Vikings Unleashed: 9 modern Viking erotic romances

by Kate Pearce

  “So…how do we start this?” she asked.

  “The conversation or the arrangement?”

  “Either.”

  He sighed. “First things first, tell me how you feel about it. No bullshit.”

  She cringed. “You’ll be angry with me.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because that’s the rational response to a situation like this. The woman you’ve committed yourself to taking a second lover isn’t and shouldn’t be an everyday thing.”

  “I’m not angry with you, sweetheart. Disappointed? Yeah, there’s definitely some of that. I waited so long for you, and didn’t believe us getting together would actually happen.”

  “And as soon as we did, I latched onto another man.”

  He turned his hands over, palms-up. “We’re on the same page. I know that you can’t help it. Afótama are supposed to be immediately drawn to their mates, and you did that with Oliver.”

  “In spite of already being partially bonded to you.”

  “I guess you could consider it an escape clause. I was switched on from birth, but you weren’t. I wanted you, but you didn’t feel the same pull.”

  Tess cringed. “It wasn’t like that. We were too close. You were…”

  “Like a brother to you. Don’t even say it.”

  “Then I won’t.”

  “I wasn’t going to push it, Tess. I was going to get out of the way, partial bond or not, so that you had your chance at head over heels with someone. And then I realized that you’re my only chance for that, and I shouldn’t be so quick to give it up.”

  “So, that’s why you’d fight for me?”

  He brought her hands up to his lips and kissed the backs of them. “Anyone who really loved you would.”

  “L-loved me?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Nudging up her sleeve, he pressed his lips over her wrist at her pulse point. The teasing warmth traveled up her arm and bloomed in her core. Her nipples tightened and sex tingled, but it didn’t matter how turned on she was because fucking was out of the question for the moment.

  He loved her? Did he know how seriously fucked up she was? Obviously, he didn’t.

  “I don’t expect you to feel the same.” He let her hand down, but held it on his lap. “I know you care about me and enjoy my company—”

  “Stop it. Don’t try to put words in my mouth, and don’t make it less than what it is. You’re irreplaceable, and I can’t imagine being here if you weren’t. You’re my friend, yes, but you’re also the most attentive lover I’ve ever had and I don’t want to separate those two things. You get me.”

  “Yeah, I get you, sweetheart.”

  She twirled a length of his loose hair around her fingers and warily met his gaze. “I want to get you, too. I want to understand you. Keep you. Maybe it’s selfish of me, but I don’t want you around me if you’re not mine. ”

  His lips quirked up in a half-grin. “What would my queen have me do?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Your queen would have you tell her that you’re willing to share.”

  He leaned back against the rock again and smoothed his hair back from his face. “It seems to be the gods’ will, which makes the scenario easier for me to accept. Perhaps it’s for the best. I travel so much for work that I’d rarely have to see him.”

  She gave him a playful cuff to the arm. “Be nice.”

  “Nice? Doll, I thought you knew me better than that.” He pushed up an eyebrow and wrapped his fist around her ponytail. He gave it a sharp tug, and she sighed contentedly.

  “I don’t want to know where you learned to do that.”

  “Ask me and I’ll tell you.”

  “Nope. I don’t want to imagine your little army of submissives down on their knees with their faces tilted up like baby birds waiting for scraps. I bet they were all waiting to be raided and plundered, and you begrudgingly complied again and again. Poor you.”

  “Mmm. Sounds about right.”

  She swatted him. “Asshole.” She let the playground dissolve around them, and back in the real world, Harvey pressed his hands to her face and pulled her into a breath-stealing kiss that made her forget what she was angry about.

  Nan cleared her throat at the gazebo opening, and Tess pulled back from Harvey, cheeks ablaze.

  Harvey obviously felt no such shame, and grinned as he draped his arms over the back of the bench.

  “If you’re going to neck in public,” Nan said, “you need to have guards with you.”

  “I thought we were safe within Norseton.”

  “Generally,” Jody said. He and Nan took the bench across from Tess and Harvey. “But, we do have some traffic coming in and out that we can’t control one hundred percent. The delivery vehicles, for instance. We can’t have huge grocery orders dropped off at the gates.”

  “Got it,” Tess said. “How’s our prodigal girl settling in? I can’t make heads or tails of her on the web. She’s so…”

  “Scattered?” Nan offered.

  Tess nodded. It was more polite than what she was thinking.

  “Just fine. Her parents will see to it that she and the children adjust well and get her the medical care she needs. We’ll question her later about what she knows. We’ll give her some time to calm herself first.”

  “Great.”

  “Where’s Mr. Gilisson?” Nan asked. “He did come back with you, didn’t he?”

  “He left some things in Fallon up in the air and had to go make some calls.” And thank gods, because she and Harvey needed that talk. “He’ll catch up with us soon.”

  Nan lifted her chin and stared out between Tess and Harvey. “Excellent timing. Here he comes now.”

  Ollie jogged up the path, waving on approach.

  Tess couldn’t help smiling as he came. A man that big shouldn’t have moved so gracefully. He had a confident awareness of his body, and every movement hypnotized. She’d been awed by him from the moment he stepped into her suite, and that hadn’t changed. He must have been exquisite in battle.

  “What?” he projected as he took the adjacent bench.

  “Nothing. Just thinking about you…and your sword.”

  “Oh, yeah? Want me to fit it in your sheath?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Harvey gave her knee a squeeze. “Having trouble focusing? Your grandmother asked you a question.”

  “Sorry. I, uh…” There wasn’t a damned thing she could say that would keep her out of trouble, so she just cleared her throat and looked studiously in her grandmother’s direction. “Could you repeat that, please?”

  “Certainly. I asked if you were ready for a heavy blow.”

  Tess felt her brow furrow. “I’m sorry?”

  Harvey leaned in and whispered, “Your parents, Tess.”

  “Oh.” Tess could read nothing from Nan’s expression, but Jody’s was drawn. He leaned forward with his forearms over his thighs and wrung his hands. He wouldn’t look at her. That didn’t bode well.

  “I didn’t want to dump too much on you at once, because I worried you’d dump it all back into the web. I understand Mr. Gilisson can help you with that?”

  Ollie nodded.

  “Then by all means, please help her.”

  Ollie closed the short distance between his bench and Tess, and sat at her right. She looked at Harvey, who nodded grimly, and let go of his hand. She took Ollie’s. Touching them both could lead to unpredictable results. Harvey would have understood that.

  “Hi, Tess!” Bubbly, smiling Erin jogged past the gazebo waving with a small dark-haired woman on her heels, whom also waved. Erin wore those bright white sneakers, a sports bra, and a pair of exercise shorts so tiny that if she bent over, they could probably see London and France.

  “Hi,” Tess said through clenched teeth. Ollie hissed and Harvey muttered, “Fuck, Tess.” She looked down to find she’d dug her nails into Ollie’s palm and Harvey’s thigh.

  “Sorry.” She gave them apologetic pats, and retook Ollie�
�s hand.

  “You could hardly fault them for looking,” Jody said. “I mean, our girls are h-h-ho—”

  His eyes rolled back in his head and his body shook violently with a seizure of some sort.

  Harvey and Ollie both got to their feet, but Nan held up her hands, keeping them back.

  Jody stopped shaking, and now growled through his bared teeth. “Nan!”

  “Gods, child, it wasn’t me. I always fire off a warning shot.”

  They all turned to look at Tess.

  She blinked, and then shrugged. “Did I do that?” Whoever did it, she thought he’d totally deserved it.

  Jody growled again.

  “Sorry,” she said flatly. “I guess I have a new trick.”

  Ollie chuckled and took her hand once more. “You are a scary little woman.”

  “Just wait until I actually know what I’m doing. Really, Jody. I am sorry, a little.”

  He rubbed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “You need to work with Nadia on keeping your emotions from coming to sudden heads like that. You have the capability to seriously hurt people without trying.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Who was the brunette of so little enthusiasm jogging with Erin?”

  “That would be your secretary Lora.”

  Oh.

  She probably should have known that.

  “Wait, Lora’s not—”

  “Afótama? No.”

  “Thank you, but what I was actually going to say was lily white. It’s extra-white here, y’all. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

  Nan sighed. “I’m certain Lora has. She was one of many children who were adopted during the time you were gone.”

  “That ought to help keep the gene pool fresh. How do people avoid hooking up with their relatives?”

  “Careful record-keeping, which is one of the jobs of the matriarch. Hopefully, I’ll have many years ahead to teach you your next role. Back to the matter at hand, however. Around twenty years ago, your brother Keith set out on a mission of exploration, if you will. Like all of us, he was enamored of the sea. He and some of his friends chartered a boat, and they hopped from island to island in the Caribbean, visited the South American coast, and I’m certain they even made it to Hawaii once or twice. One day, he came home and he had this harebrained scheme to find us all a new place to settle. Somewhere by the sea, he said. We all laughed it off at the time, because where could we go and thrive where men don’t already live? He made it his mission to look anyway. We received a letter from him when he’d just turned twenty, and he told us there was a small island a gentleman would consider letting us lease. Of course I said no outright, and then we didn’t hear from him again. Your parents set out to track him, and that was the last time we saw them alive. The Cuban government was kind enough to send them back to us for burial.”

  Whoa. Tess’s life and history really was sounding more and more like the plot of a graphic novel. “But, you said you believed Keith was alive.”

  She nodded. “Yes, Keith is alive. He’s on the web. You wouldn’t recognize him.”

  “And there’s something’s wrong with him,” Jody said. “His thoughts are wild. He doesn’t seem to have any awareness of us any longer. He’s lost in his own head.”

  “Do you think he was somehow responsible for our parents’ deaths?”

  Jody nodded, but Nan shook her head.

  Shit. If they didn’t agree, how the hell was she supposed to know what to do? She didn’t want to believe her own brother would purposefully lead their parents to harm, but if he had, what was she willing to do about it? She could convene the Thing—their assembly—and let the Afótama hash out a suitable punishment for him, but this was a family issue. Her brother, her parents. She and Nan would deal with him quietly.

  “It’s not high priority at the moment, Tess,” Nan said, “but tying off bleeding arteries is one of the queen’s jobs. I couldn’t find him, but you must try. You need to ensure our secrets aren’t being spread around, and that if one of us harms another, appropriate measures are taken to discourage others who would do the same.”

  She got up and gave Tess’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze. “It’s a lot to take in all at once, but you were born to be queen, and that means you’re equipped to endure the trials. Don’t forget to check in with Lora. You should know the staff, at least by their faces.”

  Nan stepped down from the gazebo and headed toward home.

  Jody stood next. He pulled his beanie hat down more snugly and shifted his weight. “When it’s time to look, Tess, I’ll go with you. We need to get you better at tracking first. It’s in the Afótama skill set, but you should be best at it.”

  “I can’t even find my way out of a crowded parking lot,” she said softly.

  Harvey wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close. “I’ll help you. You’re too hardheaded for anyone else.”

  “Ha ha.” She sighed and laid her forehead against his chest. “Thanks for being here,” she projected as Jody left them.

  “I’d do anything for you.”

  There was another set of footsteps retreating down the path, and Tess knew without looking that it was Ollie.

  Shit. How must they have looked to him? He probably thought Tess had totally shut him out in favor of Harvey. The truth was, neither man was ever far from her mind. Just because her attention wasn’t on one didn’t mean she wasn’t concerned about the other.

  In the web, the two of them were closest to her in the middle. She could hardly check in on the clan without having to mentally climb over them, and that connection was getting stickier with time. If she lost one man, his absence would leave a hole not just in her heart, but also at the very center of the web. She wanted them both. Needed them both.

  “He’ll have to figure out how to take you when he wants you, Tess,” Harvey said softly, apparently tapping into the cause of her stress. “You know I’m not going to leave gaps for him to fit in. He’s going to have to make his own.”

  “I know.”

  But what if he didn’t want to? What if gaps weren’t enough for him?

  15

  “There you are.” Tess found Ollie in the mansion’s private library, bent over a large book.

  He looked up and smiled. “Yeah, here I am.”

  She sidled up to the table he’d claimed and peered at the ancient text. “What are you reading?”

  “It’s an accounting of some of the battles our group engaged in before we sailed to the Americas.”

  “Before we split, you mean.”

  “Yes. It’s interesting stuff. It’s hard to tell how much is hyperbole and how much is factual, but there’s a lot of good warfare strategy in there.” He picked up the left-side pages and carefully shut the book. After belting it and returning it to its glass case, he pulled off the white archival gloves and bunched them together. Nan must have really trusted him to give him free rein of such valuable documents. “Did you need something?”

  The sharp tone took her aback. He’d just smiled at her! She realized it must have been forced.

  Crossing her arms, she leaned against the table edge and cleared her throat. “Not really. I wondered if you were hiding from me.”

  He rubbed his thumbs over the glove fabric as if meditatively, and stared at her for a long while.

  She didn’t think he was going to answer, and she couldn’t make sense of the emotions coiling around him.

  “Of course not,” he said finally. “If I were going to hide, I’d go back to Fallon.” He dropped the gloves, and sank onto the seat at the end of the table. He patted his lap, and Tess sat sideways across it. She sighed as she nestled her face against his chest.

  Felt so good to be near him, and he’d been scarce since that afternoon at the gazebo. She’d worried he’d walked off to stew and plot his challenge, and it’d been a hard two days without his soothing touch. It was as loud as a rock and roll concert inside her head. The buzz had gotten worse instead of b
etter thanks to some out-of-control tutoring sessions with Nan. Nan could tell Tess in very practical terms how to manipulate the Afótama web to get the information she needed out of it, but to Nan, it was simple. Tess’s gift was unpredictable because of whom her father had been. The last of their kind born of a warrior had been Ótama’s daughter Sævör.

  Tess drummed her fingertips on the sides of Ollie’s arms. Maybe she was looking to the wrong person for a tutor. Who better to educate her on her gifts than the woman whom they stemmed from?

  She had a thought.

  “Ótama told me that before he died, my father made sure that our match was ordained.”

  “I remember reading that off you in your playground.”

  “It didn’t make sense why he would do that until now.”

  “Explain.”

  “Well, we’ve had centuries of Afótama queens with Afótama consorts. All of their powers manifested in more or less the same way.”

  “And your father wasn’t Afótama. Hmm. I think I see where you’re going.” His rough fingertips traced the sinuous curve of her jaw and chin.

  She sighed indulgently and closed her eyes. “Exactly. I’ve got all the queenly shit, but not the same control of it because no one here knows what the other half comes with.”

  “But, I do.”

  “Mm-hmm. You can help me map out what’s what, maybe work with Harvey to figure out how to counterbalance the two sides.”

  Ollie grunted and tipped her off his lap as he stood.

  She slapped her feet to the floor before her ass could hit it. “What the fuck was that for?”

  “Nothing.” He walked to an open bookcase and peered at the spines. “I’ll help you all I can.”

  She ground the heels of her palms against her eyes and gritted her teeth. She would have thought that of the two of them, Harvey would have been the more difficult one to convince they should give the ménage arrangement a shot. Ollie was far more laidback, so she was surprised at he hadn’t considered the compromise on his own.