Edge of Ruin: The Edge Novella Boxed Set

  And while he taught her how to please him, her own greediness felt like a fire between her legs, igniting every time she sank down to take more of him. Sometimes she looked up, feeling that considering blue gaze of his on hers, and she understood, then.

  He was testing her.

  And Matylda didn’t care what he threw at her. She was going to pass his test.

  Especially if it involved something like this, sucking him and licking him, worshiping him until she could feel her own dampness between her thighs and her breasts felt swollen where they pressed out above her corset.

  Matylda thought she could do this forever.

  Zavier sank his hands in her hair, pulling it out of the knot she’d tied it in sometime this morning on the bus. And then he thrilled her by holding her head still that way, moving himself in and out of her mouth, making her feel indescribably beautiful with every thrust. Mighty, somehow. Outside herself, even as she was centered completely on his cock surging between her lips and the corresponding red-hot blaze between her legs.

  And when he was finished, he let out a shout as he flooded her mouth and watched her swallow him down. Matylda felt as if he’d given her a gift. Something precious.

  Zavier looked down at her as he tucked himself away. Matylda knelt where he’d told her to kneel, only distantly aware that her knees were complaining about the hard ground, the cold, a stone or two. But she couldn’t bring herself to care. Then he reached over and wiped away the moisture that had accumulated beneath her eyes, making her heart kick and her breath catch all over again.

  “The food you made should be ready,” he said gruffly.

  And there was no reason at all that Matylda should feel that like a glowing endorsement, but she did. She moved back to the fire, stirring her soup that had long since tipped over into a thick stew, and then ladling it out into the two tin cups she’d found in her box of supplies that could serve as bowls.

  And then had to talk herself into eating it. Because she was hungry—but she also didn’t want to lose that remarkable taste of him in her mouth.

  Hunger won out.

  They sat there in a companionable enough silence, eating into the dark. Zavier didn’t shower her in compliments for the meal, but he emptied his cupful and took the rest of what she’d left in the pot, which Matylda figured was the same thing.

  When they were done, they sat for a bit. She stared into the fire as he sharpened one of his blades, and she thought, this is marriage. This is what it feels like. As if that would settle her on the strangeness of it all. Eventually, she gathered up the cooking things and fashioned a kind of torch from the fire to light her way, and then went down to the lake to do the washing up.

  The water was bitterly cold, but it got the job done, and she used an extra length of cloth to wash herself, as well. The frigid water made her feel clean and more than that, a bit less fuzzy than she had before.

  Back at their little camp, Zavier was banking the fire. He took the box of cooking things from her and nodded toward the tent, then went to lock the box in his truck.

  Matylda didn’t know why the tent loomed there like a step too far, after everything that had happened today already. But she hadn’t balked yet, and no matter that she thought he expected her to at any moment. She hadn’t. She wouldn’t.

  There were worse things in the world than one gruff, overbearing, not particularly friendly mountain man. Who she happened to have married. Like Nicoline’s potential execution if Matylda didn’t make it past June as the one wife Zavier couldn’t bring himself to trade in.

  She shook her strange reluctance off and forced herself to head for the tent as he’d told her she should, unfastening the opening and crawling inside before she could change her mind or talk herself out of it. He’d hung a lantern from the tent’s roof, illuminating the inside—which felt close and cozy already, and that was just with her inside. Matylda thought of Zavier’s big body crammed into this flimsy little space, right there on top of her, and had to swallow, hard.

  There was a rustling behind her, and then it was happening. Zavier pushed the opening wide and then crawled inside himself. He threw himself down on the bedding that he’d laid out on the floor of the tent, a sturdy pallet strewn with thick furs that took up almost all of the floor space, then propped himself up on his side. And watched her as if he could read every panic-edged thought that flitted across her mind.

  “We’re going to sleep naked,” he told her, matter-of-factly, proving that if he really could read her, he didn’t really care if she was panicked. “I don’t want to hear about some fucking nightgown. I don’t give a shit about modesty. When you’re in my bed, wherever the hell my bed might be, you’re naked. Understand?”

  Matylda moistened her lips, delicately. “That sounds very chilly, especially in the dark of winter.”

  Zavier’s blue eyes gleamed. “I’ll keep you warm. I promise.”

  She was certain he knew that that sounded a great deal more like a threat than a promise. She also knew that this was part of the test. Maybe it was all a test. Maybe all he knew how to do was test the wives who came here and tried to hold on to some part of themselves against him.

  Matylda didn’t have that luxury. She could sit here and think herself into hysterics—though that wouldn’t help her sister—or she could listen to that greedy ache between her legs. The twin, sharp pinches of sensation that she knew on some vague level were her nipples reacting to his talk of nakedness. The heaviness in her breasts and the silken, knotted thing low in her belly.

  She decided to listen.

  Her hair was tumbling all around her, and she liked that. It let her imagine that she had some sort of curtain between her and this man—her husband, for her sins—who lounged there beside her, taking up all the air inside the little tent and all the space while he was at it, without doing anything else but lying there. He wasn’t threatening her. He wasn’t even ordering her around.

  She couldn’t decide if that made it better or worse.

  Matylda unbuttoned her outer, short coat that kept her arms and her neck warm but was cropped at the tightest part of her corset. She opened one hook and eye closure after the next. She eased off the first boot and began to work on the second when she heard a faint noise, and looked up again.

  Zavier’s eyes looked even more blue than usual, like some kind of flame, so intent that it made her stomach flip over. And then a thick sort of sensation roll straight through her, like honey.

  She worked on her boot, and she set both of them aside in the corner of the tent, as neatly as possible. She rolled off the long wool socks she wore, one and then the next, and only then did she turn to the matter of her corset. It was a worn leather, less restricting it had been when she’d bought it years ago, but it did its job. It had leather cinches that kept her contained, and she loosened those while Zavier watched. Only when they were loose enough to allow movement did she twist around to work on the laced opening.

  When she finally pulled the corset off and breathed deep for the first time today, she understood why the tent was so different from what had gone before. In a great rush of air and comprehension. She’d felt naked and exposed in the truck. And again on her knees.

  But there was nothing metaphoric about stripping down to her skin in front of Zavier in this tiny little tent where there were no distractions and nothing to look at but him. It was fact.

  There was no seneschal and his staff she could call out to if things got weird or too much. There was no recourse out here. There was only Zavier.

  This was her marriage.

  She set the corset aside, aware that there was a lump in her throat, and that while she should have been able to breathe easier now that she’d lost all that restriction, it was very much the opposite.

  Zavier was tighter around her than a corset and he wasn’t even touching her.

  “You seem scared all of a sudden.” His voice was a low lick, as dangerous as the fire or the dark outside. “Wife.”
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  “Not at all,” Matylda lied. Although in truth, scared was not the right word. She was a little too shivery and damp for that. She ached in too many places—for him, not because of him—to believe it was anything as simple as fear. “Corsets are very restraining, that’s all. Sometimes you breathe a bit heavily afterward, just to remind yourself that you can.”

  “I don’t like them,” he said. Sounding almost lazy, if such a word could possibly be applied to a man as alert and watchful as this one.

  “Corsets?” She was so surprised that she forgot to keep herself from looking directly at him, which she’d been doing to make it seem as if he wasn’t so close. Or so . . . him. And that was a mistake. Because then she really couldn’t breathe. The lantern light did wondrous things to his face and that rock solid body, so long and rangy, filling up the whole of the tent, and she didn’t know if she ached or had become the ache herself. “You don’t like corsets?”

  Corsets weren’t something anyone liked or disliked. Matylda had never heard anyone register an opinion either way. They were simply what was worn.

  “No,” Zavier replied as if that was a silly question. “Corsets are for delicate little ladies who wouldn’t know hard work if it bit them. It’s different up here. You need to be able to work hard and run if you have to, and that corset won’t let you do it. You’d pass out and then I’d have to stop what I was doing to save you.”

  “A fate worse than death,” Matylda said before she thought better of it.

  His mouth flirted with a curve, but that flat line won. “Don’t wear it again.”

  Matylda looked at her corset, rolled up in the corner next to her boots, and then back at him.

  “You realize that’s shocking.” She met his gaze again because why not? Everything was already insane and so far outside her realm of understanding she couldn’t possibly make sense of it. Why not make it worse? “Scandalous, in fact.”

  “Sweetheart,” he drawled, as if this was all amusing to him, “if that’s what shocks you, you’re going to have a hard few months.” He nodded at the rest of her clothes. “And you’re not done yet.”

  But he was, Matylda thought. Done with this conversation anyway, which made a different kind of heat slap at her. This one not centered between her legs. This one was a little more temper and a whole lot less need. She thought of Nicoline. Of all the things that were at stake here. Her ruffled sense of propriety—triggered, ridiculously enough, by a corset she’d never enjoyed all that much in the first place, now that she thought about it as a choice instead of a necessity—wasn’t something she could soothe. Not here. Not with a man like Zavier who clearly enjoyed being as improper as possible.

  What did you expect? she asked herself. Men who want to be proper don’t try to carve a living out of these mountains.

  Proper was life in the cities. Not up here, with nothing between her and the wolves but a thin tent wall. And him.

  Matylda slid her fingers to the shirt she wore, pulling it from the waistband of her skirt and then unbuttoning the top few buttons. That allowed her to pull it up over her head, and so she did, the way she always did at home. When she worked last of her hair through the opening, and then looked up again, the air in the tent had changed. Matylda didn’t look down at herself the way Zavier was doing. She knew that her breasts were on display now, round and full, with no corset to hold them up or shirt to conceal them. She shifted forward onto her knees and tugged at her waistband, pulling her heavy winter skirt down and over her legs.

  And then she was naked. Just as he’d demanded.

  She thought he would touch her there and then. Grab her, perhaps throw her down on the furs and claim her fully, now that there were no clothes between them—and she couldn’t deny the way her blood quickened at the thought. But Zavier only watched her for what seemed like a lifetime or two, except far more breathless.

  Matylda knelt there, naked and aching with things she hardly understood, as he toed off his own boots. He’d lost his heavy coat somewhere, so there was only that harness of blades to remove and hang from a corner of the tent that she imagined had been put there for precisely that purpose. He peeled off his shirt, then his trousers, and then he was as naked as she was.

  Except not, because he was built hard and tough, with all those astonishing muscles. More than that, he was covered in tattoos.

  They were glorious. They were a kind of rough magic, etched into his skin, dark black words she couldn’t read, in a language that made no sense to her. There were winding shapes down his arms and lifted brands. And over his heart, on that hard, flat plane, a huge circle etched with more of the same fascinating letters.

  “What is that?” she asked softly. “What do they mean?”

  Zavier slid his hand over that compelling circle, and the expression on his face shifted. Matylda had no idea why it made her feel . . . sad. For him.

  “It means that once upon a time, in a land far, far away, I was a very different man.” Zavier jerked his chin towards the furs. “Lie down, sweetheart. This is no time to talk. It’s time to fuck.”

  “Oh,” Matylda said breathlessly. “I thought we already did.”

  “That was just playing around. When we’re naked, it gets serious.”

  “More serious than the truck?”

  “Were you dressed?” He shook his head. “That’s not serious, Matylda. I didn’t even touch your tits, much less get them between my teeth.”

  “Oh,” she said again, with very little sound.

  Zavier was tired of waiting. Matylda knew that because he simply reached over and hauled her towards him then, laying her down on the furs himself.

  He was right, she wasn’t cold at all, trapped between the furs and the magnificent heat of his harsh gaze on her.

  And that was before he crawled over her, pressed her deeper into the pallet with that beautiful body of his that burned hot like the fire inside of her, and took his sweet time blowing her mind.

  5.

  Matylda wasn’t like the other wives.

  Zavier was forced to admit that surprising truth—and the related, unpleasant fact that it unnerved him—pretty quickly into the trip home. Which could have taken a quick three days, had he wanted to get there as fast as possible. But instead, calling on the wily behavior of the raider king he’d refused to serve across the sea after his shithead of a father had been rightly cut down, he’d spent years leading hapless women around for a week to ten days in the extreme alpine wilderness, just to see what they were made of.

  Not much, he usually found. A lot of tears and too much whining, more often than not.

  Zavier’s problem was that he’d been raider bred. A son of Donovan, a true raider king, no less, and raised to take his place in his clan’s warrior brotherhood. And he might have left the eastern islands—and his clan and family and the brotherhood—a few years after Wulf had risen up and cut the old man down, but he kept looking around these soft mountains for a version of a raider woman. Someone he could trust to do what needed to be done without all the coddling the soft women here seemed to need. Coddling Zavier couldn’t—wouldn’t—provide. He kept waiting for a tough one, with her own backbone and no fear. The kind of woman who could handle the hard, lonely life out on the frontier.

  Not to mention an ex-raider son of a bitch like him.

  He’d given up. Raider women were exclusively raider-bred, he’d concluded, and he had to make do with whoever the douchebag lords sent him in their annual attempt to appease him. To solicit his cows and encourage him to keep his dangerous ass away from their cushy estates downhill. He didn’t expect any better from some pansy lord who hid from the weather and the reality of the world in the ancient castles that dotted this part of the battered, drowned earth. A woman with raider tendencies would kick a lord’s ass.

  A real raider woman would take over the whole of the Apennines.

  Most of his wives freaked out the first night, right about the time he told them to prepare him some food
. That was usually after a long, tense ride in terrible silence, during which he knew they made themselves sick worrying about his sexual demands. Because none of them had ever done what Matylda had, and taken that edge off right there in town. The more stoic wives dramatically endured the first night, acted as if they were handing over a very sad tithe until he made them come all over him the way no tithe ever had before, clearly. Either way, there was always weeping for days. He was always left to cajole them and comfort them, except his versions of both were not exactly what the average lowland female was looking for. Apparently. After about a week, the women were either so submissive they melted into useless puddles at his feet and shook when he spoke, or they tried to minimize his bossiness and general overwhelming approach by nagging and picking and muttering beneath their breath.

  Zavier was not a big fan of either.

  He’d learned over time that the first week to ten days of camping was a little glimpse of what the winter would be like. There would be slight variations, but what he saw in those first days was always, always what had him delivering his latest bride for a trade-in come the March equinox.

  But Matylda did none of those things.

  At first he thought he was just a little edgy after a grim winter on his own out there, thanks to the last trembling flower who’d refused to get off the bus last fall, and therefore too susceptible to the fact he had access to some new pussy.

  Matylda fucked him, whenever and wherever he wanted it. She seemed to want it as much as he did, even before he worked his magic on her. That alone was enough to distinguish her from her predecessors. She was lusty and open. She didn’t hide or pretend to be asleep or act as if she didn’t want him because he wanted more than the “normal” amount of tithes per week and it made her feel dirty to enjoy it. None of that typical lowland female shit.

  He’d woken that first morning in their tent with her soft, naked body draped over him, and he hadn’t actually meant to introduce her to the joys of morning sex. Not just yet. A man liked a head-clearing fuck before he rolled out of bed to face a day of hard labor, sure, but that hadn’t always been possible with the fragile little creatures who cried when he looked at them and required a much softer and careful touch to get where he wanted to go.