His manhood was stiff and thick, pointing upward at the sky and surging with need. When I wrapped my fingers around the silky skin at its base, a small drop of liquid formed on the soft head. Fenris groaned. I glanced up; his eyes were closed, and his hips rocked against my touch.
The mighty Fenris-wolf of Ironwood forest, I thought, brought low by a mere woman.
I kissed him, bringing the round tip of his cock between my lips and sucking away the pale liquid.
“Sol,” he cried. “Oh, stars, Sol!”
His fingers sank into my hair, and he held my head for balance as his hips pulsed with energy. I took more of him into my mouth, caressing his head with my tongue. My lips moved up and down his length. He moaned, his fingers tightening against my skull. I ran a hand up the inside of his thigh, gently cupping the sac that hung beneath his cock. His entire body shivered in response.
Smiling, I moved lower, kissing the wrinkled skin beneath his manhood. When he groaned in pleasure, I took the sac gently in my mouth, running my fingers along the smooth tip of his manhood. I circled the sac with my tongue, feeling the two delicate eggs inside. He was trembling now, my poor Fenris.
Wrapping my arms around his thighs, I returned to his cock. I took as much as I could in my mouth, licking and sucking, devouring him the way he’d devoured me when we first met. He cried, his legs stiffening against me, his cock pulsing in my mouth.
“Sol,” he panted. “Sol, I can’t stop—”
I pressed my hands into his thighs, bringing him closer, deeper. And he exploded inside me, his cock throbbing as it sent his seed spilling down my throat. I swallowed reflexively, tasting salt and a distant, subtle tang, like greens from the garden once the weather turns hot.
His body sagged against mine, and I looked up. Fenris stared at the shifting birch leaves above us, his eyes unfocused, a dazed expression on his beautiful face. As I watched, he blinked, shook his head, and turned to me.
“My beautiful Sol. You didn’t need to do that.”
I grinned as I let him pull me into his arms. “I wanted to.”
His smile widened. For once, his face seemed open and relaxed, his forehead smooth and his eyes light. He seemed younger, somehow, as if my kiss had eased some deep, nameless fear. He kissed me, first on the cheek, then lower, to my chin, my neck, my shoulder blades, his lips moving over me softly, delicately, like moth’s wings, sending shivers down my skin. Heat built in my core, slicking the inside of my thighs and tightening like a knot in my abdomen. When he pulled away, I realized I was panting.
“Sol,” he whispered, gazing at me as though I were the most amazing thing in all the Nine Realms. “I never thought I’d see you here.”
I broke away from his stare to glance around the clearing. It was a beautiful place, an island of bright green, pale birch bark, and dappled sunlight, hidden in the darkness of the Ironwood’s thick pines. The little river gurgled softly as it curled around the massive boulders at the foot of the rocky hills beyond the birch grove.
“I never thought you’d want to come,” he added, turning away from me.
“Where are we?” I asked.
He met my eyes, his face once again creased in the heavy lines of a frown. “You’ll want to go home?”
“What?”
“Home. Back to that cabin you share with your mother and brothers. I can take you there.”
I shivered, suddenly cool. “But...Nøkkyn said you could have me.”
Fenris snorted and rocked backward. “You’re not property, Sol. I can’t just pick you up and run off with you, like a dairy cow.”
Something dark and sharp cut through my heart, leaving my insides hollow. “I see,” I whispered.
“When you’re ready, I will return you.” His voice sounded oddly pinched. He looked away from me toward the sparkling surface of the river.
“Is this,” I began, taking a deep breath. “Is this where you live?”
He shrugged. “Not exactly.”
I took a step closer to him. When I ran my fingers along the curve of his neck, he shivered and inhaled sharply.
“It’s beautiful here,” I said, pressing my cheek against his chest. “I don’t want to leave.”
He sighed, and his head sank to rest on mine. He raised his arms and wrapped them around me. I closed my eyes, listening to the rhythm of his heartbeat, breathing in his thick, rich scent.
Fenris cleared his throat. “If you—Would you want to see where I sleep?”
I smiled against the warm skin of his chest. “I’d love that.”
Fenris looked almost shy as he led me from the birch grove. We walked straight toward the jagged rocks of the steep hillside, and for a second I imagined we’d climb up into the very mountains themselves. Then Fenris turned sideways, smiled apologetically, and vanished between the rocks. I yelped, and he reappeared.
“The entrance is pretty small,” he said. “Sorry. You can really only get in if you go sideways.”
I stepped around the mess of broken granite. There was a dark crack in the hillside, almost entirely blocked by Fenris’s naked body.
“Just through here,” he said, vanishing again.
Dark, narrow places have always made my heart clench. Still, I ground my teeth together and turned sideways to slip through the opening. Bare rock scraped the skin on my back and thighs, and then I was through the entrance, blinking in the gloom of a small cave.
It was barely bigger than our cabin, with jagged stone walls and a rocky floor illuminated only by the sliver of light that managed to slip in through the entrance. One stone wall was marred by the dark remnants of a small fire, and an enormous fur lay crumpled across half the floor. Several woven bags hung from the ceiling and walls, mostly empty, but a few swollen with loaves of bread. I smiled as my eyes crept around the cave a second time. It looked exactly like the hideout of a madman, or a demon.
“It’s not much,” Fenris said. “I’ve, uh, never had visitors.”
I reached for the closest bag of bread, feeling its hard crust through the woven reeds. “Really? What about your friend from the Æsir?”
Fenris shook his head. “He meets me on the other side of the river. This place is...not for him.” His voice faded, and I turned to him. It was too dark to be certain, but I thought he may have been blushing.
“Would you like some bread?” Fenris asked. I sensed he was eager to shift the conversation.
“No, thank you.” I turned to him. “How do you fit in here? As a wolf?”
“I can’t. But I’ve got to sleep somewhere, right?”
I didn’t reply. Another implication from his words slowly sank into my consciousness. I’d been so certain Fenris had other lovers. He was so handsome, and he’d approached me with such bold confidence on the banks of the Lucky river. I’d just assumed I was one of many women he met on the cool moss beneath the trees of the Ironwood. Or perhaps I’d told myself that to assuage my guilt, as I had never once mentioned King Nøkkyn to him.
But if he’d never had visitors— If I was the only woman who had ever seen the inside of his cave, the place where the mighty Fenris-wolf slept—
“You saved me,” I whispered. My voice sounded as rough as the walls of stone surrounding us. “From King Nøkkyn. You rescued me, like in one of Bard Sturlinsen’s stories.”
Fenris shook his head. His eyes were wide and liquid. “I’m no hero.”
“But, you saved me from the wicked king.”
“No.” Fenris shifted on his feet and turned away. “Sol, I— I would have let you go with Nøkkyn. If you’d said that’s what you wanted. But—”
He pulled a sharp breath over his lips. It was almost a gasp of pain.
“It would have felt like dying.” Fenris rocked back and forth, then sank his hands into his hair. “All those stories, those Sturlinsen fantasies. They make it sound like falling in love is something magical. But, stars, Sol. For me, it’s been torture. And, when you leave, it’s going to kill me.”
He glanced up again, just long enough for the thin light streaming through the cave’s entrance to dance along the tears pooled in his pale eyes. Then he turned his back to me and rocked forward, as if his body ached to run.
“Fenris.”
He stiffened as I said his name. It was a small enough cave I only had to extend my arm to touch him, and take a single step to wrap my arms around him. His heart hammered against his chest as though he’d just run the length of the Ironwood, and the words he’d just spoken seemed to hang in the air between us.
Love.
I’d never thought to use that word with Fenris, my mad, handsome lover from the Ironwood. Since the day King Nøkkyn grabbed my breast through the soft fabric of Ma’s green dress and declared my worth equal to twenty cords of purple oak, I’d tried not to think of love at all. Love belonged to girls like Maddie Liefsen who wore ribbons in their hair and had shoes to protect their delicate toes from the mud.
But now everything had changed. Fenris, the monster of the Ironwood, had rescued me. He’d stolen me away from the wicked king and had taken me to his secret home deep in the darkness of the Ironwood.
I was free.
And, yes, by the Realms! There was a word for this feeling, for the ache in my chest whenever I imagined my life without Fenris, for the sense that I would die without him, that I was only truly alive when the two of us were together. Since we’d first come together on the mossy banks of the Lucky River, that moment when I decided I wanted him and not King Nøkkyn, Fenris had filled my waking moments and chased my dreams. He’d brought me more joy than I’d thought the Nine Realms could hold.
That was what people meant when they said love.
“I don’t want to leave,” I said. “I love you, too.”
The words felt so right rising from my lips. As if my love for him had been woven into the fabric of the Nine Realms from the very beginning, lying dormant for the long aeons before my birth, just waiting for me to turn toward Fenris and speak the truth my heart had always known.
Slowly, with every muscle of his body taut, Fenris turned to face me. A single tear streaked down his cheek, cutting a gleaming path along the curve of his cheekbones. I wiped it away with my fingertip.
“Fenris, I—”
His lips crashed against mine, stopping any further conversation. He kissed me with a sudden, desperate ferocity, as if he thought I might change my mind, decide to leave the cave and abandon him.
The thought made me shudder. I reached for him, wrapping my arms around his chest and sinking my hands into his thick hair. I met his storm of kisses with my own fierce need, and all my wild joy at my rescue. We sank together to the stack of furs lining the cave’s floor, our arms and legs entangled, our bodies already slick with sweat and anticipation.
I opened for him with no hesitation, and no words. Fenris gasped as he slid inside me, filling me, completing me. Then his mouth met mine again, and our lips and tongues danced even as our bodies came together. When we drew breath, we drew it as one.
This is freedom, I thought, as his body rippled above me, his pleasure echoing and heightening mine.
This is love.
THE MONSTER’S WIFE: CHAPTER ONE
We must have been the first people in the world to discover such pleasure.
If anyone had known this much bliss before us, I was certain no fields would ever have been plowed, no orchards planted, no monuments constructed or fortresses erected. If the great kings and queens of history had known this pleasure, they would surely have neglected their duty to civilization and culture in favor of the sheer ecstasy their bodies could create together.
For the first time in my life, I had no chores. Fenris owned no chickens with eggs to collect. There was no dairy cow lowing in her stall to be milked, no gardens to weed, no apples to slice and dry. I had no clothes to mend or wash. In fact, I had no clothes at all. My mother’s dress still lay, I assumed, shredded, stained, and abandoned on the forest floor, somewhere in the Ironwood. Fenris acted like he’d never worn clothing. I liked it that way, with no rough weave to hide his gorgeous body and where I could see the slightest trace of arousal stiffen and jerk his manhood, even when we were doing something innocuous.
And we were frequently interrupted while doing something innocuous.
I couldn’t even bend over to pick up a stick of firewood without a flush running down his entire body. This in turn led to me dropping the stick and pushing him to the duff of the forest floor, then riding him until I screamed so loudly we startled the birds from the trees.
We ate the bread of the Æsir, or Fenris would vanish for several hours and return with fresh meat, still dripping with blood, which we’d roast on sticks over a fire in the birch grove. We ate the meat still steaming hot and barely cooked through, laughing at our own impatience as our fingers ran with the juices. Sometimes we stretched out on the cool moss and fed each other as darkness pooled around the bases of the trees and the night birds began calling to one another from the waving canopy of the Ironwood.
Mostly, we made love. Morning, afternoon, and night.
Sometimes Fenris’s nightmares would awaken me in the middle of the night. He’d cry out as his body thrashed in the furs, and I would run my hands through his hair and along his chest until his pale eyes opened.
“I’m here,” I’d whisper until he rolled over and pressed me to the furs, his manhood teasing the space between my thighs.
Once, we had two days of cold rain—the kind of rain that signals the end of summer. Fenris lit a fire in the little stone hearth he’d built inside the cave, and we spent those two days coming together for hours, pushing our bodies as far as they would go, gasping and crying, our sweat and breath mingling with the smoke of our fire.
I could never get enough of him. Even once our bodies were exhausted, when I was so sore I couldn’t imagine taking him again and he was so drained his proud manhood lay soft and vulnerable against my side, I devoured him with my eyes, tracing every gentle curve and hard line on his body, staring into his pale eyes and running my fingers through his dark auburn hair until sleep finally claimed me, separating us at last.
I STRETCHED LAZILY in the thick furs, flexing my arms and legs before I opened my eyes. A thin sliver of sunlight painted the roof of the cave, and birds sang outside. It was morning, then. I turned on my side, feeling for Fenris, and found that the furs were mine alone. He often rose before me, and I had no memory of him crying or thrashing in the darkness, so I doubted a nightmare had woken him.
Fenris never spoke of the terrors haunting him almost every night. I asked only once what chased him through his sleep, and he’d frowned at me.
“What do you mean?” he’d asked.
“Your nightmares,” I’d said, placing another stick on the fire between us. It was early morning, and he’d lit a blaze to ward off the autumnal chill in the cave. “You kick and toss like you’re running.”
Fenris had run a hand through his hair, tugging at it as a dark furrow formed between his eyes. “Doesn’t everyone?”
I let it go at that. I’d had my own nightmares since moving to the cave, dark dreams where I was trapped in the Ironwood beneath King Nøkkyn’s hard, black-clad body, screaming for a rescue that never came. If Fenris didn’t wish to speak of his nightmares, so be it. We all have our secret fears.
I shook off my memories and came to my feet, stretching and rocking forward on our bunched up furs. My fingertips brushed the rough stone of the cave’s soot-encrusted ceiling. I winced at a deep, familiar ache between my legs, then smiled as I remembered all the activities of last night that had left me so sore. A faint rustle of movement drifted in from the tall grass outside, and I smiled as I tried to imagine what Fenris was doing out there. A moment later, curiosity got the better of me. I slipped through the crack and out of the cave.
Fenris crouched next to the stream, splashing cold water over his face and torso. He turned and gave me a smile that lit the forest, as though he’d secretly
expected me to vanish in the night and was overjoyed by the mere fact of my continued presence.
“Good morning, beautiful,” he said.
The thin, early morning sun caught the droplets of water scattered across the ridges of his abdomen, making them glimmer. My chest tightened; by the Realms, he was handsome!
“What are you doing up so early?” I asked.
His grin widened. “Red deer,” he said, sniffing the morning air. “An entire herd of them, on the move just north of here. I thought I’d go and bring back the finest and the fattest for the woman I love.”
My smile grew at that. Since the day he’d rescued me from King Nøkkyn, Fenris had used every opportunity to work the word love into our conversations.
“You’ll be fine, won’t you?” His smile vanished as his brow furrowed.
“You always ask that,” I chided. “You must think me a scared little girl.”
Fenris wrapped his arms around my waist. “I think you are the bravest woman I’ve ever met,” he said, his breath warm along my neck, “and the most beautiful.”
I giggled. My body responded to his, flooding with heat, my soreness forgotten in the sudden rush of arousal.
Fenris pulled away, and his back straightened as he sniffed the air again. “They’re on the move. Hold that thought.”
He took a few steps backward, until the heels of his bare feet sank into the dark mud of the little stream that tumbled past our cave, and he grinned at me as his body began to shimmer with golden light. I brought my hand to my mouth. A shiver raced up my spine. This was hardly the first time I’d seen his transformation, but it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you got used to.
The golden light grew and grew until his entire body was obscured, until the entire dancing stream was hidden from view, until the delicate sparks of light touched the very tops of the birch trees. Only then did the light fade and disperse, revealing an enormous black shape, like a nightmare brought to life.
The Fenris-wolf turned to me and pulled his lips back in a grin, revealing bone-white teeth longer than my forearm.
The Complete Fenris Series Page 14