by Megan Crane
She turned to find Gunnar standing near the back end of the boat, three glossy black pit wolves arrayed around him. One on its stomach. One sitting. And one standing alert, its head tilted slightly to one side. All of them—man and canines alike—had their eyes fixed on her.
And she understood exactly how ill she’d been, and by contrast, how much better she was now.
Because when her gaze met Gunnar’s, she felt it everywhere.
Suddenly, she couldn’t think about a single thing except the drag of his mouth over hers. The memory howled through her, as if it had only been waiting for her to get her feet on solid ground again before it knocked her silly.
The worst part was, she couldn’t look away from him. There was no way he didn’t see how hot she got, how red.
“Where are we?” she managed to ask, though she knew the answer. Maybe not the exact place on a map, but this was his home. The cavern had the feel of Gunnar all over it.
“Put on your boots.”
His words didn’t make sense. They were a strange jumble, and then he inclined his head toward the dock and she saw the boots he’d found for her in Wyoming, standing neatly side by side a few feet away, as if he’d carefully placed them there. Not dropped them or kicked them, placed them.
Her heart squeezed in her chest, then hit too hard as it beat.
She walked over to the boots and worked her feet into them, bending to lace them up and then standing back up more slowly. She kept waiting for the dizziness to descend on her again, but it didn’t.
Or at least, not her more recent dizziness. When she straightened fully she met Gunnar’s gaze again, and the kind of spinning her head did then was familiar, but had nothing to do with any illness.
She made herself swallow it down. She ignored that same old burn as it spiraled through her, reminding her what power this man had over her and how she craved it. And she had no idea how long she stood there, the length of the dock between them, waiting.
Waiting for him, she understood. Whatever that meant—and she told herself the way that rang in her was leftover illness and the need for a very long bath, nothing more.
“Come,” he said abruptly, and there was no reason she should feel that as if it had been one of the bishop’s harder blows against her backside, calculated to sting the worst in the moment after impact. Gunnar wiped his hands on his trousers, then straightened and started walking.
Away from her.
He headed for the set of stairs she hadn’t seen before, hacked into the earth in the cavern’s far corner, and started climbing them toward the roof of the cavern and the narrow opening there as if he hadn’t the slightest doubt she’d follow along behind him as commanded.
And there wasn’t really a choice to be made, was there? Or if there was, Maud had made it back in the desert. Or in that bandit city, where she could have caused a scene and alerted those friends of the bishop’s to her presence. She hadn’t done that. It hadn’t occurred to her to do anything like that.
What was she going to do now? Get back on that horrible boat? Leap into the water and swim until the sharks got her or she swept ashore somewhere even worse than the places she’d left?
Even if she’d wanted to run away from him—and the truth, Maud knew, was that she had no such inclination, which she was sure told her all sorts of unsavory things about herself—there was nowhere to go.
And that was a good thing.
It meant that as she started after him she could stop pretending that had there been a reasonable course of escape, she might have taken it.
* * *
She looked like a ghost.
That was Gunnar’s first thought when he’d looked up, alerted by Fen’s warning whine, to see her climbing down the side of his boat. It was the only graceless thing he’d ever seen her do, as if she was too afraid to take her time. She’d made it to the bottom of the ladder and then she’d stood there as if she didn’t entirely expect her legs to hold her. Neither did he.
And he hated the part of him that wanted to race to her side and make sure she could stand. That she didn’t crumple into a heap on the dock. What the hell was that? He knew she could. She’d been better every time she’d woken up and he’d made sure she’d gotten more of that healer’s broth into her with each dose, all herbs and roots and nutrients. The raiders used it on long treks to keep their energy up when there was little food and no opportunity to hunt. It could handle a little seasickness, no problem.
Even from halfway down the dock he could see she wasn’t as sickly as she’d been for the past two weeks, or as pale.
Then she turned that red color again, which pissed him off and made his cock practically leap out of his trousers, and yeah: She was fine.
He could hear her behind him now as he climbed the stairs he’d carved into the unforgiving mountainside years ago to give him easier access to the cavern. He made every other fool who dared come here wear a blindfold so they couldn’t find their way back and because he liked to play the madman tech head when it suited him, but it didn’t occur to him until he was halfway up the stairs that it hadn’t even crossed his mind to make her wear one, too.
Because you’re sacrificing her ass, he snapped at himself. It doesn’t matter what she sees.
But he knew that wasn’t why. Just like he knew all kinds of other things about himself, after two weeks of playing nursemaid to this woman who was supposed to be nothing to him but collateral damage.
No amount of assuring himself that he was only looking after his investment—after all, it would be a pain in his ass to go all the way back into the western highlands to find a replacement—could distract him from the truth. He knew that. He didn’t want to face it, but he knew it.
Maud was a very serious problem. As much a temptation to him in her illness as she’d been at the night market in Lincoln, if for wholly different reasons. He wanted to fuck her, sure, but not when she was puking up her guts and blind with nausea. It was the fact he’d wanted to protect her—and had—that made something gnaw at him, sharp enough to hurt.
He jumped the last, steep step and let the usual punch of the harsh island winds sink into him. They roared off the cold, gray sea, barreled across the pines and the mountains, and howled around his abandoned little corner of the desolate world. He heard her come up behind him, panting at the exertion. And if he was the man he’d been when he’d left this place weeks ago, he would have stayed where he was. He wouldn’t have reached down to clasp her wrists and haul her up that final, killer step. It wouldn’t have crossed his mind to help her.
But he hoisted her up to solid ground, and he didn’t let go until he was sure she wouldn’t let the wind knock her right back down. She let out a gasping sort of noise, then wrapped her arms around her middle, as if that would do a damned thing to keep the eastern island winds from chipping her into pieces.
“Your—uh—creatures are right behind—” she began, and then squeaked when all three of the pit wolves poured up and out of the stairway to form their usual circle around him.
“They like to think of themselves as bodyguards,” he said darkly.
“They … think?”
He scowled at her. “They’re pit wolves, Maud. Dogs. They think they can hunt like their wild cousins, but mostly they’re nothing but pets.”
Pets with vicious fangs and a protective impulse to rival his own, to say nothing of a healthy dislike for strangers, but still. Pets.
“That doesn’t answer my question.” She blinked in that way of hers that told him she was processing things. And he didn’t know what that weight in his chest was, only that it was worse now. Much worse. He rubbed at it, angrily. “You have pets? What I mean is, you have pets? That’s surprising, given the raider thing in general and your whole thing in specific. I wouldn’t have imagined pets were something you did. Generally or specifically.”
“Let’s go,” he bit out, because what the hell was wrong with him that he liked the fact he made her babble like th
at? That he knew exactly what it meant. That he liked that, too. Because it made her that much more his—
He knew what was wrong with him. It just enraged him.
It was a short walk, but a brisk one, out there on the exposed bluff where there was nothing but the battering wind, the few hardy scrubs and gnarled old evergreens that were tenacious enough to suffer through the winters in such an exposed spot with the beginnings of the summer grasses spread around them so tentatively. He didn’t look back again, not until he cleared the bluff and started down the other side, to the little hidden cove where his cabin sat, flush against the far hill.
“Oh.” She breathed that out from behind him, close enough that he imagined he could feel the puff of the word against his back, because she had no goddamned sense of boundaries and nearly walked right into him again. “It’s so pretty.”
He’d built the cabin himself. All three stories tucked out of the wind, with great big windows facing the sea and the distant east. He spent all his winters here. He’d developed his geothermal heating ideas here before he’d implemented them clan-wide, and versions of them were all over this cabin. The radiant heat from the floors. The offsite generator, to cut down on the unlikely possibility that anyone might sneak up on him. The easy hot water and the steam room. A thousand ways to cut the cold, to make life easier, to use fuel more efficiently so raiders could live well while shrugging off the confines of mainland society—many of which he’d developed further for the Lodge and the clan in the years before this last one.
But he hadn’t built any of it for this woman. Not for this fascinating, dangerous virgin nun with her distracting mouth and that melting thing inside of her that he could see in her eyes every time she obeyed him. Not for the woman who had curled herself around him in her restless, delirious sleep as if he was the only thing that could ever make him feel better. Not for Maud, who seemed as unfazed by the fact he planned to sacrifice her as she had by everything else—and yet, paradoxically, looked at him as if he was the only thing on all the earth that could hurt her, if he liked.
He’d built it for Audra, who had preferred the comforts of the Lodge. But that hardly mattered. He’d still built it for his mate and the life he’d intended to live with her, sooner or later.
None of this was for Maud. Neither was he.
He hated that he needed the reminder, too.
“The church is always going on and on about the beauty of the dark,” she said, right there against his back as if this was an intimate moment. “But look at your house. Look at all the lights. They’re like … joy.”
“They’re electric.”
“I grew up with only fire and candles,” she continued, disregarding his growl of a response. “Sometimes neither, if the weather was bad or we ran out of flint or matches. It makes everything more perilous. More difficult. It makes for awfully long nights in winter with nothing to do but lie awake in the pitch black and wait to see if the storms will blow your shelter apart.” She didn’t say anything for a moment. Gunnar had no reasonable explanation for why he stood there, waiting for her to say something else. Doing a great impression of someone who gave a shit, he was aware. “It makes you wonder why the church thinks we’re better off in the dark, doesn’t it?”
Gunnar hadn’t wondered about that in years. He knew. Scared people were easier to control.
There was no good reason he didn’t tell her that, bluntly. Her church was bullshit and always had been. There was no debate. But he didn’t get into it.
“Don’t get too comfortable here,” he bit out, and the tragedy was that it hurt him to say it. He’d lost ground in taking care of her, and it felt like a cruelty now, to say the things he must. To try to wrench them back to the place they belonged. No kissing, no confidences. No long nights through a quiet sea, checking on her every little while to make sure she kept breathing and taking a little too long to make sure she wasn’t too hot or too clammy. “This isn’t your new home. This is a brief stint on death row.”
He didn’t look at her, but he could feel her get tense. Still, her voice was as calm and as cool as ever when she spoke again.
“I understand, Warden Gunnar,” she murmured, and he hated that. He hated the laughter he could hear in her voice. The warmth. He hated that he wanted nothing more than to bask in it. “But it really is a very pretty prison, all the same.”
Gunnar slanted a look over his shoulder at her, and shook his head at the sparkle he could see in her summer-blue eyes. She was obviously healthy again.
And he was screwed.
“I’m sure that will be a great comfort to you,” he growled, “when you’re stretched out under my knife.”
He didn’t wait for her to answer. Or maybe he didn’t want to face her, having said it, and that was completely unacceptable.
Gunnar stalked toward his cabin, aware that no matter what he said to her, no matter what he did, she would follow him. She couldn’t help it any more than he could. He’d learned that, if nothing else, from their time on the ship. It was as if she’d been expertly crafted to his precise specifications—
But that was another betrayal, damn it. Maybe the worst so far in a long list of wrongs against his mate that he would answer for when she returned, he knew. There was no avoiding that reckoning. He kept proving, again and again, why he’d never deserved Audra in the first place.
He didn’t want Maud. He couldn’t have her.
He wanted this over. He wanted his mate back.
And he wanted, for even one second, to be something other than royally and epically screwed.
8.
Gunnar stormed his way down the side of the wind-battered hill, slamming his way into the highest level of the cabin and leaving Maud to follow like the obedient little sacrificial lamb she supposed she still was, even this far from the Great Lake Cathedral. The pit wolves were less conflicted. They raced right after him, then kept on going, half running and half tumbling down the rocky hillside in a gleaming streak of glossy black fur and sharp fangs.
Clouds scudded above, gauzy whites and gloomy grays against a complicated blue sky and the light of a June sun that was a far less intrusive presence than the one Maud had known in the Great Lake Valley in the west. This sun kept its distance, playing hide-and-seek through the hardy pines and making long, deep shadows dance across the rocks and the choppy waves of the gunmetal sea.
This world she’d woken up today in bore no resemblance to the one Maud knew. Dark mountains rose in the distance wearing stacked belts of thick clouds and caps of leftover snow from the just-passed winter she could still feel in the shivery kick of the wind. There were endless fields of an impossible spring green and exultant waterfalls from what seemed like every dark rock. So much water everywhere, when Maud had grown used to high desert places with so little. Yellow flowers stood bravely against the slap of the salt wind, climbing their way over the cove’s rocky walls that would look purely forbidding without them, while sleek, sturdy birds chased each other over the cliffs and floated on the cold breeze.
Maud followed her raider, however little she wanted to think about him and his knives and what he planned to do with her. Much less when. It was cold and exposed out on the bluff, at the top of that strenuous staircase leading out of his cavern. The wind off the sullen sea sliced through her and made her actually ache from the chill of it as she carefully made her way after him on the narrow, rocky little footpath that wound down from the exposed top of the cavern toward the cabin’s front door.
It was a rambling, cozy-looking place made of timber and stone on three levels, with smoke coming from its chimney and soft lights gleaming in its windows. It didn’t look like a death-row prison, and Maud thought she should know, having lived in western temples that actually were. This place looked inviting and cozy in all the ways Gunnar himself was not.
Though he can be, an unhelpful little voice reminded her. After all, he’d taken care of her all throughout their journey here. He’d tended to her. He’
d held her and washed her and watched over her. When he feels like it.
Something inside of her eased at that. She let out a long breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding in. And she’d forgotten about it on that hideous trip across two rolling oceans, what with her stomach trying to escape her body every thirty seconds. But the fact she was twisted and messed up inside seemed especially clear to her then, wandering down the side of a steep hill toward the dwelling of the crazy man who only wanted her because he thought her virginity had some kind of ritualistic power he could use.
That part was par for the course. It was no different from the church, really. What Maud couldn’t understand was why a potentially unhinged raider who wanted to kill her—who’d said so, repeatedly and baldly, and without dressing the whole thing up in prayers and hymns and condescending talk of redemption and ceremony and her poor, blackened soul—was the only man in all the world who had ever made her feel safe.
She paused at that, frowning out at the water, but the brooding sea far below her had no answers to share. It did nothing but batter itself against the same craggy shore, again and again, learning nothing and gaining nothing, either, as it threw itself against the rocks and then retreated.
The sea, Maud thought darkly, was not a great role model for someone in a similar predicament. And she thought the hardscrabble, forbidding shoreline looked a lot softer and more approachable than Gunnar ever did.
It took another deep breath or two to settle herself, but then she pushed her way through the heavy door and stepped inside the cabin. Only when it thumped shut behind her did it occur to her that she could have made a different choice. She could have set off across those green fields. She could have seen what waited for her in those dark, moody hills in the distance. She could have headed back down to the docks in his cavern and launched herself out to sea on one of the numerous floating contraptions he kept there. She could have escaped, or tried to escape, or at the very least refused to follow him. Hell, she could have leapt from the top of the bluff and let the sea and the rocks claim her before he could.