Edge of Temptation

  “Take off your clothes.”

  The order spun in the air between them, spiked and hot. Maud wasted no time in obeying him—hell, she wanted nothing more. She kicked off her shoes, then stripped off her shirt and trousers. She would have torn them if she could. Whatever got them off faster. Whatever made him happy.

  But Gunnar shook his head, almost sadly, only that glittering thing in his dark blue gaze to show her he wasn’t upset, but playing with her in his own hard-edged, dangerous way. Like a very large, very lethal wolf.

  “Fold those clothes,” he told her. “Nicely, please, since neither one of us is a wild animal, as far as I know. Take them and your shoes and place them on one of the armchairs. Neatly, Maud.”

  It was a delicious torture to move through the half-chilled room, in and out of the reach of the new fire he’d built. Her breasts ached as she walked, her nipples like twin points of flame, and the wetness between her legs was so slippery and hot she was afraid she might embarrass herself. Or she was almost afraid—but not enough to do a single thing but what he told her to do.

  “Come back and bend over the bed again, little nun,” Gunnar said. So sure, so calm. So perfectly at his ease, as if all of this had already happened. As if it was foretold. His power, her surrender. As inevitable as her next breath.

  She didn’t run to him, but only because she thought he’d draw this out more if she did. If she showed him the intensity of her enthusiasm he’d likely tease her that much more, and she didn’t think she could take it.

  If he asked you to take it, you would, a knowing little voice inside her whispered.

  Maud walked, as gracefully and as slowly as she could, and then she gulped in a breath or two as she bent herself over the end of the bed in the position he’d showed her before. Face to the coverlet, ass in the air.

  She sensed his movement in the instant before he stretched himself over her, his chest pressing into her back and bearing her down into the mattress. Sensation exploded through her, almost too much to bear. His trousers were rough as he kicked her legs open and settled himself between them. Rough and coarse and oh god, she thought she might come. She really thought she might—

  “Don’t you dare, little nun.”

  She gritted her teeth while he did absolutely nothing to help, simply rubbing himself over her like he was a giant, impossibly delicious blanket of heat, dominating her and making her nearly delirious in equal measure—but she managed it. Somehow, she managed it.

  Whatever he asks, that little voice murmured. Whatever he needs.

  She blinked when Gunnar’s hand appeared before her face, holding something carved from smooth stone and shaped oddly, a thick curve with a wide, flat base on one end.

  “This is a plug,” he told her, his mouth at her ear, so that every word was a caress. “Have you worn one before?”

  “No, sir.”

  She could barely form the words. She didn’t know how she kept from stuttering in that bubbling mix of excitement and panic and sheer lust that kept washing over her, threatening to drag her under.

  Gunnar made a low noise, something caught between a laugh and a growl, which made her stomach flip over, then knot. “Then you might not enjoy this as much as I will.”

  He sounded not in the least bit worried about that possibility, which made a very hot, very red and prickly heat sweep over her, staining her with its bright flush and making her break out in a sweat. He laughed again, and she thought she could die from that sound alone. Some part of her craved it—except maybe it wasn’t quite death she craved. Maybe she lacked the words for the things she wanted.

  He knows exactly what you want. She knew that as well as she knew her own name.

  “I’m going to put this plug in your ass, Maud,” Gunnar told her almost casually, still bent over her, so hard against her that she could feel the heft and heat of his cock against her lower back, insistent and huge despite the trousers he still wore. Her mouth watered. “It might hurt a little bit, but you’re going to take it all, without complaint. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When it’s inside you the way I want it, I’m going to spank you.” He reached between them, his hard, callused palm moving over her butt, soft and sweet. “I’m going to redden the hell out of this ass. It’s going to hurt a lot, but between you and me, I think you’ll like it. You’re already so wet I can smell it.”

  She only moaned at that, not sure if she was humiliated or electrified. She couldn’t tell the difference between the two. Gunnar let out another dark, stirring sort of laugh, and then he smoothed his hand over hip, slipping it beneath her on the bed until his long fingers found exactly how molten hot and needy she was. He made a tsk-ing sound, and she moaned again, as he toyed with the lips of her pussy but never pushed in. He did it until she sobbed, holding her securely between his wicked hand and his lower body, making it impossible for her to do anything but take it.

  Then he rocked his hard hand over her, so his palm rode hard against her clit. Once. Then again.

  Maud shuddered and nearly broke. It was like light, like heat.

  “Oh yeah,” he murmured into her ear, sounding darkly male and intensely satisfied, his beard a luscious scratch against the tender skin of her neck. “You’ll like it.”

  She couldn’t tell if she was sobbing or moaning any longer, and she couldn’t seem care about that the way she had in the convent. She couldn’t seem to care about anything but this. Him.

  “When I’m done spanking you, I’m going to take that plug out,” Gunnar told her, his voice inexorable. An unstoppable force. “Then I might fuck you there, hard and long, until I come. How do you like that, little nun? Do you want my cock in that round little ass of yours? Even if it’s about me, not you?”

  “Yes, sir. Yes, please. Please.”

  She cried that out without a single moment of pause or consideration, writhing against the bed, a dark and lush ribbon of sensation snaking through her and taking her over. She didn’t know what she was asking for. She didn’t care. If he wanted it, she wanted it, because that was how much she wanted him.

  “These are the rules.” He pulled back, levering himself off her back, which felt like a far worse punishment than any he’d mentioned so far. He held the plug to her, cool challenge written all over his hard face. “First, kiss this. Thank me for knowing what you need.”

  Maud was hot, then cold. Maybe she’d been coming this whole time. Maybe she’d never stop.

  She raised her chin and she kissed the cool stone. It made her shudder. Then she thought about what he was going to do with it and she shuddered again. Deeper. Longer.

  “Thank you, sir,” she whispered. “You know exactly what I need.”

  His big, battered hands were on her ass then. He squeezed something out of a bottle he’d placed on the bed beside her, and a faint, sweet scent she couldn’t identify filled the room. And made her head spin. Gunnar spread her ass cheeks and then he was rubbing between them, massaging that slick oil on the tight little bud at her center. Maud panted against the coverlet, unable to stand entirely still. His touch was wild and wrong, as twisted as it was wonderful, and somehow every little movement of his fingertips was wired directly into her pussy and everywhere else she had a pulse.

  He was in no rush. His hard, muscled thighs held hers apart as she stretched out before him on his wide bed, her face in the furs that warmed as she panted into them. Gunnar massaged oil into her asshole for what seemed like forever while Maud jerked and then moaned into the mattress beneath her, and only when she started moving her hips back against his touch did he sink a long finger inside of her, spreading the oil into her as he went.

  Into her.

  It was exquisite. It was dark and terrible and deeply, wildly erotic. She felt lush and full. Restless and maddened. It was an insanity.

  He lit her on fire.

  And he didn’t stop. He didn’t even pause. He moved his finger in, deeper and deeper. He added a second.
Then he began to thrust, slow and easy and inexorable, in and out of her ass. Maud made a high, strange noise into the bed. She thrashed and she writhed, and she didn’t know if she was trying to get away from him or if she was trying to get … more.

  “Make all the noise you want,” he told her, and his voice sounded rougher than usual. He widened his fingers, then narrowed them again. He repeated the action again and again, maintaining his smooth thrusting all the while. “Scream, cry. Curse my name if you need to. It won’t make any difference. When I take out these fingers, the plug is going in. Do you understand?”

  That should have sounded cruel. She should have recoiled. But it had the opposite effect. Maud … relaxed.

  She pulled in a deep breath. Another. Maud had believed it when the bishop had told her she could scream the convent down and it wouldn’t stop him hurting her as he pleased. She’d never screamed and he’d always hurt her, and that had been very, very different. She didn’t know what it was in her, some deep, feminine sense she hadn’t known was there, but she knew Gunnar wasn’t talking about the same thing.

  This wasn’t about power, or not in the way she’d experienced it in the convent. This was about the two of them, not the church.

  “Yes, sir.” It came out like a sigh, wrenched from deep inside of her. “I understand.”

  “Good girl,” he murmured, and that flooded her with warmth. Light.

  She started to rock back against his hand. Those awful, wonderful fingers started to make a new heat curl inside of her, like a terrible smoke.

  “I was telling you the rules.” He kept fucking her with his two blunt, thick fingers, pausing only to add more oil, until she felt almost as slippery in her ass as she did in her pussy. “From this point forward, you can come whenever you like. You don’t have to ask. That’s how generous I am.”

  She couldn’t imagine coming. In the same instant, she thought that when she did come—and she knew she would, she knew it was as inevitable as the rest of it—it would wreck her. It terrified her, even as she rocked herself against him harder, so that dark ribbon curled and curled and brought her even closer to the very place she was afraid to go.

  She didn’t know what she wanted—as long as he didn’t stop.

  Please don’t let him stop.

  “You will not put your hands up to block me while I spank you, no matter how much it hurts. You will not twist or writhe or try to escape, no matter how intense it gets. You will take what I give you. Do you understand, Maud?”

  “I understand, sir.” Her voice was strained. Tense and needy. She knew he could hear it as well as she could. “I do.”

  He pulled his fingers out then, and the only thing she knew for a moment was her own harsh breathing and a strange openness that wasn’t quite empty. Not quite, not when her pussy felt so swollen and hot that she thought a deep breath might toss her over the edge.

  Gunnar didn’t say another word. He didn’t need to speak. He did exactly what he’d said he would. She felt the kiss of stone against the little bud of her asshole, the hard thing warmed slightly from his hand, and then there was nothing but deliberate pressure as he pressed it into her.

  She hissed into the wool bedding. It wasn’t fun, not even after the first sharpness passed. It didn’t quite hurt, but it was an uncomfortable fullness and a raw wrongness and she wasn’t sure—

  “Breathe,” Gunnar ordered her gruffly. “Now.”

  She obeyed him, and felt the stone sink another inch inside of her.

  “Now bear down,” he told her.

  It felt dirty. Sinful and wicked and worse, impossible. But she did it, because he’d told her to, and he pushed the stone plug deep into her as if he’d never imagined there could be any other outcome. He kept going until the wide base stopped it going any farther, leaving it flush against the outside of her stretched asshole. He tapped it with a finger and she felt the shockwaves … everywhere. She went up on her toes, and his hand was on the small of her back, holding her still. He tapped again.

  And oh god, there was a dark, hot, quivering inside of her that she thought might eat her alive.

  “Perfect,” he told her, his voice gruff. “Now lie there and breathe.”

  He left her there for a moment, bent over the foot of his bed with her ass in the air. She heard the water run in the bathroom, but that was so far away it might as well have been on a distant planet. She couldn’t get past the alien thing in her. It commanded her pulse. It made her pant in a brilliant, shivery mix of panic and need. It made her eyes tear up.

  And more than that, it made her pussy bright, hot, and soaking wet.

  “Come here,” Gunnar ordered her, and she jerked at the sound of his voice and the thread of a dark amusement threaded through it. “Are you drifting off to sleep, Maud? We can’t have that. Stand up.”

  It took her a long time to obey him. Her body didn’t feel like her own. She pushed herself off the bed, and even that small movement made the plug shift inside her, pulling and scraping and oh my god—

  She wheeled around to find Gunnar sitting on one of the chairs near the fire, watching her with a hard, dark, possessive expression on his face that made everything inside her clench tight. And made the plug in her ass feel as red hot as the rest of her.

  “I told you to come here,” he told her with that soft, lustful menace that she thought she lived for, at this point.

  And she had no choice, after that. She had to walk to him, across the wide bedroom, every step she took jarring the plug and somehow shooting all of that greedy, dirty need straight into her pussy, so she was tight and sweating and beside herself and half crazed by the time she made it to him.

  Maybe more than half crazed.

  “You look desperate,” he murmured, still sounding amused, though his dark blue eyes glittered. “My dirty little nun.”

  And then he pulled her closer and tipped her across his lap. He arranged her how he wanted her, her ass high and exposed, her breasts pressed against one thigh with her pussy almost rubbing against the other, and her head and hands pointed toward the floor.

  Maud couldn’t stop trembling. She couldn’t tell where one shiver ended and the next began. Gunnar’s thighs were hot and hard beneath her, and he let her feel exactly how hard and heavy his cock was as she lay against it.

  “You remember the rules,” he said, as calmly as if he was discussing one of his books. “If I were you, Maud, I’d keep my hands braced on the floor and hope for the best.”

  But that wasn’t what she was hoping for. Her pussy was a blazing pulse. The plug in her ass was lighting her up and making her feel something like feverish. She’d never felt anything like this in all her life, and she thought she might love it.

  If she survived it, that was. Which seemed a little touch and go just then.

  Her whole world was Gunnar. He held her draped over his lap, shifting her to stretch her out even more. She shut her eyes and let her head fall. He rubbed her then. All over the curves of her ass, which tugged against the plug and sent that dark ribbony thing spiraling through her, tighter and tighter. He didn’t pretend that the spanking was anything other than erotic and carnal, unlike the bishop. He dipped deeper to stroke her poor, aching pussy and toy with her swollen clit until she was making high-pitched, keening sounds that didn’t even sound like her, and he made low noises of approval at the wetness he found and the way she squirmed. Then he moved back to her ass again, smoothing his palm over her curves, making it clear he was taking possession of all of her.

  And when she thought about how she must look, her pussy so swollen and wet and needy and that thing sticking out of her ass and keeping her cheeks from closing entirely, she felt … raw. Undone. Something far more dangerous and damning than merely feverish.

  “Perfect,” he murmured. “That’s the problem, Maud. You’re fucking perfect.”

  And then he smacked her. Hard.

  Pain bloomed, crisp and hot.

  Glorious.

  It was li
ke a lightning strike, and the burn of it connected everything, every single sensation he’d pulled out of her body with such certainty. The plug in her ass and the hunger in her pussy and all that pulsing, quivering, dark and terrible yearning that made her as much a stranger to herself as it made her his.

  Incontrovertibly his. Red-edged and bright, like the pain that seared through her from that hard blow to her ass cheek. It would leave a mark.

  This would all leave a mark, she thought, as the sharp pain tipped over into something else, wild and dark and beautiful. God, how she hoped it would all leave marks.

  Gunnar smacked her again and Maud came, hard.

  Right there against his leg, across his lap with her ass plugged with the stone he’d put there, so hard and so long she saw stars—

  And she hardly even noticed that she cried out his name, loud and heedless while she fell apart.

  11.

  Maud came when he spanked her.

  And she didn’t stop.

  It was the only thing that could possibly have made that tense, clenching thing inside of him ease, even a little, while visions of her on her knees with Riordan’s cock in her mouth and her eyes on Gunnar chased through his head and made something in him roar.

  Need. Possession. Hunger.

  Gunnar had suspected his little nun, who melted when she obeyed him and had called him sir with no prompting, might get off on a little pain. It had been the way she’d talked about punishment and penance. The way she’d relaxed when she’d worn that collar in Lincoln. And the fact he had no doubt she wanted to please him, whatever it took. But there was always the possibility she’d meant something … cute.

  He was a lot of things, including way too close to losing his shit, but Gunnar was definitely not cute.

  And it turned out, neither was Maud, stretched across his thighs with a plug in her ass, trying to rub her pussy against his leg. It was the best thing he’d seen since she’d knelt before him near a river in the western highlands and played with her own sweet clit. Better, because he had his hands on her this time. He could feel the heat of her skin when he slapped it. He could feel the ripple in her ass cheeks, and see how the butt plug made her jolt and tense and then shudder some more.