Edge of Temptation

by Megan Crane

“Are you a virgin?” It wasn’t a question so much as a gruff, hot demand.

  And it didn’t occur to her to lie to him. Maud nodded, feeling flushed and helpless and something much hotter than merely embarrassed, and that deliciously relentless grip on her chin didn’t help. Or ease.

  Something blazed in him, as dark as it was hot. It made his blue eyes glitter. It made her feel breathless. Stretched thin.

  “Good.”

  He dropped his hand, and she hated that.

  Maud hated all of this. She hated that she really did worry she was dreaming this, when nothing that had happened to her in the past ten years had ever felt so real. More than that, she hated that walking off into the desert of her own accord no longer seemed as appealing as it had before.

  She hated that unlike her every interaction with the bishop and all the senior nuns, all of which slid toward her inevitable punishment with varying degrees of swiftness no matter what was said or done, she had no idea what this wild raider might do next. He might kill her, as she thought he’d threatened he might. He might take her virginity, the idea of which she knew she ought to fill her with horror and despair yet … didn’t. He might leave her where she stood, disappearing into the night as if he really were a figment of her imagination.

  Maud found it was that last one she couldn’t bear to consider.

  “Please,” she said, and she was only a little surprised to find that she was whispering. “Take me with you. Wherever you’re going, I don’t care. Please.”

  The raider’s forbidding scowl deepened. His face was dark, drawn. Something like haunted. She thought he was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, and later, maybe, if she survived, she could wonder why she only liked the things that hurt her. The hard things that could tear her apart, just because she was looking at them.

  As if he could use those teeth around his neck to shred her into pieces, and she’d like it.

  You would, something inside her whispered, thick and hot.

  The needy, greedy pussy that had always made her so vulnerable before softened, then turned molten, making her shift from one foot to the other to ease the sweet burn of it before it made her shudder everywhere else.

  She had the distinct impression he could tell.

  “That’s a dangerous thing to ask a man you don’t know.” His voice was a low rasp. Hard and harsh. It made her feel a cold shiver down the length of her spine when the night was still so warm. “You have no idea what kind of price I might demand. There are things a lot worse than death, girl.”

  “Please,” she said again. None of that mattered. The truth was, she wanted to live. She’d walked off into the desert, yes, but she still wanted to live. And this dark, gloriously powerful man made her want to do whatever it took to make that happen—to keep feeling desperate and alive the way she did in this moment instead of desperate and doomed the way she always had in the church. “I’ll do anything.”

  His blue eyes looked shadowed then, and Maud didn’t think it was the falling dark.

  “Why?” It was a challenge.

  “Because,” she said quietly. “I want to live.”

  He studied her as the stars shimmered above them, making it seem closer to daylight than it should. He looked at her as if he’d already hurt her, and her heart squeezed tight behind her ribs. He looked as if he could study her like this for hours, and maybe he did. He moved eventually, prowling around her in a circle like some kind of big, tough predator. Maud simply stood there and let him, though she didn’t feel at all like his prey. Or maybe she did. The difference was, it didn’t frighten her. She felt his gaze all over her like the touch of his hands and she fought to keep breathing. To keep from shaking where he could see it. And yet none of that was fear.

  He stopped when he was in front of her again, and he was even more beautiful, even more harsh. Stone and threat and that fascinating mouth. His dark face was filled with ghosts and a focused sort of rage that she felt like a lick, sweet and hot, straight to her clit.

  “Prove it,” he dared her.

  And Maud didn’t think. She hardly breathed.

  She followed that odd little song inside of her that had made her follow a wild desert fox for absolutely no reason. She followed it, so old and so wise and connected to parts of her she’d never accessed before and hardly recognized now.

  But she knew them anyway. She’d been searching for them all these years. She’d despaired of ever finding them.

  Surrender, a voice inside her whispered. It will set you free.

  It felt like fate.

  After all this time, and nowhere near the church for the first time in a decade, it felt like faith.

  And for the first time in her life Maud went down on her knees of her own volition, out of desire and longing instead of fear of consequences or a sense of duty, then knelt before her dark, commanding raider right there on the red desert floor.

  He was tough and fierce and the stars were a distant, hectic clutter behind him. He glared down at her, something ferocious in that set expression he wore and the harsh line of his forbidding jaw, but Maud wasn’t afraid. She was something very far away from afraid. Her heartbeat was a tense, wild throb against her ribs, in her neck and her wrists and deep in her pussy.

  It felt like hunger. Like need.

  “What”—his voice was so hard it should have hurt her, as intense as the kick of her own heart—“the fuck are you doing?”

  If she was smart, she would have stopped right there.

  But that was the story of Maud’s whole life. She never made the smart choice.

  She didn’t start now.

  Maud didn’t care what happened next. She didn’t care if he took her with him or left her here. She didn’t care if he was more dangerous than the desert night closing in on them from all sides or the church she’d walked away from.

  She didn’t care. Or she cared too much. Far too much to be anything like smart.

  Either way, she took her life in her hands and reached out. She never shifted her gaze from his. She tilted herself forward and very carefully, very deliberately, placed her hands high on his thighs, so high her fingertips almost brushed those tempting diagonals stamped into his bare flesh while her thumbs flirted with the thick hardness pushing out his fly.

  He was so hot, the heat he generated rivaling the desert floor she knelt on. So hard, packed taut with all that heavy muscle. It was as if he was forged from lost, precious metals, not made of flesh and blood like any other man.

  Her raider didn’t move. He didn’t shove her away or pull her closer. His hands hung there at his sides, loose and ready though he otherwise seemed rooted into place, and she had no doubt he knew exactly how to use them if he chose. He didn’t move a muscle, but she still felt something intense and desperate and huge fill the space between them. The whole of the desert around them and straight up to the stars spread above them. His gaze was blacker than the night and his dark braids fell to his shoulders, reminding her that he was completely uncivilized in every way that mattered.

  Maybe that was why she couldn’t stop. Why she didn’t think to stop.

  Maud moved her hands to the fastening of his trousers and the impressive erection that strained against the material there. She didn’t look away from him while she did it and his face was still carved from stone. Impassive save for that dark thing in his gaze. As if nothing was happening. As if her hands weren’t on him, tugging down his fly.

  But his cock told her a different truth.

  She jerked her gaze from his as she pulled him from his trousers. He was huge. Commanding. Hard—and harder still when she touched him. Maud let out a soft noise as her breath deserted her. She tested his thick length between her palms, rubbing that steely shaft and then testing the satiny head, big and blunt and plump. Her mouth watered. She felt shivery straight through, as if she were filled with all the constellations arrayed above her.

  His scent was sharper here. Clean and male, salt and musk and some dar
ker temptation that made her reach lower to cup his heavy balls in her hand. The weight of them made a liquid, silvery sort of heat wash over her and through her, making her pussy a bright and molten ache.

  “I don’t like repeating myself,” he gritted out. One hand curled into a fist near his thigh. The other moved to test the shape of her jaw. And his cock reared, powerful and perfect, so close that not tasting him felt like a penance. “Don’t make me ask you what the fuck you’re doing again.”

  Maud shifted closer. Her whole body ached, and she couldn’t stop that low, rolling shudder that kept taking her over and twisting her up inside. She felt something like feverish, outside herself and yet anchored hard to the nipples that poked insistently at her tunic and made her breasts feel too heavy, the delicious clenching low in her belly that was driving her mad, and that wet, hot need flooding her pussy.

  “Don’t worry,” she whispered, strung out somewhere between those hard fingers at her jaw and the massive cock right there before her. “I’m just praying.”

  And then she tipped herself forward and sucked him deep into her mouth.

  2.

  His cock betrayed him.

  Gunnar wanted the nun off him. No one touched a raider without permission. No one dared. He wanted her on her feet and moving toward the all-range vehicle he’d stashed a short hike away so the douchebag priests couldn’t hear him coming. He wanted her virginity, not her goddamned mouth on him.

  But her mouth. Her mouth.

  Her mouth was a marvel, as deliciously wicked as her loose clothes and cropped blond hair proclaimed her pure. He never had a chance.

  She sucked him in deep, then pulled back nice and slow, lavishing all that wet heat on every thick inch of him she could reach. She gripped him with a sure fist down low at his base, almost making him groan out loud, then lapped at his cockhead as if it were a sweet dessert.

  She made a greedy little noise, as if the taste of him alone was getting her off where she knelt there before him, and that was it. That was too much.

  Gunnar moved to shove her off his traitorous asshole of a cock that didn’t care what vows he’d made or what he’d lost or even what he had to do to make it right again—but ended up cradling the little nun’s pretty face between his hands instead.

  She tipped her head up as she took him in deep again, as if she knew exactly what it did to a man to see her like that. Her bright blue eyes and a wide, carnal mouth that was made for this and his dick disappearing between her lips—

  He almost came right then and there.

  But Gunnar was a raider, not a little bitch. He was a warrior of the raider brotherhood, blood brother to the king of his clan, and he didn’t lose his shit over a piece of ass. Not even this one, with her talented tongue and that suction and that wet, swirling perfection it seemed she could do forever.

  He wanted her to do it forever, and he didn’t even know her goddamned name.

  Gunnar couldn’t fist his hands in her hair the way he liked, so he sunk his fingers into the short, soft blond strands instead and guided her whole head and that devastating mouth of hers where he wanted it. Then he gave up what little fight he’d had in him and began to thrust into her in earnest.

  And he forgot.

  Why he was in this bastard of a desert in the first place. Why he needed a virgin, of all rare and unusual things in this sex-focused, piece-of-shit world. What he’d lost on that battlefield in Kentucky a year ago and the man he blamed for it, Gunnar’s own blood brother Wulf who just happened to be the raider king. What he’d traveled so damned far to do here and why it mattered that he do it in the first place, because he refused to accept the world as it had been this past, dark year.

  Gunnar forgot.

  There was only the rhythm he set, demanding and intense, and the way she met him with such silken ease. There were the faint wet sounds she made and the scorching heat of her mouth. There was too much sensation, a brilliant stream of light and need surging from his cock to the balls she still held cupped in her palm and the place she still gripped him, pooling in his lower back and ripping him wide open.

  He wanted more. He wanted to give her more. He wanted to take even more than that. He wanted everything—and he couldn’t remember why he’d had the smallest moment of doubt.

  He surged into her, over and over, and she began to hum. She hummed like one of the camp girls back home on the eastern islands, like her role in life was to suck cock and she was some kind of overachiever in her field. She hummed as if she was enjoying herself as much as he was, which Gunnar knew was absolutely fucking impossible.

  She shifted to brace her hands on his thighs as she took his thrusts and his view down the length of his body to where she knelt for him was spectacular. She was all his. Her mouth stretched wide around him, her eyes half lidded, with moisture leaking from them. Farther down, she even rocked her ass in the air as if she wanted nothing more than to rub that pussy all over him.

  Something he thought he’d like to experience himself, in fact.

  And Gunnar didn’t think he’d seen anything better in his entire life than this virgin nun on her knees in the dirt with her mouth too full of him.

  But as if she could read his mind, she shifted position again, changed the angle of her head, and then swallowed—so his cock slid nice and easy into the back of her throat.

  There was an animal noise, long and low, and Gunnar was only dimly aware he’d made it. He didn’t care. The whole world fell away and there was nothing but this. That insane slick fit. The way her face fit in his hands. The way his cock slid as far as he wanted it into the throat she offered up to him without even the faintest hint of a gag reflex, god bless her dirty soul.

  The way he surged into her then, like a wild thing, as if he’d never stop.

  He didn’t want to stop.

  And when he came it was with a mighty roar, pumping himself into her again and again while she swallowed down every last drop of him.

  Somehow, he didn’t stagger. Somehow, he stayed upright despite the body blow of his climax. When he finally let go of her she sat back, releasing his cock and licking her lips as she did it, which made lust surge through him all over again as if he hadn’t just busted a nut for the first time in a year.

  A year.

  Reality slammed into him, a vicious sucker punch.

  Audra. His mate.

  She had died in a raid a year ago and Gunnar had sworn that very day that he wouldn’t rest until he’d found a way to bring her back. No matter what dark magic or ancient ritual that might require, all of which he’d been skeptical of while she’d been alive and claiming she could harness the elements, but what the hell, he was determined to believe in that shit now if it would work. And no matter the dirty lies the other members of the raider brotherhood, the clan’s warrior class and the men he’d considered family, had told about her in the meantime—Wulf, his blood brother and king, chief among them. She had not betrayed him. She had not betrayed their king and conspired against his rule. She had not enlisted the help of that asshole Dandro. None of that was possible, and Gunnar would prove it.

  He would build a goddamned time machine if that was what it took. He would bring down the stars and the whole raider clan, too, if necessary. He’d sworn these things over her broken, bloody body on that muddy field in Kentucky and he’d done nothing else this whole long year but figure out how to go about it. Not one damned thing.

  Until now, when he’d forgot himself entirely in the mouth of the supposed virgin whose only purpose to him was to be the vessel he needed to bring Audra back. She wasn’t supposed to get him off on the way.

  Hating himself didn’t begin to cover that dark, loathing, furious blackness that ate at him then. It didn’t come close. It wasn’t even in the same planet as the spiked, slimy thing that tore through him and almost made him wish he really had been sucker punched by someone who knew how to carry out a sneak attack on a raider warrior. Like an elbow to the temple. Or the swing of a
blade serious enough to sever his head from his body so he didn’t have to think about what he’d just done here.

  No such luck. He should be used to it by now. Gunnar was many things, but lucky had never been one of them.

  And his dirty-mouthed nun was still kneeling there before him, a serene expression on the too lovely face he’d just fucked like an animal. He tucked his traitorous cock back in his pants even as it started getting hard for her all over again, the little shit, and scowled down at her.

  “Do you know what the word virgin means?” he growled.

  She blinked, but only settled back on her heels. The moon was coming up, throwing light around as carelessly as one of the bastard western kings and making her glow, and it wasn’t as if this woman needed help looking any prettier.

  “I know what it means,” she said, her voice huskier than before and that sent another spike of hunger straight through him, because he knew why she sounded rough. He’d pounded himself into her throat and come forever. That tended to make a girl a little scratchy. And him all kinds of greedy for more. “The church takes a very strict and narrow view of virginity. An intact hymen is all that matters.”

  Gunnar was as hard again then as if he’d never come at all.

  And he didn’t know which one of them he wanted to kill for that insult first, her or himself.

  “Tell me,” he said, making no attempt to temper his harsh tone. “What kind of virgin sucks a cock like that?”

  Another long, slow blink. He noticed she was remarkably still, when he was used to the camp girls back in the eastern islands and their constant, seductive movements, or raider women in general who never seemed to stay in one place for long. Or his Audra, who had never walked when she could dance instead, the better to cause a little commotion wherever she’d gone. This woman was like a statue. She knelt there as gracefully and as easily as if she could happily remain there for days. Her hands rested on her thighs, and she’d made no move to wipe her mouth or her face, or to do anything at all but continue to gaze up at him.

  As if waiting for orders, the dark, sick fuck who lived inside him whispered, stirring up the kind of shit that was better off buried. I bet you could come up with a few.