pure didn’t want to share. Still, he looked unhappy, lost in his own memories, and she suddenly wanted to pull him out of those black depths.

  “I lost my sister. You have my sympathies.” There. That was the correct thing to say. Carefully, to explore these new feelings of hers, she patted him on the arm. He turned his head and glared at her, so clearly she had not entirely gotten the hang of emotions.

  “Sympathies will not bring them back.”

  No, she thought, but she’d bring Eira back.

  “Our brothers are feasting with Odin and his Valkyrie in Valhalla.” A grizzled, big-shouldered man she’d been introduced to earlier, Geir, leaned towards them, shoving his dagger into a soup can and stirring vigorously. “They’re fighting and happy and drunk.”

  “Yeah, with Odin’s Valkyries riding them hard tonight,” another crowed.

  Pure doubted that. Th
e drunken party, however, was all too likely. Odin had never been a fan of moderation. If the god could do something once, he’d do it twice—and then twice more. Just for good measure.

  Still, Vikar’s hopes for his dead men had to count as proof that the man wasn’t entirely animal. She’d mark this conversation in the plus column when she reported back to Odin. Grief and anger over the loss of his crewmen. Redeemable berserker. Check.

  “So,” Vikar said, “tell me, Pure, how does a princess do it?”

  “What?” She stared at him blankly. When had he decided she was a princess?

  “Fuck,” he repeated patiently. He sank back on his heels, watching her. “You tell me what to expect, baby.”

  Maybe she needed to subtract that mark from the plus column.

  A flush crept up her cheek, and the heat had nothing to do with his fire. What was she supposed to tell him? The truth? That no one there wanted her? That she’d been bound by an oath to their gods—and that tonight he took not only her virginity, but her immortality as well?

  “I’m waiting.”

  She froze. “Is that an order?”

  He made her nervous. Deliciously so, but he was a hard, dominant brute. Sexy as hell, yes, that too. All she had to do tonight was take what she wanted. All of what she wanted. Could she bring herself to do so? He wouldn’t let her go halfway—no quick fuck in the dark to seal her deal with him. No, her berserker would make her admit her sexiest fantasies—and then live them.

  The others gathered around the fire could both hear this conversation and see them. Those fierce faces froze in their lusty merriment, but laughter lit up Var’s face. Vikar had promised to share her with him. Maybe her fantasies were naughtier than she had believed because that possibility had the wetness slicking her secret places again.

  “Yes,” Vikar said thoughtfully. “I think that is. So, tell me, baby. Because I’m all ears.”

  “They just do it.” She turned towards the fire, hoping the heat hid the flush crawling over her cheeks.

  “Yes,” he mocked. “But right now I’m wanting the specifics. You all do it in the dark, Pure? Turn off the lights and then have at it? Or does the place you come from—the kind of place that has longships—have some dirty little secrets?”

  Had he finally guessed her origins correctly? Did he truly want to know how the gods fucked? Fuck. She rolled the word on her tongue. Those four letters were blunt but precise. She didn’t want to talk about that world. She had tonight and no more.

  When Var passed her the drinking horn, she grabbed the long horn gratefully. Maybe with her mouth full, Vikar would cease his question.

  The piece was pretty—and expensive—with a silver mount along the rim. Apparently, the rumors about the berserkers keeping to the old ways were true. The drinking horn was undoubtedly stolen goods from a museum, but the beer inside was cold. Cold was good. There was also far more beer than she’d expected. The curved design made it impossible to set the horn down without spilling, so a good Viking drank up or passed the horn along. She didn’t give up, so she swallowed, savoring the mellow bite of the hops.

  There was nowhere to run, even if she had wanted to. And if she was honest with herself, she didn’t want to leave. She wanted this. She wanted him. Giving in to her curiosity, she examined his big body. Despite the hard musculature of his shoulders, his golden skin looked soft. Imminently touchable beneath the cotton T-shirt. All of which paled in comparison to the thick, promising ridge of his erection punched up against the front of his leather riding pants. That part of him was as large and broad as the rest of him. She’d strip off that leather, that outer shell, and explore him with her mouth and hands.

  He grunted something to Var, and the other man disappeared into the shadows closing in on them fast.

  She swallowed more. She didn’t care. All that mattered now was the heat licking at her. The curiosity making her burn. What would Vikar do first? Would he be all over her, or would he move slow and deliberate? What would it be like if he lost control and that big body covered hers?

  His hands took the horn from hers. “I don’t want you drunk, baby.”

  She didn’t know what he wanted.

  “Don’t play with me, Vikar.” She breathed in, loving the masculine, smoky scent of him. He smelled wild. Free. She’d be free, too, when she finished this job. “Just fuck me.”

  ###

  Loki’s balls. This female undid him. She’d had too much beer, and she’d made promises she clearly wasn’t sure she could—or should—keep. Too bad for her. He was pirate enough, Viking enough, to hold her to those words. All of her words.

  Standing up swiftly, he motioned for two of his men to take the first watch. The desert held far more than the Vikings—or even the humans passing through on the freeway. There were dragons and Fenrir’s bloodthirsty children, half-wolf and half-men. Odin himself had been known to raise the dead and send their rune-inscribed bodies back to haunt the living, and the frost giants periodically tested the borders. Bad enough Vikar had sailed his longship down, losing two of his crew to the waves. He lost no one and nothing more.

  Truth was, he was the one in danger.

  He’d enjoyed more than his fair share of pretty women. Some liked the idea of inviting a brutish berserker into their beds, while others he had seduced. He knew how to touch, where to kiss. Moreover, he enjoyed it. A passionate battle between the sheets was a far sweeter alternative than the bloodier passages that earned him his keep and brought him the gold and silver he added yearly to his hoard.

  This woman was more than pretty.

  More than a quick seduction and quicker tumble.

  Pure made him want to think in terms of keeps. Of adding her to his hoard like she was a bracelet or a coin he’d taken. Like she was the sweetest, most precious of treasures. No. He was Viking and berserker to boot. She was merely plunder. And Loki’s balls, he wanted to plunder her sweet, luscious body. He’d spent the ride imagining her spread out beneath him on his furs. It was past time to make those fantasies a reality.

  “Come.” He held out a hand.

  She eyed him like he’d called a dog. Her displeasure didn’t matter. She owed him her obedience, and by the gods, he’d have it.

  “That’s it?” She rose though, even if her feet stayed put. He noticed that—and noticed how the bare skin of her forearms flashed beneath the leather jacket. The bustier she wore was a short, fitted garment cut low across her breasts and stopping just below the soft curve of her waist. The dark leather cupped her breasts, pushing them up for him to see. His fingers itched to pull her laces free.

  He’d like her even better naked.

  “Time to pay up, Pure.”

  She didn’t look horrified. Or even outraged. No, the face she turned towards him remained calm and cool. That icy serenity made him eager to undo her, laces and all. His Pure was too composed. He wouldn’t hurt her, never that, but he’d rock her boat all right. The way her eyes widened, the wicked grin spreading across his face, clearly telegraphed his intentions. Fortunately for them both, he was excelled at spreading chaos.

  “You agreed to follow my orders,” he reminded her when she didn’t immediately move. “You want to fight me on this one, baby, I’m more than happy to show you what happens.”

  “Which is?” She lifted her chin stubbornly. She wasn’t afraid of him, she was pushing back—hard—and that shouldn’t have turned him on. The erection punching at the front of his pants said otherwise. He shoved the emotion down. Later. He’d have tonight and possibly one more night before he got her safely to her destination. He had time for fantasies.

  “I’ll put you right over my knee and paddle your sweet little ass until it’s cherry red,” he promised.

  That calm façade of hers didn’t twitch. She simply looked defiant—and curious. “You want to pull my panties down first, Vikar? How do you know I won’t like that?”

  “Hel,” Var muttered.

  And she still didn’t move.

/>   “Is that it?” she demanded. “That’s all you’ve got to offer me for foreplay?”

  The erotic jolt that hit him at her words was unexpected. “You’d enjoy it.” His damned imagination loved this game she’d started, wanted to invent a thousand naughty games he could play with her if he’d had more time.

  “I don’t think so,” she said in that cool, decisive voice of hers, her feet still planted right there on the ground. He didn’t know whether she was stalling or genuinely thinking his teasing offer over. Either was possible with Pure, although he leaned towards the thinking-it-over side of things. Pure struck him as a woman who paid her debts. She’d let him touch her on the bike earlier, and he’d treasure his memories of the muted heat of her, the breathy gasps she hadn’t been able to hold back.

  “Are you still wet?” He had to know.

  She blinked, like his question made no sense. She’d claimed to be no virgin, but her experience was obviously limited.

  “Between your legs,” he said. Her eyes widened at his blunt words, but he’d never pretended to be anyone other than who he was. A barbarian. A berserker for hire. “Is your pussy slick with your juices? If you slip your fingers between those lips, will you feel the dampness?”

  “Your question is obscene,” she accused. “You can’t ask those things.”

  Gods above, he was a lusty Viking who was violent and dirty and somehow in charge of an angel. Clearly, the gods either had a sense of humor—or maybe they were finally on his side.

  “I’m finding out,” he warned and took a step towards her. “I’m putting my fingers right there, in your sweet pussy.”