“What do I get if I do?” she asked, not nearly as light or easy as she’d have liked. Nothing like playful.
“A stew.” His hard mouth didn’t quite curve. “And my thanks.”
“I’d hardly know what to do with such bounty.” She wrinkled up her nose. “In fact, I think I’d pass out if the words thank you ever crossed your lips. I’m pretty sure they’re not a part of the raider lexicon.”
Gunnar never laughed, but there were moments like this one where she thought she saw the hint of it. A certain gleam in his gaze. A different shape to that mouth. Something more than sheer command and that dark grief on his fierce features.
But Maud knew better than to point it out.
Gunnar only grunted when she presented him with a hot cooked meal the following night. He’d finally appeared from a day out in the cavern long after the late sun went down and prowled into the cabin’s large, rustic kitchen, frowning at the big cast-iron pot on the stove as if he’d never seen anything bubbling there before in his life.
But in order to know whether or not that was true, Maud would have to ask him about his lost mate. And Maud didn’t believe in ghosts. Especially not when it was clear Gunnar believed enough in them for the both of them.
“It didn’t make me come,” she informed him serenely as she ladled out a generous portion into one of the earthenware pots she’d found and handed it to him. “But I think you’ll like it anyway.”
Gunnar threw her a dark look, that was all, and then he sat at his long table and ate what she’d made. Then had a second helping. And then cleaned out the rest of the big pot on the stove.
He’d prowled across the room, headed for the stairs and the bottom floor workshop he disappeared into whenever he wasn’t in the cavern. He had to pass behind her armchair, where she was curled up with a fat book about a boy wizard in some made-up place that made her imagine hope was real and worth indulging.
She felt him when he stopped behind her, then bent down close to get his mouth near her ear. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t jump. Her pulse took care of that, hammering through her body, turning her still and tight and even needier than usual.
“Thank you, little nun,” he murmured, so low and so gruff it was like a rough cloth dragged over her tender skin. She had to fight back a shiver. And a little moan to go with it. She bit her own tongue. “Don’t pass out. I might not resuscitate you. Or then again, I might. And you wouldn’t like that any better.”
Then he straightened, and it was cold where his breath had touched her, and she heard him head down the stairs a great deal more quietly than such a big man should. What he might do if resuscitation was called for danced around inside of her, making her breath shallow.
And it was possible Maud had never felt so proud of anything before in all her life as she did of that stew.
The days rolled on. Maud discovered how long it took to dry sheets on the line, and how meditative it could be to lose herself in mindless work. And how liberating it could feel to do none of that mindless work when she wasn’t in the mood for it any longer, for that matter, and watch Gunnar do it instead. She took long walks in the fields and spent more than one afternoon soaking herself in the marvelous hot pools that dotted the craggy landscape. She walked along the beach and found her way into the cavern when it was low tide, where she could wander the docks and run her hands over all the ships and motors and parts Gunnar left there, all of them as mysterious to her as some of the books he kept or the runes he wore stamped into his skin.
She slipped into his workshop on the lowest floor of his cabin that really was filled with as many mysterious-looking herbs as it was machine parts and bristling collections of very sharp things. He seemed to know what to do with all of them and when he was concentrating on something with all of that fierce, brooding attention of his, he didn’t always notice if she wandered in and watched him while he did it. He muttered to himself, which was how Maud learned which herbs did what without having to peer over his shoulder at the handwritten book he kept referring to—which she was fairly certain he’d notice her doing if she tried.
“What book is that?” she asked one afternoon, after he’d looked up and blinked to clear his head, then scowled when he’d found her on a high, runged stool in the corner.
“Stop coming down here.”
“I want to know what book that is.” She propped her feet up on the highest level of rungs and rested her elbows on her thighs. “Why don’t you want to tell me?”
He straightened and stretched, all his heavy muscles rippling beneath another snug thermal, this one unmarred by that weapons harness he sometimes wore. This one nothing but a love letter to the sculpted glory of his warrior’s body, no longer quite as lean as it had been when she’d met him. He was more solid now. Sleeker and even stronger than before.
“It’s a spell book.” Gunnar lowered his arms and met her gaze steadily. “And I lock it up when I’m not using it, so don’t think you can sneak down here and try to destroy it.”
There was only one reason he’d think she’d want to do that.
“Gunnar.” Maud smiled at him. More sadly than usual. “I’d have to believe in it to want to destroy it. And you already know I don’t.”
She thought there was something bleak in that steady blue gaze of his.
“You don’t have to. I do.”
Maud didn’t believe in spells, and she didn’t think Gunnar did, either. Not really. Not the way he clearly wanted to believe in ghosts. She wasn’t so sure about hope, either, despite all the stories he kept here that suggested otherwise. And she was discovering all kinds of things about herself as the long days passed. From which dried fruits she liked to the kinds of bath salts she preferred to how best to wash her hair as it grew in, silky and blond around her ears. It was all a very nice, if futile, exercise for someone with a current lifespan of the average fly.
And the truth was, she spent most of her time daydreaming about the shorter and shorter nights.
Every night Gunnar would order her to go to bed the moment he saw her eyes drooping shut, which they usually did as she sat near the great fire on the top floor. He’d stay up later, doing his mending with his astonishingly clever hands that should have been too big for such close work or reading one of his books or studying his damned spells in the bright light of his electric lamps. Sometimes he merely stared into the fire, or stood out on the deck and gazed out over the murmuring sea. But he always sent Maud off to sleep alone.
And she always woke up to find him next to her in that massive, fur-piled bed. Not only next to her, which would have been breathtaking all on its own. She usually woke to find herself wrapped around him, her head nestled on his broad chest and her legs entwined with his. Or with him on his side, holding her tight in the curve of his great big body, sheltering her and keeping her warm with one of his heavy arms keeping her where he wanted her.
She knew him differently in the dark. She knew how he smelled when he slept and the crisp feel of the dark hair on his chest beneath her cheek. She’d never shared a bed in her life, and at first it kept waking her, this giant furnace of a man who sprawled so confidently and claimed every inch of that massive bed as if he’d collared it, too. But soon enough, she craved him there, so much that on the odd nights when he didn’t come down to crawl in with her she couldn’t sleep at all.
He never wore a shred of clothing in that bed, so she knew, too, the thickness of his cock as it pushed against her bottom on those mornings he held her that way. If she moved at all, he’d roll away, and so some mornings she would lie there for what felt like hours in the gray dawn, indulging herself. His cock pressed hard against her ass and his strong, hard arm wrapped around her belly. The thin shirt she wore to sleep in always seemed to ride up, and the little stretchy shorts clung a little too tightly, and it was a revelation. A big man and a soft bed. His scarred and callused hand spread out over the soft swell of her belly. His breath in the crook of her neck and his chest a hard
wall at her back.
And that gloriously hard cock of his—making a mockery of his distance and his gruffness and his bad temper by day—strained against her. She had to shut her eyes and chant old hymns inside her head to keep from shivering, or arching back into him, or any of the other things the feel of him made her desperate to do. She remained motionless as long as she could, fighting every urge and need that swirled inside of her. Over and over, until he finally pulled himself away from her body and threw back the covers to greet each new morning.
They never spoke of it.
The June solstice passed unremarked as well. Maud didn’t die on the spot, as she’d half expected she might. Far away on the other side of the world, girls she’d known for years must have gone through the initiation ceremony, she knew. Her roommate Edyth, for example. They would have all filed into the cathedral dressed as novices with bared heads for the last time. Then they’d have lined up to offer their prayers to the high priests before delivering their virginity to their confessor and his chosen second up there on the altar in front of the whole congregation, wreathed in incense while the choir sang the ghostly hymns of old battles. Like the branding ceremony, it was meant to hurt. The novices were meant to show their devotion with their pain and their tears as they gave themselves to the church in the most basic and primal of ways.
Some would have made enough noise and cried enough tears to be deemed worthy of a nun’s metallic headdress and all the many duties that went with that tremendous honor. Others would have been sent out into the desert because their devotion was considered lacking or their innocence was judged compromised, usually because they didn’t show enough remorse during their deflowering.
The pain of consummation is sin leaving the body, the priests had intoned, again and again, though they’d never explained what sin could possibly remain after all those years of training. Only a novice who purges herself of sin can take her place in the church.
And all of this happened across the ruined planet while Maud wrapped herself around the big, tough body of her raider in the dark and waited for god to punish her for leaving the convent the way Bishop Seph had always promised He would.
You will scream at last, the bishop assured her a thousand times, that wet gleam in his eyes while he’d gripped the back of her head and pounded himself into her throat. You will scream when I take your hymen or you will die, Maud. There is no escaping the church. There is no escaping me. There is only this, or there is death.
But one day became the next, and she lived.
She lived.
Longer than she’d thought she would, and not in the church or the desert.
Maud told herself that was a gift in itself. That she should be grateful for each and every day she proved the bishop wrong, no matter how long she had left before Gunnar’s mad little ritual.
Some early mornings, when the diffident darkness was already surrendering to another summer dawn and Gunnar was holding her so tightly she finally felt free again, she almost convinced herself she was. She almost believed that what she felt was grateful.
Almost.
* * *
She thought the faint sound from behind her was the pit wolves.
It had been raining for days. Winds slammed into the cabin walls and rattled the windows, and squalls hurtled themselves across the heaving waves in the cove below to beat at the glass doors. Gunnar kept the fires going and the pit wolves had slunk inside to shake themselves off, then stretch out on the hearth in a pile of contented, damp black fur.
No one Maud had ever known had actually kept a pet. Once upon a time, or so the stories went, domestic animals lived with humans and kept them company, some of them not even made to work for their keep. She’d always found it hard to believe. Who had so many resources that they could afford to share them with animals that could—and likely would—turn on their owners in an instant?
But somehow it didn’t surprise her that Gunnar had three fierce pit wolves who followed him around and looked at him with nothing short of adoration. They eyed her with more suspicion, or they had. It was amazing what bribes of dried meat could do to win over savage beasts, human and canine alike. One of them, the one Gunnar called Skoll, even sat near her in the stormy evenings and leaned his great furry head against her legs.
It had taken her days to realize that odd sensation she felt whenever that happened was comfort.
“I’m not feeding you anything else, you terrible beggars,” she said now, stirring her latest attempt at a stew. Gunnar hadn’t repeated that thank you, but that only made Maud all the more determined he should. The fact he kept leaving her gifts of game he’d hunted that she could turn into more stews and other meals to tempt him into it, convinced her that sooner or later he would.
And that would never happen if the pit wolves made eyes at her and convinced her to feed it all to them instead. She was smiling as she turned around to face them—
But the pit wolves were nowhere to be found.
Maud’s smile toppled from her lips.
A strange, silent warrior stood in the doorway. His dark and deadly gaze was trained on her, and she didn’t have to count his blades or his obvious muscles to know that he was instant death standing there before her, the rain from outside still pouring over the cloak he wore and the hood still covering his head. He swiped it off as she watched, mute and astonished, and let the whole sodden mess of it fall to the floor at his feet.
He never shifted his hard, dark gaze from Maud.
Her first thought was that he was an avenging angel after all, sent from the church to strike her down the way she’d long been promised one would if she abandoned all her training and vows. Maybe she’d celebrated her life, such as it was and no matter its expiration date, a little too soon.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked. He had a rolling sort of laughter in his voice, though he wasn’t doing anything even close to smiling.
“Maud.”
Why did she answer him? What was wrong with her? If he didn’t know who she was, if he hadn’t been sent specifically to handle her defection from the church, why announce her identity?
“Maud,” the man repeated, in that same way of his, and she was sure he was laughing at her then.
He crossed his arms over his hard-packed bare chest, making his gleaming brown muscles bunch and ripple. He was built more densely than Gunnar, though he wore it with the same offhand ease that spoke to a bone-deep level of ruthless danger that seemed to emanate from him in waves. He wore blades slung from a harness and he looked as solid as the cliffs outside, packed into trousers and boots.
Cliffs that could move so quietly she hadn’t heard him until he’d closed the door behind him, that was. Cliffs that could hurt her a lot worse than the desert would have, she was suddenly very certain.
“Are you here to strike me down for my blasphemous acts?” she asked, trying to keep her tone polite, as if that might make the difference between life and death.
The warrior moved, if only slightly. A slight change in the angle of his torso, to block more of the exit. She had no doubt it was tactical.
He reminded her of an assault rifle, like the ones the men in that bandit town had carted around. Blunt and deadly. Gunnar reminded her of a blade, sharp and lethal—but then, Gunnar was a danger she knew. A danger she craved. This man was simply lethal.
“How blasphemous are you talking?” he asked, and the flash of his grin took her by surprise, so at odds was it with his air of ruthlessness. “Let me guess. It looks a little traitorous if you squint?”
She was so mesmerized by the man’s obvious, exorbitant strength, all those thick, hard muscles and the tattoos and brands, that it took her a long, tense moment to realize he had the same circular sigil stamped on his chest that Gunnar did. That made her relax at once. He was a raider. His tightly curled black beard was cut closer to his jaw and the thick braids that hung around his face called attention to the fine lines of his cheekbones. His dark eyes stamped
him an indisputable warrior, ruthless and mighty all the way to his bones. Beautiful and terrible at once, like Gunnar.
Or perhaps relax was a strong word, in the presence of a raider warrior who was eyeing her as if he was still deciding whether or not he’d cut her down where he stood—or put his hands on her in a way the church would not have sanctioned.
But at least divine vengeance was off the table. She hoped.
“I didn’t know Gunnar holed himself up in here with a little treat to while away the winter,” the man said when she didn’t answer him. His voice was distracting. Low and rich and almost sweet, it tempted her to imagine he wasn’t as dangerous as she could see perfectly well that he was. “He’s got you tending his stove and wearing his woman’s clothes. Does he call you by her name, too? Or only when he’s doing you from behind, so he can pretend she never died?”
“Um,” she said. Her throat almost hurt, as if she was holding in a scream, when she wasn’t. Or she didn’t think she was. Not deliberately. “No?”
And then what he’d said filtered through, and Maud frowned down at the clothes she wore and had come to think of as her own.
Most of the things Gunnar had tucked away in his closets were too brightly colored for her after all her years of suffering through lectures on the cancerous nature of feminine vanity. Or much too small to cover herself in any meaningful way. She’d gravitated to the same few pairs of relatively plain trousers in a material she’d only ever seen on Gunnar before, that repelled water and were surprisingly comfortable for a woman used to wearing flowing, monochromatic dresses that were far less confining. The embroidery that graced some of them, great flowers and mystical creatures alike, was a little whimsical for her tastes, it was true. But it wasn’t as if she had other options. And the shirts were the same. She’d found herself returning again and again to the ones that looked like feminine versions of the quiet and competent shirts Gunnar wore. She’d assumed that was one more example of figuring out what her actual preferences were.