Edge of Temptation

by Megan Crane

  Maud held her breath, but he was in complete control. He pinched her clit and when she gasped at the bolt of sharp need that surged through her, he slid inside her, slick and hot. Already oiled and ready, so his possession was a smooth, deep thrust.

  She let her breath out on a moan.

  And then she simply closed her eyes and surrendered to him all over again.

  He took his time. His strokes were lazy and shallower in this position, but oh, the other things he did. He held her against the wall of his chest and she was entirely at his mercy that way, one arm beneath her head to prop it up and hold her where he wanted her as he plundered her mouth, his tongue and his cock in a complicated counterpoint that made her feel pulled apart. Entirely wrecked.

  And all the while his other hand learned the rest of her. He toyed with her nipples, rolling them between his fingers and then tugging on them, making sure there was always that edge, always that little bit of pain—

  He knew, she realized, in a terrible surge of heat and shame and a dark sort of joy. He knew exactly how much she hated the pain and craved it equally and how it galloped through her entire body, each sharp tug on her nipple or hard pinch on her clit connected to all the rest of it—the lazy thrust of his cock in and out of the tight grip of her ass, the almost sweet exploration of her mouth, the way he held her helpless and plundered her as he wished. The pain was electric, a shock wave that coursed through her and sent her spinning, around and around and around, and only he could catch her.

  She’d had the pain without the pleasure. She’d even had orgasms whenever she could without the pain.

  But Gunnar used her hunger and her lust and that sharp, electric sensation against her all together and all at once, with devastating accuracy.

  He made her come again and again, his hands on her nipples or on her clit, his mouth at her neck or claiming hers, and all the while his cock moved inside her, slow and sure and relentless. She was limp and beyond moaning when he finally moved with some urgency, flipping her over on her stomach and pulling her hips into the air. He knelt behind her, pouring out fresh oil to ease his way before he thrust into her once again, straight to the hilt.

  Then he stopped playing around. He fucked her, hard and intense and deeply, exultantly selfish. It was all about him and that massive hammer of a cock pounding into her, and all Maud could do was lie there and take it with her face in the mattress and a warrior behind her, inside her, everywhere.

  And this time when she came, it was another dark roll like the night before. It was as if his cock caused an earthquake and she could do nothing but splinter apart in all that fullness and delicious gluttony, toppling off into the ether as he roared behind her and emptied himself into her.

  Then he bore her down with him into the soft mattress as if he couldn’t bear to be parted from her for even a moment, and strung out on all that sensation, her body his to command and use as he saw fit, Maud drifted off to sleep yet again.

  When she woke a second time, the rain lashed the windows and the wind rattled at the walls, but despite the gloom Maud knew it was still morning. Just as she knew she was alone before she turned over—carefully, very carefully—to find herself the only occupant of Gunnar’s big bed.

  She sat up slowly, gingerly, and took stock of her various aches and pains as she did. She stretched, noting pulls in strange places and raw spots here and there. Her ass no longer stung, which disappointed her, because she knew that meant there would be no red marks remaining when she looked and there was a part of her that craved them. She didn’t question it. She felt … loose, and a little precarious, and she could feel the kiss of the oil deep between her ass cheeks, but she was fine. A little sore, but in the way she liked.

  The way she’d spent her whole life pretending she didn’t like, because she’d been so afraid that if the bishop knew, he’d stop spanking her altogether and find a far more effective form of punishment. One that didn’t come with a hard cock to suck and that delirious ache in her pussy.

  She crawled out of the bed and padded into the bathroom, not bothering to cover herself. She heard footsteps on the floorboards above her, but she didn’t rush what she was doing. She took her time underneath Gunnar’s shower, washing herself off almost as thoroughly and carefully as he had last night.

  She was finishing getting dressed when Gunnar appeared in that disconcertingly silent way he had when he chose. One moment she was alone, pulling her boots on, and the next he stood at the foot of the stairs, his dark gaze on her like a touch.

  Maud straightened slowly. The air felt thick, suddenly. She thought she could feel every place he’d touched her, with his hands, his mouth, that beautifully merciless cock. She could still feel him inside her. She could still feel him, and her body was as utterly under his control as if his hands were still on her. Her nipples burned and she realized they’d stiffened beneath her shirt. Her pussy was wet and ready in a single slick, hot instant. Her ass clenched and her hands followed suit. Hell, even her mouth watered.

  But Gunnar’s dark blue gaze was narrow and that cruel mouth of his was grim.

  Her body didn’t seem to give one single shit about that.

  And Maud couldn’t help herself. She laughed.

  “I’m glad I amuse you.” His voice was a growl, and a warning.

  Maud shrugged. “It’s not that you amuse me. It’s me.” His dark brows lowered and she hurried on. “Women are forever tossing themselves against the great rock walls of men who would destroy them if they ever crushed them in return. Most women don’t actually want to be crushed, you know, no matter what they pretend.” She smiled at him. “But not me. I’m only happy when I’m pinned down with no hope of escape.”

  Gunnar ran a hand over his dark beard and she glutted herself on the movement of his muscles beneath one of those wonderfully tight shirts he wore that made his biceps into poetry.

  “You feel crushed, Maud?” He tone was terse. Harsh.

  But she smiled, big and wide, with all of that fragile madness in her silly heart.

  “Yes,” she said fervently. “Thank you.”

  And Gunnar looked … thrown. His hand dropped back to his side and he gazed back at her as if she’d hurt him—but no, that was crazy. He was much too closed off and grim for hurt. He looked properly ferocious in the next instant and she told herself she’d imagined it.

  “Sit down,” he grated at her, and she found she didn’t particularly want to obey him. But that glittering thing stole across his eyes again, the one she could feel tug deep inside her like that iron chain, and she did it anyway. She perched herself on the arm of the nearest chair and tried to look demure and a little bit saintly.

  She was sure she failed on both counts. And her heart was battering at her, too hard and too fast, as though it knew something she didn’t.

  “We’re headed back to the Lodge with Riordan,” he told her. He moved to stand near the fire and scowled at it, but she didn’t doubt that he knew exactly where she was sitting and would react the moment she disobeyed him. There was a tension in his shoulders she didn’t like, and a new sort of bleakness around his eyes. “My blood brother really is the king of this clan and his word is law.”

  “So you really are a prince.”

  “I’m not a fucking prince.”

  There was no give in the way he said that. No remnant of the grumpy man she thought she knew, who she’d flattered herself that she’d entertained a little bit over the past weeks. There was only the terse raider warrior, as if that other man had never been.

  She sat straighter. “Why don’t you want to go back? Isn’t it your home?”

  Riordan had talked a lot last night, before Gunnar had ordered her to pray for him. About people, places. Maud had gotten the distinct impression the Lodge was more than simply a big house. It had seemed more like a city the way he’d talked about shopkeepers and the odd tavern.

  “It’s where I keep my actual workshop,” Gunnar told her. “The one here has only bi
ts and pieces of the things I need. But that one has everything.”

  She didn’t understand why he said that as if it should be deeply meaningful to her, though her chest was tight and something alarmingly like a sob seemed to be crowding out her ability to breathe.

  Then she understood.

  “So there will be no more delay.” Her voice sounded bizarre, but then she realized it was only that her ears were ringing. “We can hurry up and get right to the blood ritual. The killing.”

  That muscle worked in his lean jaw, making his beard seem darker, somehow. Making his eyes seem bluer.

  “Yes.”

  Something happened to the sob inside her then, at his flat, unapologetic tone. It … hardened. Crystallized. It wrapped itself into a ball of something spiky and gnarled and black, and it filled her up with a very different kind of light. She’d never felt anything like it. She shook from it, but it got her to her feet and she liked that better. She didn’t know why, really, she only knew she didn’t want to sit there before him any longer.

  “After…” She waved her hand at the chair where he’d spanked her and the bed behind her.

  “We fucked, Maud. Get over it.”

  She didn’t recoil because he didn’t actually haul off and slap her, but she thought she’d likely remember it as if he had.

  And she understood that thing inside her, making her pulse a silken scream and her eyes feel scraped raw and narrow.

  She was angry.

  It turned out, anger made her quiet. Cold. As if he’d shot her through with ice.

  “The first fuck, sure,” she replied coolly, as if she’d had even a fraction of the sex he obviously had. “The second one, though. That was a little less the scratching of an itch and little more emotional.”

  His blue eyes were very nearly black, then, and his mouth was a hard line.

  Gunnar didn’t shrug. He held himself too dangerously still for that, but her sense of being dismissed, of being condescended to, was the same. “That happens the first time. It goes away.”

  From somewhere far off, where she was not encased in ice with a hard-edged knot of something metallic keeping her standing upright, Maud understood that it would have been a lot better for her if he’d picked up one of his blades and thrust it straight through her gut.

  But luckily, that was something she didn’t have to deal with.

  Not just yet.

  “Oh, you misunderstand me,” she said instead, softly. Almost sorrowfully. And run straight through with that icy fire she hadn’t known she possessed. “I meant for you.”

  12.

  Gunnar dealt with the emotions he was absolutely not fucking having by driving like a goddamned maniac.

  It was a long, treacherous drive from his deliberately remote cabin on the farthest edge of the clan’s main island to the busy center of all clan life, the city arranged around the Lodge and the hidden, island-studded harbor that kept them safe and protected from their enemies. Gunnar had picked the spot deliberately. Some of the brothers who liked a little space had found themselves land on other, smaller islands that could only be accessed by boat, which meant they spent the better part of the winter months on lockdown, cut off from the rest of the clan. That would have suited Gunnar fine.

  It would not, however, have suited his king to find himself cut off from the clan’s top tech head when the Lodge’s generators failed or any other potential disaster arose during the dark, wet winter storms.

  Keep your genius within a day’s drive, Wulf had told him, and back then in the early days of his rule he’d still tried to pretend his commands were requests. He’d clapped Gunnar on the back. You never know when the clan might need you.

  Are you a trained monkey or a man? Audra had asked him later. She’d been crouched between Gunnar’s legs, her hands wrapped around his cock, her face painted in bright reds and her dark black hair adorned with shells. She’d claimed she’d had visions of Wulf’s death. Is this a cock or your blood brother’s leash? He doesn’t own you, Gunnar. He only thinks he does because you let him.

  His cabin on the faraway cove was his compromise. His little bit of freedom that was only a few days’ walk, or, if it was a true emergency that warranted the use of one of the clan’s vehicles, one very long day’s drive. The letter if not the spirit of his blood brother’s request. And that was at the best of times, when the mountain passes were clear, the mud on the desolate plains wasn’t too deep, and the bitch wind from the sullen northern Atlantic wasn’t toppling whatever evergreens had finally succumbed to her rampages.

  Today was not the best of times by a long shot.

  Gunnar took that as a challenge.

  He drove like he was on a suicide mission, slamming his foot on the gas pedal like he was back on a long, smooth, straight stretch of Eighty back on the mainland instead of winding, perilous island roads that could ice over even at the height of summer.

  “Listen up, you crazy fucker,” Riordan growled at one point, when Gunnar had been punching it for a number of hair-raising hours and had misjudged a turn on one of the mountain passes, hitting a slippery patch and almost—almost—fishtailing them all off the side of the tired old road to a lonely, slippery, rocky death far below. “I’m a goddamned warrior. I’m not dying in some bullshit traffic accident because you’re driving this truck like you’re drunk off your ass. Slow the hell down.”

  An hour ago, when Riordan had shouted something similar after Gunnar decided to take a river like a complete asshole and they’d come a little too close to flooding the engine and stalling out for a few hours, Gunnar had only shot him the finger and kept going.

  But this time they’d skidded to a stop about a single slim hair away from the crumbling edge of a steep cliff over a killer drop into a faraway valley. Gunnar wasn’t the only one sitting a little too straight and still, as if they’d all collectively decided the slightest movement might send them hurtling over the edge. It might. He shifted the truck into reverse and very slowly, very carefully, backed the fuck up.

  And then sat there for a second, when they weren’t in danger of accidentally tumbling over the side of the mountain because someone exhaled, and made himself unclench the death grip he’d had on the steering wheel for the past few hours. The rain had been relentless all day, chasing them down the endless sodden fields and meadows near his cabin, slamming into them in mad, skittering waves as they’d started up into the foothills. Now it was drumming against the metal roof of the truck and making the cab’s interior that much closer, that much more intimate.

  Not like it could get much worse. It was already torture.

  Maud sat between Gunnar and Riordan on the truck’s bench seat, and there was nothing about that Gunnar was okay with. He didn’t like that he could feel her against him at every sharp turn, and no matter that she was gripping the dashboard in front of her in an effort to keep that from happening. He liked it even less when she shifted the other way and fell against Riordan, that prick. He spent a lot of time when he should have been paying attention to the road in front of him remembering the way she’d knelt down so prettily between Riordan’s outstretched legs, how she’d smoothed her hands up his thighs, how she’d reached into his fly to free his big cock and oh yes, his favorite, how she’d licked it before she’d taken it deep.

  Gunnar had never been a jealous man. Possessive, yes, but that was a different thing. He liked what was his to remain under his control. Audra never had been controllable, not even close, so he’d been a lot less cool about her playing around with other men, especially once she was his mate. She’d been a loose cannon.

  A fucking problem you need to solve or I will, Wulf had told him once, the condescending prick.

  Maud, meanwhile, could have been his completely. In every way. Gunnar knew it. He felt it inside of him like the truth of that was his own blood in his veins. She was his.

  She could touch a thousand proxies, and all she’d see, hear, touch, taste, was him. It got him hard just thinking
about all the ways he could use that connection between them to drive them both wild—

  But that wasn’t reality. Reality was Audra on a muddy field in Kentucky when she should have been back on the ship. Reality was the promises Gunnar had made over her broken body. The grave he’d dug her instead of the pyre the clan had refused her, so he could reverse what had happened with the magic she’d believed lived in her.

  Reality was that Maud was his to sacrifice, not to keep, no matter what he’d managed to convince himself last night.

  You can’t keep her and you know it, he growled at himself.

  That inevitability made him … a creature he hardly recognized. Hair-triggered and wild, careening over mountains like he was acting out his own death wish.

  Like you think if you kill yourself and Maud and Riordan just for fun, that changes anything? a scornful voice within him demanded. It shook him, how much it sounded like his lost mate. It only makes you a coward. And a failure besides.

  No one spoke as the rain slammed into the windshield and washed over the hood. But that didn’t make Gunnar’s heart stop pounding at him as if he were running flat out with a thousand armed enemies at his back. He didn’t think anything could.

  He should never have touched Maud. He should have realized exactly what was happening when watching her suck Riordan’s cock hadn’t woken him up from the little dream world they’d spent the past month in. Maybe he had. Because there was no pretending he hadn’t known what would happen when he took her downstairs. She was never going to be just a medicinal fuck, this little nun of his who looked at him with the world in her eyes and the sweetest surrender in the curve of that wide, carnal mouth of hers. She was never going to be an easy kind of camp girl lay, all comfort and no commitment.