by Megan Crane
The blond man’s gaze shifted from what appeared to be a lazy contemplation of the flames in front of him to Helena, and that slap of cool blue was like a kick to her stomach. He was beautiful, she registered dimly, in the way natural disasters were. Harsh and intense, as if he were prying open her head and peering inside with that single glance, and god help her if this terrifying man found out her secrets. If he so much as suspected them.
Helena found herself inching backward, closer to Tyr, until she was flush against his sculpted chest and all those weapons he had strapped to his hard body, as if he might keep her safe. As if such a thing was even possible in the face of a man like the one studying her—but she couldn’t analyze that just then. Her reaction had nothing to do with her brain. It was bone deep and purely physical. It was survival.
Tyr’s hand tightened around the back of her neck, his thumb dragging back and forth over her nape. Once. Then again. And later—later—Helena would have to think about how and why that made it possible for her to breathe instead of passing out. To keep standing. To look back at the unquestionably deadly creature in front of her who was something much more harrowing and far more dangerous than the kind of wolf Tyr was.
The blond man smiled, which made a chill blast down the length of Helena’s spine. For the first time since Tyr had gotten ahold of her back in Ferranti’s courtyard, she actually shivered from the cold.
Did Tyr move even closer to her then, sharing a blast of that body heat of his that he gave off without even trying? She couldn’t tell. And she didn’t dare look away from the man in front of her, who continued to eye her as if she was prey.
“This is why we raided some piece-of-shit office building and missed the tide?” the blond man asked, in a voice as lazy as the way he was sitting, though the lie of that was in those far too knowing eyes of his, hard and much too shrewd. “This muddy swamp rat? I didn’t know you liked getting it on with forest animals, Tyr.” He didn’t move, or shift his gaze over her body, and still Helena felt stripped naked. “How kinky.”
Tyr only grunted, and for some reason that made the man’s smile deepen.
“Is this a claim, brother?” he asked mildly, so mildly, and Helena didn’t trust what sounded like so simple a question. She was sure she could hear layers. Tricks upon tricks.
“I’ll get back to you on that once I wash all the mud off her.” Tyr angled a look down at her. “Who the hell knows what’s under it?”
In some distant part of her brain, she registered that she should be offended by that exchange. But she was too busy wishing the man before her would look at something—anything—else. He didn’t.
“Who cares what’s under it?” he asked, still watching her too closely. “As long as she can suck a dick without bitching about it, we’re good.”
Helena fought to keep from stiffening, or from showing her reaction on her face, but she didn’t think she fooled anyone.
“You know I don’t like sharing,” Tyr said behind her, and she didn’t recognize that note in his voice. It dawned on her that it was laughter. “Never have.”
“No, you don’t. Asshole. What bullshit loyalty is that?”
“The kind that doesn’t involve rubbing one out on another brother’s cock. Call me crazy.”
The blond man’s blue eyes gleamed bright and amused in the firelight. “A pale and judgmental loyalty at best, then.”
Were they joking with each other? Were they … friends? Helena found it impossible to imagine either one of these scary men engaged in something as mundane as a friendship. Or a joke, for that matter.
Tyr didn’t respond, though the other man acted as if he had, glancing down for a moment as if biting back a smile. Then he returned that harsh gaze of his to Helena.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked her, in that same mild way with so much mayhem and iron will beneath it. Still lounging there, as if he was anything like lazy. Still entirely too beautiful, in a way she imagined could leave scars.
“The king,” Helena replied. She didn’t even know she meant to speak, and then there it was. “You’re the raider king.”
The smile that curved his hard mouth didn’t reach his cool blue gaze and he didn’t move, but still, she thought he liked that.
“I am,” he said, so conversationally and something like kindly, as if he were a harmless old woman talking about the weather in some distant, peaceful compound. She was almost tempted to believe it. “I am Wulf.” Then his gaze seemed to sharpen, though his voice remained the same. “Who the hell are you and why were you worth stealing from a concrete bunker in the middle of nowhere?”
Panic sideswiped her so hard, so ferociously, that Helena’s eyes blurred. She felt Tyr’s fingers tighten again, and that was the only way she recognized that she must have jolted and leaned even farther back against that oddly comforting chest of his.
Tyr was very still at her back. In front of her, Wulf merely raised an eyebrow. And waited.
“I’m not,” Helena stammered out, terrified she’d given herself away. But neither man seemed to react any further, and she forced herself to continue. “I’m not anyone. I’m not worth anything.”
Wulf only stared back at her for a moment, then shifted that gaze of his to Tyr. Whatever passed between them was wordless and instant, and then the indolent king waved a hand as if he was bored.
“Clean her up,” he told Tyr. “She’ll start to smell like low tide once the wind dies down and I don’t want that on my boat.”
Tyr grunted again, and Helena now wished he wasn’t standing behind her. She wished she could see his face—maybe read what had just happened there.
Because she couldn’t kid herself, not even when Tyr wheeled her around and propelled her back out into the darkness. Something had happened. Tyr and his king had conducted an entire in-depth conversation on top of and around the one she’d heard. And then another one in that final look they’d exchanged. She could feel that restless, anxious thing roll over inside of her and twitch—the thing that had kept her alive and relatively independent all this time.
It told her what she already knew. This really had been a terrible mistake.
Back out on the beach, it took her way too long to realize that Tyr was directing her straight toward the water. He grabbed a pack from a pile of them near the fire without letting go of her and she stumbled along while her mind whirled, trying to come up with escape options that wouldn’t get her killed. Or simply laughed at while he foiled them, one after the next—the more likely outcome.
But then they were at the steep incline that marked the water’s cold edge, and the salt in the waves swirling around her feet with every pulse of the tide made them sting. And the breath she took to question him about what had happened with Wulf disappeared into the wind, because Tyr finally let go of her. The place where he’d held her all this time seemed to pulse, raw and red, as if he’d ripped off a swath of her skin when he’d taken away his hand.
Down here near the water, it was quieter. Intimate, somehow. The surf crashed and surged around their feet, but the shouting and the laughter seemed to swirl somewhere over their heads. And Helena didn’t know why she was trembling when she turned to face Tyr there on the steep little shore.
Only that it wasn’t fear, and it should have been.
He didn’t speak. It took her a long, breathless sort of moment to understand what he was doing. It took the loosening of those leather straps and the clank of his weapons as he threw the whole complicated contraption into the sand a bit above the water’s reach that made her blink. And then she realized he was taking off his clothes.
Her heart stopped. Then dropped, hard, to slam into her belly.
She should protest. She should run. She should grab one of those evil-looking blades he carried and stab him with it, take back her tablet computer in its plastic case that she watched him pull from his pocket and shove into that pack he’d grabbed, then disappear into the night and take her chances with the wolves.
Helena wasn’t like the other women she knew. She never had been. Her parents had raised her with a different purpose, and after they’d died, she’d known that she had no choice but to follow the path they’d chosen for her. She’d never really comprehended how Melyssa could have failed to feel that same sense of responsibility, how her sister had thought of herself first and the family mission second or not at all.
You want to be some kind of hero, Helena, Melyssa had said more than once with a roll of her eyes. Good for you. But I want to be a mother and maybe someday, if I meet the right man, a long -term wife. And then, depending on how annoyed she’d been with Helena, she’d sometimes twist the knife, Like every other normal woman in the world.
Helena had accepted a long time ago that she wasn’t normal. Or she’d tried to accept it, anyway. The fact was, she didn’t feel what other women felt. She didn’t want what they wanted. She didn’t get giddy around every strapping man who could theoretically keep her safe while she got big with his child. She didn’t fantasize about making enough babies—or maybe even having one of the very rare multiple births people murmured about as if they were miracles—to be considered the prize of her region.
She’d always felt like an alien. Or like a much older woman trapped in a younger woman’s body. Helena’s fantasies had always involved her by herself, out of her fertile years and not expected to think of repopulation or compliance any longer, moving where she wanted across the mainland and doing exactly what she liked.
Which in her case was solving the last of the problems her parents had been focusing on when they’d died. Think of it like strings of light, her mother had said. One bulb goes out and the whole string goes dark. We have to make sure all the bulbs are intact again. Helena needed to open up a door that had been closed tight for as long as anyone could remember, the better to step through it and release the stranglehold the western kingdoms had on electric power. That was the point of her life, her parents’ lives, her grandparents’ lives before them. Light in all this darkness, the better to keep the monsters who lurked there at bay, and with Krajic close on her heels she had less time to do that than she’d imagined. The point was, she wasn’t normal and aside from the usual teen angst drama every girl suffered when she started bleeding, she’d never wanted to be.
But this man, who she believed might truly be part wolf, made her feel like the very silly girl she’d never been while breaking into temples in the west with her parents and getting the ancient power plants beneath and around them running again. All … obvious and awkward. All giggles and scorched hot cheeks. And that terrible, aching need beneath, like it was colonizing her bones.
Helena should have done something—anything—to save herself. She should have tried, at the very least.
Instead she stood there as if she’d grown her own gnarled roots and sunk them deep into the sand. And she watched him as if she didn’t know how to turn herself away. As if her body was in control of this, her mind be damned.
Tyr kicked off his boots and tossed them up near his weapons, and there was no reason that should rocket through her as if even the economical way he moved that huge body of his in so prosaic a task was a kind of sensual art. He glanced at her, then stripped off his trousers. And Helena’s heart exploded inside of her. She felt it shatter. Then it pounded so hard she could feel it like another hard kick to her stomach and a new agony in her veins.
Clothed, he was the devil, dangerous, and more fascinating than he should have been.
Naked, he was a god.
He was all flat, sculpted planes and hard-packed muscles beneath golden, suntanned skin. The dark hair on his chest was much thicker down low on his abdomen as it neared his—
She couldn’t look. She couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t look, and that gnawing ache between her legs was a pulsing, greedy thing that rolled through her, making her feel edgy. Restless. Itchy, somehow, as if her skin no longer fit her.
He turned that gleaming gaze of his on her. “You’re just going to stand there?”
“I don’t know what we’re doing. What you’re doing.”
“I bet you can guess.” Helena swallowed, hard. Tyr’s mouth moved into that hard curve that was far too predatory to be a smile. “Take your clothes off, girl. Or I will.”
Helena did a rushed, heart-pounding sort of math in her head. Stripping in front of him, with all the other raiders just up the beach, felt … bad. Wrong. Or something close to either one of those things, that she couldn’t quite define, but made her feel entirely too vulnerable. Or him stripping her, his hands on her the way they’d been in the woods—
“Helena.” Her name in his mouth did things to her she didn’t understand. All of it much too hot and slippery and heavy. “This isn’t a dilemma. Your clothes are coming off. The only question is how.”
She told herself it was fear, that edgy thing that coiled tighter and tighter inside of her. He straightened and stepped toward her and she gulped it back, whatever the hell it was, and put her hands on the hem of her shirt.
It wasn’t a show. She wasn’t trying to entice him. She’d heard what Wulf and he had said and she had to believe this was about washing her, nothing else. Though when she glanced at him, that look in his dark gold eyes had gone volcanic.
Helena ignored that—and the hard, low pounding of her heart at the same time. She tugged the T-shirt up and over her head, concentrating on how heavy it was, how laden with mud and water. She let it drop from her hand and she kept her attention on what she was doing, her hands moving to her horribly wet jeans. And that was harder. She had to peel them down her clammy thighs and then pull them inside out to get them off her legs, and all the while Tyr stood there—right there within arm’s reach—his gaze so hard on her she was sure she could feel it scraping over her skin.
Over her nipples, which puckered into hard points—though she told herself that was the wind. Over her hips and her pussy and her exposed legs.
“This thing is going to work fine if you follow directions,” he rasped out. “Pick up your clothes.”
“Is this a test? Take them off. Pick them up. Repeat for no reason to prove obedience to demon raider overlord.”
“It’s fine if you call me Tyr.” And she was sure there was laughter in those dark gold eyes of his, though there was no hint of it on his stern mouth. “And I’m waiting.”
He didn’t tell her that he didn’t like to wait and that she should know better than to make him wait. He didn’t have to tell her. She could feel it.
She wanted to argue, because she wanted to show him that he couldn’t boss her around like a slave. But the fact was, he could. He had. He’d likely continue. And there wasn’t a single thing she could do about that except take it. Survive it. Accept it until she could come up with an escape plan.
And wonder why, instead of making her feel sick and scared, the notion only made the wild heat in her that he’d wrung out of her in the woods flare all the more, licking her all over with the same dark flames.
She bent over and grabbed her T-shirt and jeans, then couldn’t seem to keep herself from hugging them to her chest as if they were some kind of shield. Or security blanket.
Tyr’s ruthless mouth curved slightly, very slightly, in one corner.
Helena felt it like another touch of his hard, hard hands. She had to fight back her shiver. Then he closed the distance between them, looming over her again. It felt like a delicious threat. It felt like his hand curled between her legs again, grinding against her clit. It felt like a line that could never be uncrossed—
That happened when you shot your mouth off in the courtyard, she told herself harshly. Everything after that was inevitable. This is inevitable.
Helena didn’t know if she wanted to cry, or scream, or something, anything to ease that coiling madness still pulling tighter and more hectic deep inside of her.
“Wait,” she said hurriedly when he didn’t stop. When he kept coming at her. “Tell me what you’re going to do. What this thing is. Why did your king ask if this was a claim? What does that—”
“Shut up,” Tyr rumbled at her, and then he bent slightly and swept her up into his arms, muddy clothes and all, not seeming to notice or care when she struggled against him. He frowned at her. “Why were you walking around without shoes on?”
She was suspended in the air, clutched to his chest with her own clothes in her arms. Naked. God help her, she was naked with a raider—but she’d never been as smart as she should have been, had she? The only thing smart about her was her mouth. And as always, she used it without thinking.
“Because big scary men busted in and dragged me out of my bedroom in the middle of the night. What kind of question is that? This is an abduction. If it was a date, I would have put on some shoes.”
Tyr laughed, though the sound wasn’t particularly soothing. He shifted her in his arms and started moving, but she was too caught on that hard, very male look in his dark gold eyes to pay much attention to that.
“If this was a date, Helena, you wouldn’t have worn any clothes at all and I’d already have fucked you twice.”
A hard fist of pure need slammed into her, reminding her of that insane shattering in the woods. The feel of his fingers thrusting deep inside of her, his palm so demanding on her clit. And the way his eyes gleamed, he knew it.
He didn’t push it. He didn’t have to. Helena figured her widened eyes and inability to breathe told him everything he needed to know about her thoughts on his version of dating.
Tyr carried her straight into the dark and heaving sea. He walked out into the water until the waves lapped at her ass. He gazed down at her, so tough and nearly feral, hunger making his face stark against the night. She felt it echo in her and it connected hard to that needy thing inside of her, and she hated it. She hated all of this.