by Megan Crane
She kept choosing Gunnar.
One more thing she needed to think about. Soon.
But she was inside the cabin then, and all Maud could notice was the heat. The heat. It seeped up from the floor beneath her, as if the floorboards were on fire and simmering. It blazed out from the massive stone fireplace that dominated the far wall of the great, open space, all thick rugs on dark wood floors and high-beamed ceilings to let the pale mid-June light fill the whole room. All that decadent warmth washed over her and into her, like a caress against her cold cheeks and then all over her body. She had to stop a minute to take it in.
She looked around as she let the heat do its work. There was a large cooking area, featuring a separate, bricked fireplace and a sturdy old cast-iron range with four enameled doors, the likes of which Maud had only ever heard whispered about in passed-down stories the old women liked to tell around the campfires while the men told each other lies about hunting. There was a long, rustic wooden table with benches, which struck her as funny, as it was impossible to imagine surly Gunnar having any sort of dinner party or gathering that would require that much seating. There were great soft couches arrayed around the big fireplace, dark brown leather piled high with soft furs. And shelves filled the walls anywhere there weren’t windows, packed full of books and jars filled with a variety of different substances, hunting trophies, and any number of items she couldn’t identify at a glance. Strange little machines and what looked like a skull. Half-burned candles, historic-looking urns, and small collections of goblets and pots. It should have made the place feel cluttered, but it didn’t. Instead, it simply felt warm. Lived in.
Home, something delusional inside her whispered.
“Are you paralyzed?”
Gunnar’s voice was as dark and harsh as ever, but here, in all this cozy warmth, Maud found she cared about that a lot less than she had standing out there on an exposed cliff with nothing to shield her from the lash of it, save the grim sea beyond.
“Only with joy,” she replied, sounding very nearly merry to her own ears. She could acknowledge, when she met his baleful glare across the length of the room, that the fact her good cheer irritated this formidable raider was all the more reason to make sure she indulged it. “Your prison is so warm and happy.”
She couldn’t be sure, but she thought he actually growled at her. And she had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing when he scowled at her, then jerked his head for her to follow him as he stalked down the stairs.
Laugh it up, she told herself as she crossed the great room and made her way down the stairs behind him. Maybe you can giggle all the way through your own bloodletting, too.
Not that thinking about that upcoming delight was particularly helpful either.
The middle floor contained a single, vast bedchamber that took up more than half of the available space. The stairway delivered her straight into it, so there was no avoiding the giant bed that stood against the back wall, set so anyone in it could stare out at the sea through the huge sliding doors that opened to a weathered deck. Another huge fireplace commanded one wall, ringed with stone and surrounded by deep, luxurious-looking armchairs festooned in lengths of wool and yet more furs. Thick rugs and skins were tossed across the painted wooden floors, and the bed itself was a dream. Straight out of Maud’s most feverish childhood fantasies as she’d shivered on her grotty couch in the caravan’s main room and tried to work out the right position to lie in to avoid the sharp wood that had poked out through the tired old cushions. There hadn’t been a right position, ever—an issue she doubted anyone would have in a glorious bed like Gunnar’s.
Four tall and sturdy carved wooden posts surrounded the mattress, which was set high off the ground and drenched in bold, masculine colors, from the woolens and furs to the piles of pillows. It looked like it could fit at least three of Gunnar, and keep all of them toasty warm, completely dry, and lovingly suspended on that hardwood frame. It made Maud’s knees feel weak in a kind of bedlust, just looking at it. She wanted to climb beneath the layers of soft covers and lie there forever, gazing out at the moody sea below with her head cradled in those sweet, soft pillows.
It took her a long time to look away from that marvelous bed, to the unadorned side wall where a large X of polished wood stood propped against it, with odd little metal loops placed at intervals all along its flat arms. And then farther still to where Gunnar waited, his blue gaze dark and stormy and fixed on her with a certain awareness that flashed straight through her. It made her pussy clench hard. It made her breasts feel too big and her skin flushed too hot.
It made her feel joyful in a very different way altogether.
He still didn’t speak. He used his chin to beckon her close, and what was the matter with her that she couldn’t seem to move fast enough? That she went straight to him as if she still wore that collar and chain and he’d yanked it?
Her body knew things about him she should think twice about. Things that wound low in her belly, coiled tight and red and hungry.
But when she reached him, he only ushered her into the next room.
It was a grand, sprawling bathroom, though calling it a bathroom suggested it shared anything in common with any of the far more rudimentary toilet situations Maud had suffered before. It didn’t. It was a vast affair. It stretched from a huge, deep, tiled tub that stood in pride of place in a bay window overlooking the sea to a stone-and-glass shower that featured a variety of shower heads and two built-in benches, and doors leading to storage spaces and closets and even a separate private toilet. That was all impressive enough. But when Maud inched closer to that marvel of a tub, she saw it was already full, steaming, and bubbling and smelling faintly of rosemary and pine.
“This makes me believe in magic after all,” she told him, her voice echoing with awe as she skimmed her fingers through the surface of the water and found it silky hot. A greedy sort of longing shook through her, atavistic and intense. She had dim, blurry memories of Gunnar’s hard, gentle hands and damp cloths, but she hadn’t felt truly clean in a very long time. Suddenly, she couldn’t think about anything else.
“Faucets fill a goddamned tub, not magic.” Gunnar, of course, sounded like the grumpy raider equivalent of that shrieking cold wind high on the bluff, and sliced right through her. As he’d meant it to do, no doubt. “I did it myself long before you even woke up. Hot water is only complicated if you’re an idiot.” He seemed to consider that. “Or if you like to hoard it for yourself, like those bitch kings.”
She turned around slowly and eyed him for a moment. “Or, you know. If you’re cold and dirty and have been throwing up your guts on a raider ship for what seems like the last ten years with no hot water of any kind.”
He made that growling sound again.
“Take a bath, Maud,” he gritted out at her. “Change your clothes—and throw that crap you’re wearing on the deck outside. I want it all burned. There are other things you can wear in the closets back there and I don’t care what you choose, so don’t ask me. And don’t go downstairs.”
Maud sighed. “Now, of course, I want to do nothing but go downstairs. Was that your intention?”
“It’s my workshop.” When she only gazed back at him, he scowled at her. “Fine. Knock yourself out. There are at least one hundred and ninety four thousand horrible ways to die down there, and that’s before you get into the herbs.”
“Which would be a disaster, though,” she pointed out. Helpfully, she thought. “For you. Because then you’d be virginless and out of luck for your ritual. You probably should have presented your scary warning as less of a dare if you really wanted me to heed it.”
A muscle worked in his jaw, his hard blue eyes glittered, and Maud was sure he was going to reach out with one of those huge, hard hands and—
But he didn’t.
And that left her to deal with the disappointment she surely shouldn’t have felt. Not when the man who planned to kill her didn’t touch her. On the e
xtremely rare occasions Bishop Seph had clearly meant to deliver a hard beating and hadn’t, Maud had felt nothing but a deep, hot blaze of triumph. Not this … small, aching thing that made her feel hollow inside.
“The reality is you’ll only hurt yourself.” She was mesmerized by that faint movement in his jaw and the way it made his grim mouth even flatter and more fascinating. Especially because without even trying hard, she could imagine the press of it against her own all over again. “Then I’ll have to fix you. Again. And you won’t like it when I do.”
Maud smiled at him. Big, bright. Until he muttered something that sounded a lot like a curse and turned away, headed for those stairs again.
Leaving, she realized. When she was sure on a level she hadn’t known she possessed that what he really wanted to do was touch her. That made it hard to swallow back her smile, but she did it.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “When I’m finished with the bath, I mean.”
He took his sweet time turning back to face her, his scowl stamped deep on his ferocious face the way it always was, and still, it made her heart seem to wheel around inside her chest like all those giddy, foolish birds she’d seen near the cliffs.
“What the fuck do you normally do all day?” he growled.
Maud shrugged. “Pray.”
That simmered between them, blood red and hot. The room fell away. Something taut and breathless stretched between them and made everything inside her clench tight, because they both knew how she prayed, didn’t they? Gunnar’s hard, hot gaze locked to hers. And it would have been so easy to cross to him, find her knees, and give thanks the way she’d been taught—
“No.”
But she heard the roughness in that single syllable. The need. She felt it echo inside of her, too, like a touch of those hard fingers against her skin.
“Figure it out, little nun,” he told her harshly. “And not with my dick.”
Maud spent a long time in that tub, trying to banish the memory of kneeling on the hot, rocky desert floor, her hands wrapped around Gunnar’s cock and the thick, salt taste of him in her mouth. It didn’t really work.
It took her a day or two, left to her own devices in that quiet cabin, dressed in clothes that must have belonged to Gunnar’s lost mate—who had apparently preferred garish colors and garments that covered less than they revealed, suggesting the kind of personality Maud would have said should have driven Gunnar insane in an afternoon—to reach the startling conclusion that she’d never had to figure it out before. When she’d been a child, her mother and uncle had dictated where she went and what she did all day. Then the church had taken her, and she hadn’t had an unregimented day in the whole of the past decade.
Maud not only didn’t know what to do with herself without supervision, she didn’t know what she liked to do. On any level. What she liked to wear, what she liked to eat, if the choice was hers. How she preferred to occupy her hours. She’d never had the opportunity to find out before now.
She had no idea why Gunnar was giving her more choices than the church had, when they’d both had every intention of killing her in the end. Maybe she didn’t believe he was really going to kill her in his silly ritual. Or maybe she was so used to this or that powerful man threatening her with her impending doom that it barely registered any longer.
Because she’d been doomed to die in the desert for at least the past five years, and so far her terrible fate hadn’t changed a thing. Why should it now, when everything else had changed?
Some days she stayed in bed all day, because she could, exchanging one pillow for another as they grew too warm beneath her, lying under and over the covers as she liked until she’d made herself fractious and hollow-headed from too much sleep and brooding at the ever-present sea. It turned out brooding was both hard and tedious.
Other days she woke up early and experimented with all the running and jumping and hitting things that Gunnar did each and every crack of dawn, though the only part of that she really liked was the hitting. She found herself a branch, not nearly as large or as heavy as his, and pounded the hell out of whatever poor tree looked uppity to her that morning. It made her shoulders ache and her elbows feel hot and creaky afterward, but that was a small price to pay for the sense of well-being that washed over her when she’d successfully paid back her tree version of Bishop Seph for one of his harsh penances.
“I could be a raider,” she told Gunnar loftily on one of those mornings as they walked back from the trees. It was cold and misty, the way it often was so early, and the air seemed to cling to them as they moved. It made Gunnar’s bare, gleaming shoulders seem to be cloaked in clouds, and it almost softened the harshness of his face.
“You suck at every single thing every last raider does,” Gunnar replied in his dark and scratchy way. “Raiders don’t get seasick. We’re not soft. When we hit things, those things suffer the blow, not us, or we all would have been eaten by wolves before the end of the Storms.” The wolf teeth around his neck struck her as a rebuke, then. Or straight up mockery. And he wasn’t finished. “You suck more than tiny raider children and feeble old raider women, in fact.”
He was never so irritated as when she tagged along on his morning training sessions, Maud knew. But he didn’t order her to stop. And sometimes, when she’d lost herself in another burst of agonizing joy while slamming her branch against the trunk of a tree—so far gone she’d stopped noting the stark differences between her wild attacks and Gunnar’s precise and lethal cuts that he could do for hours on end with no stopping—she would look up when her arms hurt too much to continue to find his gaze on her.
Sometimes it made her face feel as hot as those days she spent buried in a pile of furs on his bed.
This particular morning, she felt her cheeks flame as his dark, considering gaze moved over her, as if he was measuring her and dismissing her. At least for the tasks he thought raiders could perform.
“Well,” she said stiffly, when she was afraid her hot face alone would burn off the morning fog before the northern sun could get around to it. “I have other skills.”
“You make an excellent prayer warrior, little nun,” Gunnar agreed, and the rough edge of his voice made her sensation knot in her stomach and then slip down, hot and sharp, to bloom hard between her legs. It matched that hard glittering thing in his gaze. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
He made her want. And it turned out that wanting him was one of the things she liked to do. A lot, given the opportunity. No matter that he wouldn’t let her touch him the way she longed to do. No matter that he said things like that and then stalked off, leaving her to fight for her breath by herself in the swirl of the morning mist.
If anything, it only made her want him more.
She explored the cabin on the long evenings that slowly shifted from the last gasp of a wet spring toward the milder summer, with daylight stretching well into the evening hours and turning them thin and sharp and blue. She was fascinated by the very old, very precious, real books on his shelves, and paged through them whenever she could. Stories of daring men and wild adventures in faraway lands next to dry textbooks on carpentry. Old, specific poems about lost civilizations that seemed foreign in one line and then exactly like this one in the next. A very thick, four-volume set of hardcover books about fantastical creatures on dangerous quests next to a thick, well-thumbed Farmer’s Almanac with an ancient date on the torn cover and a great many weather predictions for places that no longer existed.
Maud even found herself in the kitchen, which was luxurious in comparison to the open fire she’d learned to cook on back in Oklahoma. Even if Gunnar’s stores were largely the sort of winter rations that made the dark, wet months seem too interminable to bear every year.
“You can eat things other than all these awful jerkys,” she told him one evening. She was slumped down on one of the deep couches, watching him eat the dried meat he seemed to have an endless affection for. “It won’t kill you.”<
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“I eat what’s available,” he retorted, his attention—as always—on the thick books he carried around and was always frowning into as if he thought they might hold the secret of life. Or her own death, more likely, though she didn’t like to think about that too much. “You want something else, get off your ass and make it.”
“Is that the raider version of asking me to cook for you?”
Gunnar ran his hand down his beard—which really shouldn’t have felt so connected to that low, aching thing that lived way down deep in her belly—and took his time meeting her gaze.
“Do you cook like you fight?”
It was a gruff, ill-tempered challenge if it was anything. But there was something about the way he looked at her that made Maud thrill to it anyway. The bishop had been a big talker. He never missed an opportunity for a sermon. He never spoke a single word when a paragraph or four might do, and all the better if he had her in an uncomfortable or actively painful position while he did it.
Gunnar, meanwhile, had made it clear on numerous occasions that he’d find total silence perfectly acceptable. Preferable, in fact. Which was, Maud could admit to herself, a large part of the reason she couldn’t seem to keep from talking to him as if she expected him to wake up one morning and explode into chattiness. She knew he wouldn’t. She found she liked watching him stare back at her in that dark astonishment, then scowl. Every time.
It turned out she was exactly as contrary and provoking as the bishop had always accused her of being.
She smiled at him now, lazy and wicked, because she could. Because she’d discovered she liked that, too.
“Not at all,” she assured him. “I cook like I pray.”
Again, that hint of temper—or something darker—in the leap of that muscle in his jaw. Again, that warning gleam in his blue eyes and a kind of intensity in the way he held himself.
“Go ahead,” he ordered her with a soft menace that her body translated as something far more like a touch, long and slow, against the bare skin of her belly. She had to fight to restrain a shiver. “Cook me a stew that makes me come.”