Edge of Obsession

  He pushed back in his chair and angled a look down at her. Her gray eyes were too big for her face and that telltale color was high on her cheeks. He knew without the slightest shred of doubt that if he reached between her legs he would find her rich and wet and juicy with need.

  “You look uncomfortable.” He had the distinct pleasure of watching her jolt a little bit, then turn her face to his. “Are you still trying to decide?”

  “Decide?” she echoed.

  And god, she was killing him. That lush mouth of hers she’d had all over his balls, his dick. It took every bit of control he had to stay where he was, lounging there beside her, not even touching her. Certainly not pulling that full mouth of hers to his and getting his tongue in there. Certainly not eating her up like she was dessert.

  You’re trying to prove a point here, he reminded himself sourly.

  He was, damn it. His cock only ever had one point to prove, the single-minded little shit, but Tyr had no intention of turning Helena over to the brotherhood as a camp girl. No matter what she thought she wanted. He didn’t think she wanted it, either. Not the way she shivered and leaned closer to him when she thought he wasn’t paying attention.

  Tyr figured her request to become a camp girl was one more of her little games, and what the hell. This was a night of celebration. If she wanted to play a game, he could, too. He liked to win. He’d consider it her punishment.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Decide.” He waited for that crease to appear between her brows. “Whose cock you want next, Helena. What do you think I’m talking about?”

  She shifted where she knelt and sheer panic washed through her stormy gray eyes, and did she really think he couldn’t see that? Then she licked her lips, which made his cock try to jump out of his pants, and the whole thing left him feeling a little bit mean in a way he had every intention of working out all over her delectable little body.

  He figured she’d like that, too. But she didn’t have to know that now.

  “Staring at me isn’t an answer.” He reached down and scooped her up, lifting her up off the floor and setting her on her feet between his outstretched legs. He leaned back in his chair and considered her, shaking his head as he did. “Maybe the problem is you’re wearing too much. The camp girls wear things that can be easily removed or shoved aside. There’s no point claiming you’re comfort pussy if no one has access to that pussy, is there?”

  He thought she knew where he was going now. He saw that panic in her eyes again, and the way she struggled to keep her hands flat at her sides instead of balled into mutinous fists. Oh, little girl, he thought, letting his gaze drag down over the jut of her nipples and the smooth swell of her belly, you have no idea all the ways I’m going to corrupt you.

  Tyr waited until she was fidgeting, and only then did he meet her gaze again. “You look like you have something to say.”

  She shook her head. Then bit her lip.

  His mouth moved toward a smile, but he never got there. “Great. Then do something about your clothes, woman. You look like you’re dressed to trek out into the far islands. There’s nothing about that screaming Pound me until you feel better, is there?”

  “Do something?” She didn’t quite stutter over that. Not quite. “What do you want me to…?”

  Her voice trailed away when his brows rose, and Tyr loved it when she flushed red and hot like that. He truly loved it. It made him want nothing in the world but to be balls deep inside of her again, slamming them both into bliss while she blushed and blushed and blushed.

  “Are you sure you’re okay over there?” he asked when she didn’t move, as if he didn’t care one way or another. “You look like you’re not too sure.”

  She blinked. “I’m fine. I’m terrific.”

  He lounged back in the chair and watched as she stripped for him, and the stark truth was that it was—technically speaking—the worst striptease he’d ever seen in his life. There was no tease to it at all. His poor, overwhelmed compliant girl simply pulled off her clothes in a mechanical, almost clinical fashion. She didn’t look at him, or anywhere else. She didn’t actually hold her nose or her breath while she did it, but she managed to give the impression of doing both. She even folded her clothes neatly on the next chair over before she straightened and stood there again. Like some kind of resolute soldier following a grim order.

  There was nothing remotely hot about any of it. And yet Tyr was so hard, and he wanted her so badly, that for a crazy minute there the red haze in his brain took over and he didn’t think he’d be able to hold on to his control—

  But he did. Somehow, he did.

  “That,” he told her, his fury at making himself wait—and at his insane need for this woman that was clawing him apart—making his voice harsh, “was just sad. A camp girl is seductive. A camp girl is sex and joy. That was like a trip to a healer in the middle of fever season, Helena. What the hell.”

  There was a flash of temper in her gray eyes, and he liked that. Also too much. The same way he liked it when she beat it back down and tried to smile at him in that way of hers that let him know exactly how much she wanted to sink her teeth into him. He was a twisted bastard, he knew. He’d always liked a few fangs. And her fuck you glare did all kinds of shit to him, the same way it had back in that Atlanta courtyard.

  “My apologies, war chief,” Helena gritted out. Her shoulders were so tense they were threatening her ears, and for some reason he found even that adorable. Tyr concentrated on her plump little nipples instead. Sex was one thing. Adorable was nothing but disaster. “I want only to please you.”

  “And the rest of the brothers,” he reminded her, deliberately harsh. “All the brothers, Helena, all the time. And on celebration nights, any member of the clan. Men, women. Both. We’re not fussy. We live hard lives out here. The weather takes us or the wolves do, or sometimes the other clans want a dick-measuring contest. Everything ends in blood. We like to enjoy ourselves while we can.”

  He watched her swallow hard, watched that panic beat at her again. But she was so stubborn, his little liar. Stubborn and tough, in her own way, and he was warrior enough to admire it.

  More than admire it. But he didn’t want to think about that.

  “And all the brothers, of course. The whole clan. I want to please everybody.” She tilted her chin in the air. “Right now.”

  Tyr waved a hand. “Then dance.”

  “Dance?”

  “You’re starting to get on my nerves, baby. I don’t need an echo. I need obedience and a pretty smile.”

  Another hot roll of red, staining her whole upper body, from her cheeks to her neck and then down to tease the faint upper swell of her tits. Tyr was absolutely riveted. He didn’t bother pretending otherwise.

  “I … uh. I don’t know how to dance.”

  “It’s not noncompliant to dance,” he chided her, trying to hide his dark amusement behind his gritty tone. “They only ruined sex. They left some things that don’t suck.”

  “My family kept to ourselves, mostly,” she said, and then frowned, and he wondered why. What such an innocuous statement could mean to her, or why she might wish she hadn’t said it. He filed that away with the rest of the clues to the mystery that was Helena, that he had every intention of cracking wide open. Just as soon as she admitted she wanted no part of being a camp girl. “I never learned.”

  Tyr sat forward and swept his carved mug from the table, then settled back in his chair as if his cock wasn’t staging a riot and he could lounge around all night playing stupid games with her. But it didn’t matter what was true, he reminded himself. It mattered what she believed.

  “There’s nothing to learn,” he told her. “It’s like sex. Go with what feels good. You should know that kind of thing if you want to be a camp girl. They dance all the time. Why? Because like I said. It’s the same as sex, it feels great, and that’s what they do.”

  Helena gritted her teeth and moved from one foot to the other, then balled her hands
into fists. “I can’t.”

  “Oh, sweetheart. That’s not something camp girls say.”

  She looked at him like she wanted to rip pieces off him. Good, he thought. Admit you don’t want this.

  “Maybe I’m—”

  But she cut herself off.

  “Not cut out to be a camp girl?” he asked mildly. “Is that what you were about to say?”

  But Helena hadn’t asked for his help back in those woods, crashing around in bare feet. She hadn’t told him the truth up in his rooms. She’d lied to Wulf and to him, and she didn’t ask for his help now. Maybe she didn’t know how to do that, either. One more lesson he was going to teach her, Tyr thought. And it was fine with him if she had to learn it while she was completely naked, wearing nothing but that mark he’d left on her neck.

  It was more than fine with him.

  “No,” she threw at him. “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  He shrugged, like he had all the time in the world, because he did. “Then I don’t know what you’re waiting for, little girl. I told you to dance.”

  12

  Helena was standing stark naked in the middle of a crowded room filled with dangerous strangers. Directly in front of the only man she’d ever met who made her feel as if she really would do anything at all if he asked it.

  Absolutely anything, just as she’d told him. As she’d already demonstrated—though she didn’t need him to tell her that what she’d done so far was little more than baby steps to a man like him. That he’d hardly scratched the surface of his appetites. A simple glance around the hall confirmed that.

  If this is all run-of-the-mill and normal to Tyr …

  And what was choking her up was the knowledge that it would take only the smallest little step farther and she would destroy herself willingly, smash herself open, batter herself into a thousand pieces, anything for the faintest crook of his hard mouth and that gleam in his dark gaze.

  Anything.

  As if Tyr was the only thing that mattered to her, or ever could. She couldn’t seem to breathe past that thought—as if it was true. As if it was more than true. As if it was fate.

  This isn’t about him, she snapped at herself, in desperation. This is about escaping him!

  “I don’t know what you’re doing, Helena,” Tyr said then, sounding bored. He swirled his drink in one hand, that indolent posture in no way fooling her. Not this time. “I told you. You have to impress me before I’ll let you loose on the brotherhood.”

  “I want to dance for you,” she told him, and that wasn’t wise. It was entirely too honest and she was afraid he could see it all over her, like another kind of betraying red blush. “But I told you, I don’t know how.” She straightened her shoulders. “The last time you told me I was bad at something I did it myself and you didn’t like it.”

  That smile of his lurked in his eyes but was entirely absent from his stern mouth, and what was the matter with her that she should tremble at that? And she could call it fear or panic all she liked. She knew better.

  It was anticipation, giddy and sweet, and complicated with all the greedy hunger that stormed through her.

  “Come here,” he ordered her. He sounded mean and it, too, tumbled around inside of her and made that bright, pulsing thing within her burst into flames. Then sink deep into her pussy. Making her restless. Swollen. Needy.

  She stepped closer to him, deeper between his widespread legs. His thighs were big and tough, encased in those dark trousers that seemed to accentuate his thick muscles, and his dark braids were still tied in a messy knot behind his head and still failed to detract in any way from all his fierce, masculine power. His knowing eyes, that ferocious beard, his glorious chest painted in tattoos and marked with scars, and below that, the impressive thrust of his hard cock.

  Helena didn’t understand how she could want him like this. Like a terrible thirst nothing seemed to quench.

  Tyr set his drink on the floor beside him. Then he reached over and took her wrists in his big hands, pulling her forward so she came up on her toes and leaned in close to him.

  “Hold on,” he muttered, putting her hands on the arms of the chair. She gripped the wooden arms as ordered, and knew there was no way he didn’t notice that her breath had caught when he’d taken hold of her and came in little pants now. But if he did, he didn’t mention it.

  Tyr reached over and tugged the fastening at the end of her braid free. His gaze moved to hers and he held it as he reached behind him and wrapped the bit of leather around his knotted hair. And it had to be the wine he’d given her or something in the food he’d fed her that made her stomach flip over. Helena told herself it had to be something like that, because it couldn’t possibly be anything else. It couldn’t.

  With one hand, Tyr started undoing her braid and that, too, was a wholly nonsexual act, surely. It was a braid. It was hair. But there was something about his big, blunt fingers, crafted into weapons in their own right and yet digging through the twined sections and raking them free so gently, that made a terrible knot she didn’t want to identify roll itself bigger and harder in her gut. Her pussy ached as if he were using those fingers deep in her folds. She felt slippery and swollen, crushed tight and shivering, and she really thought she might die from this.

  From this, an act that hardly even registered next to everything else this man had done to her.

  And everything he’s going to do, a voice inside her whispered.

  And there was something about the weight of her hair as it fell free of her braid. It slid over her shoulders and felt wicked as it did. It pooled between them. The flowery scent of the shampoo he’d used on her filled the heated space between their bodies and that, too, sent a kick of heat through her.

  She realized she was leaning over his chair right where he’d put her, her ass tilted up as she did it, which meant she was likely exposing her pussy—wet and obvious—to the entire hall filled with raiders behind her. More than likely. She was.

  Helena didn’t know what to make of the fact that while it bothered her—it made a thrill of half shame and half wild delight careen through her, leaving her breathless—she was far more consumed with what Tyr might do next. He was the only thing she could seem to make herself care about. He was worth exposing herself for. He was worth—

  No. She had to stop. She had to end this before she couldn’t end this. But Helena didn’t straighten. She didn’t step away from him or even change the way she leaned over him with her naked breasts entirely too close to his face.

  She didn’t say or do a thing.

  Tyr sat back in his chair again, his eyes a dark fire on hers.

  “I want this hair all over me,” he told her, and his voice was rougher than before. It felt like the caress of his own hard hands, all over her sensitized skin. “I want it to kiss every one of my tattoos. Don’t move your hands from the chair. Don’t worry about anything else. Just do what I told you to do, Helena.” His voice dropped into a growl, as hot and needy as she was, and god, it was like he’d flipped on a different kind of generator and it roared right through her. “Just dance.”

  So that was what she did.

  Helena stayed up on her toes. She gripped the chair arms hard and she tipped herself forward, and she understood immediately why he’d made her do this. She had to swing her hips to move her hair where she wanted it to go. Where he wanted it to go. Swing and then swivel, hitch and then roll, so the silken mass of her hair cascaded all over him. Kissed him. She started hesitantly, shaking her head to make the strands slide, and then she began to feel it.

  Just as she had with his cock earlier, she got lost in it. The movement was mesmerizing, as if she were conjuring a spell with her own body. The warm air of the great hall all around her seemed to tease her and taste her as she heated herself up. The wild yearning between her legs grew hotter and more intense as she shifted back and forth, never quite giving herself the satisfaction she craved.

  And she got lost in Tyr, too. A
gain. She learned each and every one of the tattoos on his chest, including the great round one with its own mysterious marks like runes that matched the great shield hanging over the fire in this very hall. She tried to smooth away his scars. She dipped and she moved, bending down low so she could trail the ends of her hair over him and, now and again, bend down to taste him with her lips, too. A faint drag of her tongue here. The suggestion of her lips there. She moved over the scroll of names that marked his right side. The climbing vines on his arm. All the shapes and flourishes, deep black ink and bright colors, that made him war chief. That made him Tyr.

  She let herself worship him the way, deep down, she knew she wanted to do.

  Helena understood that was all she’d done since she’d met this man. It was his power, his grace. It was the way he seemed to know exactly how to speak to her to make her bright hot and scalding wet. It was the way he looked at her as if he could read her far better than she wanted to accept or acknowledge. It was that gentle way he’d washed her hair, and then how he’d cradled her cheek in his heavy hand out in the lobby.

  It was simply him. Tyr.

  She’d thought she’d known what sex was, and he’d proved her wrong. She’d thought that even after that, she knew the extent of the things he could do to her because he’d done some of them once, and she’d been wrong about that, too.

  Because he wasn’t even touching her, and she felt undone. Destroyed. Sucking his cock had wrecked her. This was smashing her into pieces. She didn’t understand it. How she could feel so small and controlled and completely under his command, yet so gloriously big and powerful every time he growled his approval.

  Helena didn’t know what was happening to her. But she couldn’t seem to stop.

  “I told you it was easy,” he said into her ear, his voice thick and tense, and she knew, somehow. That this dance of hers had gotten to him, too, no matter how he tried to pretend he was immune. It made her feel shaken and triumphant at once. He nipped at her neck, and she was still shuddering from that when he spoke again. “Turn around.”