First to Burn

by Anna Richland

  Where was her barbarian? While her hands stroked his shoulders and down his back to the tight rise of his ass, she poured her scorching feelings into their kiss. Her breasts dragged across his chest, seeking rougher stimulation than wet skin on wet skin provided, but no matter how hard she pressed, he didn’t release his warrior.

  “Wulf.” She coaxed and ordered and begged all in one word as he lifted her hips from the bench, but his hands didn’t speed or roughen on her body.

  “Relax into the water.” One hand glided along the length of her back, arching her body until her breasts jutted from the bath, while his other hand stretched her legs until her soles reached the far side of the tub. Heated water lapped at her calves, her ribs, her shoulders, all sensitized by his gaze and pleading to be touched, but his hands stayed fixed under her back and thighs. For interminable moments only his eyes moved from her lips and breasts to her uptilted hips and spread legs. “Grab the wall.”

  She obeyed. The stone was textured—not rough, but not as smooth or heated as his skin. She craved more. She craved touch. His.

  He leaned down for a caress so brief she might have missed it if she hadn’t been watching. His lower lip caught a droplet of water descending the curve of her breast, but he didn’t press harder against her skin. His tongue never touched her. Instead it licked only his own lips, and took only that single drop before he straightened.

  Torture, that’s what making her wait amounted to. Her grip tightened on the wall behind her, giving her leverage to thrust upward and bring her aching breasts closer to him and his mouth, closer to the attention they needed, even as she floated.

  At last his lips closed around her nipple, and she couldn’t stay quiet as more need clamored in her body. Her moans mingled with the sound of his sucks. The louder she became, the harder he pulled, and she wanted it harder still. When her voice rose, he added his tongue. She felt her chest expand, heard air rasp from her throat, as he worked her.

  Fire built where his teeth scraped, spread across her skin and burned despite the water. She squeezed her fists on the edge of the pool, squeezed her pelvic muscles, squeezed the pleasure from every touch, but she wasn’t filled. She wanted to be, but his mouth only tightened her, it didn’t finish the damn job.

  Finally, his finger breached her triangle of need and she reached for his shoulders while she thrust her hips against his hand. Her unmoored body floundered, and his hand fell away.

  “I told you not to let go.” His voice sounded like an animal’s growl. He rolled her nipple hard enough to make her shiver. Anticipation and need fought as she wondered whether obeying him or letting go would be the faster route to what she wanted.

  This time she stayed where he put her, feet and hands anchored to opposite sides of the stone bath, her body floating in the hot water. For long moments he didn’t touch her, as if testing her obedience, and then his reward sent a fresh surge of desire through her as he traced a line around the juncture of her thighs. Up and down, but not inside.

  “More. Please. More.” She’d tell him with words he seemed to like hearing. “Fuck me.”

  He gave her more, but it wasn’t close enough to everything she wanted, even when he slid a finger past her entrance and sucked her nipple at the same time.

  Her world compressed to her breasts and her core, and the sensations that sizzled from them to the tensed and vibrating muscles in her body. His mouth released her nipple, but he moved faster in her, with more fingers, and then his thumb touched a spot that ignited the water on her skin. She needed to shake, to writhe, to heave from the escalating tension.

  “Hold still.” His voice, gritty and barely audible, made her open her eyes.

  The man who loomed over her, head flung back so far she couldn’t see his eyes, wasn’t in control. His lips curled back from his teeth, and his neck tendons stood out like wires. Even though he touched her so carefully, his chest heaved like he was racing for his life.

  From her instep to her spine, she squeezed and sought leverage to thrust while his fingers drove into her faster and faster, sending her spiraling in a whirlpool of sensation until vibrations swept her body and matched the water that surged around them. She must have screamed then, because an echo hung in the air and her mouth was open.

  He supported her as the ceiling came into focus. “Well?” Above her his eyes glittered like sapphires reflecting light. “How was that?”

  “Terrible.” Her feet drifted to the stones at the bottom of the deep tub as she sat. He deserved a little torture. “I can’t think.”

  “Then don’t.” He laughed, his throat muscles sharp and enthralling. “You’ll argue.”

  “Ha.” She trailed her hand down his chest to where the evidence of his self-control stood hard and thick while he threw his arms along the pool wall and offered himself. His posture proclaimed, It’s your turn to explore.

  She loved how the male body contrasted with hers. Where her body was padded and curved, his had angles and separately identifiable muscles, like the crease between his torso and his hip. The dim light didn’t penetrate the water, so she couldn’t see the shape of his thighs, but they felt like logs, too hard for her fingers to probe or massage.

  When she wrapped her hand around the part of him she wanted to possess completely, he shuddered. His shaft stood like a mortar set to launch, so she whispered, “Shot out,” and slid her hand up and down his length. Her thumb barely touched her second finger. His thickness would fill her, fill every need she had and more.

  Straddling his thighs, she guided his tip to her opening. They locked eyes and achieved the deeper union she’d yearned for each time their hands or bodies had brushed. This was the connection he’d started a month ago with his scrap of embroidered silk, the bond he’d built with his kisses, the link yesterday and today had forged.

  His hands dug into her hips, yanked her down onto him again and again until waves collided and she braced on his shoulders and threw back her head while he thrust. Her body coiled tighter with each shove of his cock inside her, each impact of his pelvic bone on her inner thighs, each scrape of his teeth at her nipples. She came down faster and harder, striving for a second explosion, reaching for it with him, together.

  With his neck tendons like ridges bisecting his shoulders, he looked like a man about to break, and then he bucked deeper yet and lifted her from the water with a last thrust. He yelled, a sound only, not the coherence of a word, and collapsed backward.

  However long she straddled him, arms looped over his shoulders and face pressed to his neck while their breathing slowed, it wasn’t long enough.

  “Splash over, Doc.” His hands framed her face. “Think that qualified as a hit?”

  She groaned. She had no words, no thoughts, no plans. He could take charge.

  He slipped to the other side of the pool. Water puddled everywhere, the aftermath a wet mess. Like her. Too sated to move, too awed at what they’d shared, she couldn’t do more than watch as he opened a teak box and extracted shampoo.

  The plastic bottle with its orange flip-top, so mundane, made her freeze. They’d forgotten one particular boring, dull, crucial, vital thing. Shit. “You’ve thought of...almost everything.” The sarcasm didn’t carry a sting, but she wanted to bawl, Shampoo but not condoms?

  “So.” She’d start normally before she opened that chat. “This is an amazing place. How often are you here?” Okay, this is awkward. She might as well have asked about the weather.

  He glanced over his shoulder, almost as if he were equally uncertain about what to say or do. “Once or twice a year,” he said, and then he returned to gathering soap and towels.

  “All this—” she gestured around the room, “—for once a year?” Inside her head, she heard her mother say, Enough questions, sweetie, or you’ll end up single like Aunt Mary. She shut up.

  The shampoo cap sn
apped decisively. “It’s been a lot of years.”

  “How many?” She watched his hands rub together until they were covered in bubbles, as ephemeral as this bond between them. If she pushed, would he shut her out even now? With the scent of oranges surrounding her, he massaged circles into her scalp, creating sensations so good she almost let her question drop. Almost. “I’ve noticed a pattern. You make a mysterious pronouncement, then when I ask you to explain, you distract me.”

  “I like distracting you.” After he sluiced water on her hair without letting it drip into her eyes, his fingers followed the bubbles over her shoulder and across the swell of her breast.

  Her body wanted to go all mushy a third time, but her brain issued a squelch command. She tugged his hand off her breast and frowned. “Not going to work.”

  He looked set to jump at the challenge she’d unintentionally issued, until he read her expression. Wise man.

  “Rinse.” He retreated to the other end of the stone ledge. “Then we’ll talk.”

  She did as he said and pushed wet hair away from her face. “So, you never said how many years you’ve been coming here.” This answer had become important out of all proportion.

  Pulling his eyes off her chest, he looked at the ceiling, perhaps counting.

  One question—how long he’d owned this secret room—wouldn’t tell her what she needed to understand, but she couldn’t move on without knowing.

  When he met her eyes, a single raised eyebrow defied her. “Six hundred years.”

  Her heart seized with the same chest-tightening confusion she’d felt struggling in the mountains to reach Nazdana’s village. She couldn’t have heard him correctly.

  “I’m immortal.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Theresa’s dark eyes were the sole color on her chalky face.

  “At least I’m not a vampire.” Wulf tried to smile. “I wouldn’t know as many great restaurants.” His joke bombed.

  “What do you mean by...immortal?” Her voice revealed nothing of her thoughts.

  “I can’t die. I can’t be killed.” Sharing his secret directly was a step he’d never risked even with Deavers. “You’ve seen my injuries heal. They always do. And I don’t age.”

  She studied him, her face as immobile as a Byzantine mosaic.

  Seconds lengthened into a minute while he wondered for the ten-thousandth time what went on in a woman’s mind. Although she relied on science, maybe she was one of the rare people who could believe and accept his story.

  “I still don’t understand. Are you...” Her inflections were choppy, with pauses where words ought to flow. “Like that movie. Highlander?”

  “Not exactly.” His jaw clenched at the comparison. Two deployments ago a new guy had thought it would make an entertaining movie night. After the captain snapped the DVD in half, he’d transferred the guy to a desk at Headquarters Company. It took a month of Judy Garland and Julie Andrews to expunge the swords, beheadings and stupid motto. “Fifteen hundred years ago I was a regular man. You would’ve called me a Viking. Then—” he forced himself to open his fists, “—I became this.”

  “How?”

  No nonsense Captain Chiesa, the straight-lipped woman who’d accosted his team in the gym, had returned. He couldn’t complain, because he’d wanted someone who’d listen and believe and maybe even care. When she leaned forward to speak, her breasts jiggled, which sent tiny waves lapping over to his side of the pool with an invitation. Then she raised a hand, and water drops followed veins down the pale inside of her wrist. If he bent forward, he could—

  “Stop it.” She snapped her fingers. “You were finally talking. Keep talking. Tell me how you became immortal.”

  “Right.” He chose a comb from the box by the pool’s edge. It felt insubstantial, so he swapped it for the weightier shampoo. “Have you read Beowulf?”

  “The English epic? With the monster?” Her eyebrows drew together, and she brushed his hands aside. “You’ve done my hair. Give me that bottle before you crush it.”

  Orders from her were a sign that his world might be intact, so he leaned back to let her touch him while he continued talking. “The Beowulf saga is true.” When Galan had recorded their history in writing, he’d left out most of the men’s names to protect them, but he’d included the songs and stories and even Hrothgar’s queen’s flirtation with Beowulf, all the parts that Wulf himself forgot whenever he remembered the monster.

  She pressed on top of his head, circled and released. Her fingers must have deactivated most of his muscle groups, because his limbs flopped. “Are you saying you’re Beowulf?”

  “No, he was our liege lord.”

  “Our?”

  “My brother and I.” Ivar would knock out his teeth for talking openly, but he couldn’t live in his brother’s form of isolation. “We joined Beowulf’s quest, looking for a bit of adventure, a bigger slice of reward. And of course we had our honor to prove. Common story. Ask any grunt today.” They’d been desperate, the belly hunger of their childhood replaced by a thirst to restore their family name, but their father had gambled away their sea gear. Beowulf had gifted Ivar with a seal-fur cloak and outfitted Wulf with a boar’s head helmet. From that moment they’d become more faithful than his hounds, willing to die for him.

  Instead they’d been sentenced to live.

  “Go on,” she murmured.

  “The first night at Heorot, we lost Handscio.” Her doctor fingers moved to the nerves at the base of his skull and forced his eyes to shut. Never had the telling of this tale, nor even the thinking of it, come so easily, but with her hands digging into his muscles, he could recall the monster without shuddering. A half dozen arms had sprung from its body, enough arms to pin a man and claw him open and fight off other men all at once. When their swords hadn’t cut the monster’s hide, he and Ivar had been as helpless as newborns thrown in a fjord. All of them had been, except their leader.

  “After Beowulf ripped the monster apart, we thought we’d earned our gold.” He could keep talking if she kept touching him. Maybe he could even sleep afterward if she massaged his shoulders. “Hrothgar’s men didn’t touch Grendel’s arm. Years of fear had destroyed their nerve, but we showed our bravery by passing the limb through the hall.” Young and stupid. “All I remember is someone—we were drunk—joked about roasting the arm, but Ivar stopped it.”

  Her fingers traced through the hair at his temple and curved around the line of his ear, again and again, until the rhythm calmed his heart. She wasn’t leaving.

  “The next night the hag, Grendel’s mother, appeared. We fought to save the man she grabbed, one of the king’s, but couldn’t. We all lived, but none of us worried about that while we followed her to the bog.”

  “Close your eyes while I rinse.” She dribbled water across his forehead.

  Submerging would be faster, but for a moment the dark water looked like the murk where Beowulf had plunged after the monster. Despite the heat, his balls shrank to his body. They’d seen blood rise to the water’s surface, and the others had begged to leave, but Ivar had refused to abandon watch. He’d backed his brother because that was his job, then and now. The others had also stayed—out of fear or faith, who knew?—but Ivar’s allegiance in the marsh had earned him the position he held today.

  “Beowulf came back with Grendel’s head. He said its mother was also dead.” The monsters had received mercy denied to the rest of them, all except their liege who’d been cursed—or blessed—to find a dragon. Sometimes over the last fifteen hundred years, he’d envied Grendel and the hag, but today, with a warm spot growing in his chest while Theresa rubbed his shoulders, today he did not envy the dead.

  “That head was our trophy. We carried it on our spears, even though it dripped on us and stunk of rot.” He inhaled the lingering orange blossoms and vanilla
of shampoo, smells that never occurred in the swamp, ones he’d first encountered in the court of Constantinople and now would always associate with Theresa.

  “Wulf, you don’t have to...” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and draped herself across his back. She felt so vibrantly alive against him.

  “I do. I need to finish.” Then they’d never speak of it again. “The blood stung my hands, like vinegar.” He looked at his hands, where there were faint lines from adolescent scars. The last permanent mark on his body was the scar next to his eye, caused when Grendel had thrown him headfirst into a bench. “I searched for a place to rinse but the water was so green no one would touch it. I wiped my hands on my shirt. Since then I’ve been immortal.”

  “Hmm.” In the silence he could almost hear her brain clicking. “So was it an infection?”

  “Most likely.” Jurik had explained the discovery of microbes to the rest of them a century before. The thirteen of them hadn’t been cursed by God, merely by a microscopic organism.

  “Are you...” She wasn’t doubting or dismissing his story. “Infectious?”

  “Apparently not. Everyone else I’ve known has died.”

  “Known as in met, or as in—” Her voice rose before she stopped.

  “Everyone.” Even if he could choose a woman to share his life forever, would he? Would he doom her to this cycle of perpetual loss? That wasn’t an easy question to answer.

  He felt drained, and the shadows under Theresa’s eyes reminded him of her mortal body’s limitations, so he helped her from the pool and toweled her dry. Although she raised her arms and turned at his prompts, she was close to asleep by the time he wrapped them both in robes and settled her on floor cushions.