Viking's Pride

by Holley Trent

  VIKING’S PRIDE

  Growing up in the isolated community of Norseton, New Mexico, Erin Petersen always felt at odds with her peers. Although power and favor is flowing back to the Afótama clan from the old Viking gods, Erin hasn’t been bestowed with any. She’s still a weak psychic, and being a perpetual sore thumb has left her aimless.

  When the sexy as sin boy-next-door Will Valle returns to Norseton after more than a decade away, not only does he offer her the possibility of a exciting job in spite of her weak gifts, but a chance to explore the world outside of Norseton.

  In the midst of the sexual awakening her brooding geek ignites, Erin learns that her “weirdness” might exist for a more sinister reason. She’s prepared to confront it with Will’s help, but in doing so, the revelations they force to the surface might shake the Afótama to their core. Erin has always wanted to fit in, but now she might be the reason many in the clan are on the way out.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Erin Petersen passed through the two boulders that acted as a sort of natural back gate for the desert community of Norseton, New Mexico, and stopped—agape and agog. Her favorite trail looped around and past the private community—where she’d lived her entire life—and out into the dry, scrubby expanse with little shade and certainly few good places to rest.

  Beside a particularly impressive saguaro cactus, a woman bent onto a waist-high flat rock. She met every rhythmic thrust from the man behind her with one of her own.

  His pants were down around his ankles. His backward baseball cap pinned his auburn hair out of his eyes.

  Erin knew them both. She would have recognized the brown-skinned woman anywhere, because the queen’s aide Lora stood out in the Norseton crowd without trying. That coloring was hard to come by in a group of people descended from Vikings. Erin and Lora went jogging together sometimes, and Erin called her a friend.

  Erin scoffed silently. Not friendly enough, apparently, if she’s been with Jody all along. Has she been?

  As far as Erin knew, Lora hated the queen’s brother. There he was, though, trying to fuck her into the next epoch.

  Unbelievable. Erin gave her head a slight shake and suppressed her body’s compulsion to throw up her hands. Queen Contessa had taken Erin aside a few weeks ago and told her in no uncertain terms to snuff out the torch she was carrying for him. Jody was too old and too jaded for her, she’d said. Obviously, Erin’s torch had been shining a smidge too brightly, because in all that time, she’d thought her crush was a discreet one.

  He was always so kind to her and wasn’t so easily annoyed about her tendency to say stupid things. He gently corrected her when she showed off her ignorance about the world. She’d only left Norseton once, and there was so much she didn’t know—so many experiences she hadn’t had. Jody had a knack for making her feel like she wasn’t completely hopeless, even if she was.

  “Right there. Fuck.” Lora writhed against the stone, fingers clawing the unforgiving rock and eyelids heavy with ecstasy.

  Rubbing her thighs together from some sort of vicarious arousal, Erin wished she were Lora. What’s ten years? Lora wasn’t that much older than her. She had to be twenty-six, or twenty-seven at the most, and she wasn’t even like most of the people in Norseton. She wasn’t Afótama—she was an adopted outsider—and yet she’d somehow managed to catch Jody’s gaze.

  No, not somehow. She’s beautiful and smart. That makes up for it.

  Jody could have any woman he wanted, and there was no reason she had to be like him. A psychic of his strength and lineage should have, in theory, wanted a partner of equal power, but the Afótama were so used to the women in their clan having stronger magic. Already, he and Lora were outside of the norm.

  What’s one more thing?

  He straightened up a bit and ran his hands down her sides to her hips, arching her up to him. She hooked her legs around him so trustingly—offering herself up to him for him to take her as he wanted, and Erin rubbed her thighs together some more. Her hand seemed to have a mind of its own as it slipped inside her shirt and up her belly toward her breasts.

  “It’s not polite to stare,” came a raspy, deep whisper from behind Erin that made her start.

  As soon as she whipped around to see who it was, the man pulled her back from the path and beyond the stones. He immediately leaned in to whisper, “I can sense him on the psychic web which means he can certainly sense me, and you as well. He knows you’re there and doesn’t care if you see.”

  Erin wrenched away from him and took off at a brisk walk toward the community. Shit.

  The man, having a good six inches on her—at the very least—and longer legs, easily caught up. “Sorry to spoil your fun.”

  “Go away.” She kept her eyes on the prize—the back row of shops and businesses in the community’s business district.

  He chuckled. “I’m just looking out for you. You wouldn’t want him to think you make a habit of watching people fuck. You don’t, do you?”

  “Of course I don’t. Don’t be ridiculous.” I could hide in the library. He probably wouldn’t follow her in there and keep talking about what she’d just done. The librarians were fairly meek individuals, but they didn’t take kindly to idiots raising the decibel level in their sanctuary of books.

  “Don’t you want to finish your walk? There are other trails.”

  “No kidding? I wouldn’t have ever known. I’ve only lived here since the day I was born.” She moved a little faster.

  On days like the one at hand, she wished to be anywhere but. Afótama couldn’t thrive for long outside their groups, though. They were social beings who needed to connect with their clan, and to touch. Her parents had impressed that on her from an early age.

  “This is your place,” they’d said. “You belong here. With people like you.”

  She’d had no reason not to trust that. She felt the urges. Perhaps not as strong as her parents had made out, but she did believe she needed to be near people with similar energy.

  The Afótama, named for a Viking princess who’d fled her home in Iceland nearly a thousand years ago to escape persecution, were magic users. Witches, of a sort, though they didn’t cast spells or lay curses. Their abilities were mostly psychic—telepathic—though some had other gifts. Their current queen, Contessa, had returned to the community after nearly three decades missing and opened the floodgates, so to speak. The old Viking gods had funneled so much magic through her that she’d needed two lovers to control the onslaught. The community had learned that Tess had two chieftains right around the same time the magic the gods had deprived them of returned. Long unseen gifts awakened in many of the families, but Erin’s family wasn’t one of them.

  There wasn’t anything special about her. She could hardly manage simple telepathy.

  He caught up again. “Well, maybe you can tell me about the more obscure trails near here, because growing up, I never sought them out.”

  “You could always make your own. Make it a long one.” She picked up her pace a little and ignored the nagging impulse to turn and stomp her foot. Just who does this guy think he is, following me? She wanted to be left alone with her embarrassment. He probably thought she was some kind of pervert for standing there and staring for as long as she had, but she hadn’t been able to help herself. She’d been transfixed by the joining of bodies and their urgency—their desperation. It had aroused Erin like nothing she’d experienced before, and she was ashamed. Obviously, there was something wrong with her.

  “I like to start with short hikes, and work up to longer ones. I’m a cataloger by nature, so all the detail around distracts me. What’s supposed to be a half-hour walk can turn into a two-hour ordeal.”

  “Seems like you should get some help for that.”
>
  “I think I very clearly just asked you to help me.”

  “I’ll pass.” Thirty seconds, tops, and she could toss herself through the library’s back door and get the guy off her back.

  “How about coffee, then? I’d like to catch up.”

  “Catch up on what?” Now she did stop to turn to him, and it took a moment for recognition to chase away her indignation. She recognized those bright blue eyes, though the face around them was slightly different. Older. The horn-rimmed glasses were a distraction. The beard he’d once worn was gone, and his hair a bit longer. It tickled his strong jaw, the rich hues in it mesmerizing against his winter tan. She’d always admired that beautiful mix of dark red and browns—so interesting compared to her drab, monotone blond. Oh. Shit. “Will,” she whispered.

  The boy next door had finally come home.

  He folded his arms over his broad chest and bobbed his eyebrows. “Hello, Erin. Long time no see.”

  “Well, that’s an understatement.” She shifted her weight. She’d last seen Will seven or eight years ago. He’d been home for a short visit after graduating from college, and she’d been fifteen or sixteen. He hadn’t paid much attention to her, and she’d returned the favor. But now, with him standing in front of her, she couldn’t help but to look.

  It was a mild enough day for shorts, and he’d taken advantage of the temperature when choosing his clothes, just as she had. His exposed arms were muscular, and he obviously hadn’t been skipping out on legs day at the gym, either. He wasn’t the waif who’d left Norseton thirty pounds ago. Dear gods, how’d that happen?

  She swallowed down her nerves and somehow managed to meet his curious gaze. “I remember you being a geek.”

  “I can’t tell if that’s an insult.”

  “No. I…” Visual overstimulation caused her words to fall off. She couldn’t look at him and talk sensibly at the same time. His hands are huge. And what she could see of them looked rough.

  Unlike their distant cousins in Fallon, Nevada, the Afótama tended to be more cerebral than powerful. The brains and brawn split off and went their separate ways centuries ago. Most of the warriors from the Ótama’s failed voyage to Greenland abandoned the women and children soon after they hit the shore in Canada. The folks in Fallon had those fighter lineages and had rough and tumble jobs suited to them, whereas the folks in Norseton had to learn early on to use their intellect to their best advantage. There hadn’t been much mixing of the two groups in the past seven or eight centuries, but that was starting to change a little. The queen and her brothers had that mixed heritage, and the queen had a notion to invite the Fallonites back into the genetic fold. Erin wasn’t so sure how she felt about that yet. It didn’t make sense for them to water down the lines. The Fallonites were far weaker psychics.

  “You were… I mean, when before, when you left…”

  “I’m still a geek.” He chuckled.

  “Are you sure?”

  He laughed and pushed his hair behind his ears. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I am. My former boss reminded me of it every day. So, about that coffee?”

  “Coffee?” Who said anything about coffee? She was having the hardest damned time focusing on anything important. Well, his lips were important. Especially the bottom one that looked so ripe for abuse by her teeth.

  “Yes. I suggested coffee and catching up, and you whipped around and asked me for what. I can sweeten the deal, if you’d like, and buy you a pastry, too. I promise I’m good for it. I’ve got a whole twenty bucks in my pocket right now.”

  He wriggled his hand in the pocket of his mesh shorts, ostensibly clutching his money, but the action tightened the fabric across his crotch. And once she’d seen the bulge, she couldn’t unsee it.

  The tiniest whimper escaped her parted lips. Kill me now. Her day was going downhill in a seriously unexpected way. She’d left the house to clear her head after the third argument in a week with her parents about some bullshit thing, only to endure a different kind of frustration.

  She forced a lump down her dry throat and forced her gaze up to those startlingly blue eyes.

  He pushed up an eyebrow. “You don’t need to try so hard to come up with an excuse. I’m a man who can tolerate a polite no, and I won’t even ask why not.”

  “I don’t have an excuse. I’m just…” She let the words fall off because she didn’t know what she was—besides a budding voyeur, apparently. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out. “Yes. Okay. Coffee.”

  “Does that include the catching-up part, too, or am I only good for the snack?”

  “Just don’t bring up the…uh…” She dragged her tongue across her dry lips and canted her head toward the trail. “That.”

  “Why, are you ashamed?”

  “Who wouldn’t be?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Because you had just gotten there. He would have known you didn’t see anything, but I was standing there—”

  “Enjoying it?” he whispered. Will leaned in close, his warm breath a tickle on her earlobe that sent an answering tug down to her sex. “You think he doesn’t know that, a psychic of his power? You think I don’t know it?”

  Cheeks burning, she took a large step back from him and gave her head a violent shake. “You can’t…you can’t do that.”

  “Can’t or shouldn’t?” His voice was soothing and level, and his stance relaxed as if he found the discussion to be too typical for embarrassment.

  “Ca—both. I can’t do that. I can’t get into peoples’ heads like that, and you shouldn’t be doing it to me.”

  “I don’t have to try. Some people are louder on the psychic web than others. In a metaphorical sense, you’re like a person wearing headphones. You’re not aware of what’s happening around you and you don’t realize how loud you are.”

  “I’m loud?”

  The “web” connected the Afótama. In the middle were Queen Tess and the clan chieftains, and others of incredible strength. The matriarch—the retired queen, Muriel—was the web’s overseer, in a way. She buffered out problems and pinpointed places where there was stress. She figured out who was hurting and did what she could to pick them up. Linking them all, however, was Ótama herself. The peculiar witch hadn’t returned from the dead, so much, as having been brought back from the place in between here and there after nine centuries in limbo. She was the reason they could communicate with each other, often across large distances. Tess said she was like a computer server, joining all the machines on a massive network. Ótama was a powerful witch, but no one would have known it from looking at her. She was so sweet.

  “You mean everyone in the freakin’ clan can tell when I’m horny? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No. I’d venture to guess most people in the clan are like you. I wouldn’t worry about Jody saying anything, if that’s what’s bugging you. If he cared that you saw him, he would have stopped.”

  For some reason, that didn’t make her feel any better.

  “I won’t be able to go anywhere near the executive mansion now,” she said in a rushed whisper. “Gods, every time I see him—”

  “You’ll what?” Still that same, calm voice. Unflappable, he was. “You’ll be embarrassed for finding the human body and the things we can do with it attractive and arousing? I doubt he’ll be feeling any embarrassment whatsoever, nor will his lady, if she ever learns of the audience.”

  Erin clasped her hand over her eyes and let out a manic little laugh. “I work under her sometimes as a temp. I’m going to have to turn those assignments down.”

  “That’s a pity, seeing as how I work with Lora. It would be nice to see familiar faces at the mansion.”

  “You’re back?”

  “I guess I am.” He winked. “Obviously.”

  “No, I mean, for good.”

  “That’s yet to be determined. So, about that coffee? I think we’d be far more comfortable discussing the boring nuances of what I do for a living if we had some
things in our hands to fidget.”

  Those big hands…fidgeting…

  She balled her own hands at her sides and let the sting of her fingernails against her palms snap her out of her lustful mental meanderings. If she couldn’t keep her thoughts in her own head, how could she ever expect anyone to take her seriously as a psychic? She’d never be able to work in the queen’s entourage. Tess needed people who had their shit together, and on most days, Erin couldn’t even hear her parents mentally shouting her name.

  “Okay. Coffee. Just…don’t read my mind.” She hoped she sounded righteously indignant, but the truth was, she was afraid to admit to anyone how ashamed she was about her abilities. He would probably think she was deranged if he stood near her long enough. Her mind always seemed to cycle back to the same things—chocolate, cheese, and sex. Usually not all at once, though being in bed with those three things sounded like her idea of a fantasy weekend.

  “I don’t read minds,” he said. “I just listen and observe. I don’t go digging around. I don’t have to.”

  “That makes it even worse.” She started for the coffee shop with Will on her heels, doing all she could to cloud her deviant thoughts from his so-called powers of observation. He probably already thought she was some kind of freak, and while that wasn’t exactly untrue, the condition wasn’t something she wanted to be well known. She had a hard enough time fitting in already.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Returning to Norseton after more than a decade away had seemed a logical venture for Will. Many of the young people in the clan went away for college, and quite a few chose not to move back, but they really couldn’t get away. Not completely. They were knitted together too intimately through Ótama, who acted as something of a psychic conduit—a living, breathing switchboard of sorts. Even a thousand miles away, he could tug on the strings of the psychic web and check in on those close to him. His parents, his brother. They could even have short conversations that way, though they’d usually end up with headaches as a result. Long distance telepathy was hard work, but it was worth it to keep the connections alive. If they didn’t use them, they’d lose them.