That night she’d understood that she felt safer as Gunnar’s captive than she ever had in her life. Today, she understood why.
He didn’t say a word until they made it all the way down into the basement and through the maze of magical things to what Maud thought of as their main living space. The boxcar and the ship’s prow, stuffed full of furs and pillows, flanking that intriguing padded area with the X and all those trunks and freestanding wardrobes that formed a kind of dressing room.
He let go of her in that hall space and they stood there like adversaries. The same way he and Wulf had circled each other warily up in the tower. Too many words caught in Maud’s throat, or maybe it was the way he was looking at her. Tortured and torn apart. Wrecked.
Gunnar seemed to shake himself, as if he’d gone off somewhere in his head. Her curse was that she wanted to know where.
“Put on some shoes,” he told her darkly. “We’re getting out of here.”
“Is it time?” she asked. She blew out a breath as she looked around. “For a basement, this is really remarkably airy. I don’t know how you managed it. You’d think—”
“I don’t understand you.” It sounded torn from him, more a howl than a statement. He was scowling at her when she returned her attention to him, but for once he didn’t seem gruff or angry. He seemed … broken. “Do you have a death wish? Is that it? Do you want me to sacrifice you, Maud? Has this been a suicide trip for you all along?”
She didn’t have to pretend to be calm then, or serene. It flowed through her. It was easy. Because she looked at him and everything made sense.
“I love you,” she said, and even that was easy, exactly as it was supposed to be.
Gunnar let out a cut-glass sort of laugh. She was surprised it didn’t draw blood.
“I’ll take that as a yes. You’re suicidal. And potentially insane.”
Maud took a breath, and then she sank to her knees. The way she had in the desert on the night they’d met.
The effect on him was electric. Gunnar jerked as if she’d scalded him. His gaze blackened.
“Don’t do that.” He reached out as if to lift her up, but stopped short of touching her. His battered hand formed a fist. “I made vows on her deathbed. I promised her I would bring her back.”
“I didn’t know her,” Maud said quietly. But the truth was, neither had he, or none of this would have happened. “But if even half of what they said today was true, you made those promises to a person who didn’t exist.”
His mouth went grim at that. “Even less reason for you to kneel, then.”
“Gunnar.” She made his name the prayer it was in her heart. “You’re blood brother to the king of this clan. And you don’t hate him. You love him as much as he loves you or you would have tried harder to hurt him today.”
He let out a hard laugh. “Maybe you missed the number of times I punched him in the face. They weren’t love taps.”
“You took down every bandit who crossed our path in Lincoln and you hit them a lot less. You were mad at Wulf, sure. But you didn’t want to hurt him too badly. You certainly didn’t want to kill him.” She thought he looked something like lost, her grim and forbidding raider. She kept her hands on her thighs when she wanted to reach for him, and she was surprised at how much that cost her. “No one should make you think you have to choose between your clan and your mate. No mate should force you to think in those terms.”
He shook his head slightly, as if he couldn’t take it in.
Maud kept going, because she wasn’t only saving her life. She was saving his.
“You brought light and quiet and heat here, Gunnar,” she told him. Reminded him, more like. “You made this Lodge a home. Don’t you want to live in it?”
He stood there before her so long she thought he’d turned to stone. Finally he rubbed a hands over his face, down the length of his beard. He shook himself, or shook her off, and when he focused on her again, he was dark and steel to the core.
Her heart sank.
“Get up,” he told her, brutal and cold. “Get dressed for a long journey. None of this was supposed to happen. I made a vow.”
Then he turned and started walking away, back down the little hall, headed out toward his study.
“Yes,” Maud said. And then, because there was nothing else to say but the last, final truth she’d been fighting off for much too long. “Yes, master.”
And he stopped dead. He turned back to face her slowly, so slowly, that she was sure she could see his temper rise from him like smoke.
His smoky eyes were a storm of black when they met hers. “What did you call me?”
His voice was the hardest she’d ever heard it. Something nearer to vicious. It made her stomach clench. It made her pulse turn liquid and desperate in her veins. But she couldn’t fall down now. Not now.
“Master,” she said again, and even more deliberately now that he was so ferocious, so huge and dark. So far out of her reach again, when he was right there. “I told you I loved you. What did you think that meant?”
“This can’t happen. This isn’t happening.” He raised his battered hands and then dropped them, as if he was fighting off an unseen assailant. “I died a year ago, Maud. Everything that’s happened since is bullshit. It’s all pretending there’s some solution to this that isn’t me with yet another dead woman at my feet.”
“I know,” she said. She didn’t mention his mother. She didn’t have to. “None of it is your fault.”
His breath was coming fast, as if he was exerting himself, when he was only standing there in that makeshift hallway.
“I don’t believe in black magic,” he gritted out. “I don’t believe in any of this crap. I don’t think Audra did, either.” He came closer then, squatting down before her, his intense blue gaze filling her world. “I’ve been telling myself this has all been about honor, but I think it’s about pride. The truth is I think she was exactly as full of shit as they say she was, but what happens then? That’s the woman I took as my mate? The one who was using me all along? The one who—”
Maud shook her head. “It doesn’t matter what she did. She’s gone, Gunnar. You’re not. That either matters to you or it doesn’t. It’s really that simple.”
He blew out a breath and then he reached out to run his thumb over her mouth, dragging it against her lip, a rough, carnal caress.
“It didn’t matter to me at all,” he said gruffly. “And then there you were. And now the only thing that matters to me is you.”
She thought she whispered his name. He slid his hands around to cup her face, and it felt like coming home.
“Maud,” he murmured, right there against her lips. “I want to live.”
Just the way she’d said it in the desert, so long ago now.
And then he took her mouth with his.
It was no sweet declaration. No soft taste of love and life and this connection of theirs that had saved them both.
This was Gunnar. It was a claiming.
Deep. Wet. Wild.
He took her mouth again and again, and she couldn’t seem to get close enough to him. She sunk her hands in his hair. She pressed herself against him.
And still he kissed her, raw and hot, as if he was inventing it as he went, this fierce and perfect tangle of tongues and teeth.
This time, there were no bandits lurking all around them, no mercenaries. There were only the two of them in this magical space he’d built, not nearly close enough.
Never close enough.
Gunnar pulled back, laughing slightly at the frustrated noise she made. His hands were big and faintly rough against her, and she was too lost in sensation to realize he was stripping her shirt from her until he was pulling it over her head and tossing it. Then he was on her again, bending to get that talented mouth of his on her breasts.
And then he tortured her. He licked and he sucked. He wasn’t the slightest bit afraid to use his teeth and make her cry out in that exquisite, razor’s edge bu
rst where pleasure and pain were the same.
Oh yes, she loved him. Oh yes, he knew her. Oh yes.
“Quiet,” he ordered her, his beard a glorious frustration against that soft hollow between her breasts. That was how Maud knew she’d said all of that out loud. She shuddered in some terrible, beautiful embarrassment that was shot straight through with need, and felt him laugh against her skin. “And don’t you dare come.”
She moaned, but that only made him laugh again. It didn’t make him stop.
And then it was a battle. She was hot and red and stretched thin, and he was her torture made flesh, all confident hands and cool eyes and that wicked, sinful mouth.
He stripped her naked and he kissed her … everywhere. He took his time. He explored every hollow, every curve. He turned her to face away from him and he lit a fire down the length of her spine, then into that dark furrow beneath, teasing the tight bud he found there.
And even when he turned her back around to face him, so he could take her mouth again and slide his fingers deep between her legs to toy with her swollen, greedy pussy at last, he wouldn’t let her ride that out the way she wanted.
“No,” he murmured, when she started to shake a little.
His long, hard, fingers, callused and battered, parted her slippery folds and traced her entrance. The one place even he had never gone. There were tears in her eyes, or maybe they were already falling, and she didn’t care.
“I said no, little nun,” he said again, more sternly. “If you come now, I’ll stop.”
She might have screamed. He certainly laughed. But somehow, Maud pulled herself back from that edge. She dropped her head to his shoulder and she panted out her struggle against his bare skin while he … took his sweet time.
He played with her pussy. He circled her clit. And then slowly, very slowly, he began to slide one of those deliciously hard fingers inside of her.
“Look at me.”
Maud obeyed, lifting her head and meeting his gaze.
So hard. So hot. A deep, male triumph that almost threw her over the edge.
Her heart hammered at her and her lungs felt tight, but every other particle of her being was focused on her hot, wet pussy and the fact his finger was in her, deeper and deeper. He twisted his wrist, and then he began to thrust. In and out. So damned slow.
She rocked against him mindlessly. Helplessly.
“Please,” she whispered, her voice broken and rough and she didn’t care. “Please, sir.”
“Oh, no, little nun,” Gunnar gritted out, his voice as raw and wrecked as hers. “You don’t get to take it back.”
“Please.” She tried again. “Please, master.”
“Good girl,” he growled against her mouth, and he kissed her.
Harder. Hotter. Deeper than before, until Maud thought she was drowning. Flying. It was all the same.
He made a low, guttural noise and then he moved, pulling his finger from inside her and rolling to his feet in that warrior’s way of his that made her stomach flip. He pulled her with him, standing her before him, a hard curve to his stern mouth when he had to keep her from falling.
“Here,” he said, low and dark. “Taste how much you want me.”
He brought the finger that had just been inside her to her lips and she opened instantly, obediently, sucking him into her mouth and tasting her own musky arousal. She gripped his wrist and curled her tongue around and around, licking every last bit and maybe teasing him a little bit, too.
His smoky gaze was more like black, need and hunger and something more than that, something more than simply possessive.
He tossed his blade aside. Maud made a soft noise of distress as she really looked at the beating he’d taken. His skin was already turning colors, deep purples and angry blacks.
But if any of his injuries hurt him, he gave no sign. He kicked off his boots and stripped down his trousers and then, finally, they were both naked. And his beautiful cock rose between them, hard and huge. She reached out to touch the velvet tip, catching the little drop of precome and rubbing it into his skin, almost absently.
Gunnar made that growling noise she loved, low and deep, and she smiled up at him.
“You make engines purr,” she told him. “And that’s impressive. But I make you purr, which I think you’ll agree borders on miraculous.”
His eyes glittered then. He looked something like tortured.
“I’ve never heard of a miracle in this entire ruined, piece of shit world,” he said, his voice rough. “Until you.”
He swept her up into his arms then, and Maud melted against him. He carried her into the boxcar and he laid her out before him on the high, wide bed, and for a moment he only stood there and looked at her there, utterly naked except for the collar she wore.
As if, she thought, he couldn’t quite believe that she was real.
Maud propped herself up on her elbows.
There was no sound at all but her breathing and his. There was nothing else in all the world but that promise in his gaze and the heat that still pounded through her, giddy and mad, making her feel jittery. Making her ache. Making her want things she didn’t know how to name.
Gunnar lifted his chin, ordering her to move into the center of the bed without saying a word.
Maud obeyed. She felt clumsy and oversized, as if her skin no longer fit her. Her skin prickled into goose bumps. She shivered, though she wasn’t cold.
And all the while he looked at her, that dark, possessive expression making him seem carved from some kind of stone.
He crawled onto the bed with her, coming up over her, though he didn’t press himself against her. Not yet.
“Gunnar—”
“Are you in charge or am I?” His voice was pleasant. That gleam in his darkened gaze was not. It made her shudder, dark and deep.
“You are.”
“Who is?”
“You, master. You’re in charge.”
“That’s what I thought.”
He reached up above her and pulled a length of fabric from one of the high posters. Kneeling over her, he pulled her arm up and tied it high above her head. Then he leaned over to the other side and did the same.
Maud didn’t know when she started to breathe like that, so heavy and wild. Or when her pulse got so loud it was like she was being struck in the side of the head. She only knew that she couldn’t hear anything, see anything, or feel anything but the mighty, gloriously battered raider who crouched over her and tied her down.
Setting her free to soar.
And god help her, she was already flying.
He settled back on his haunches to admire his handiwork. His gaze was like a caress, moving over her, making her head spin and her nipples hard again.
“For the first time in my life,” he said, low and hard, a note of intense satisfaction in his voice. “I understand the church.”
And then he stretched himself out on top of her.
That alone almost made her come. Maud bucked against him, testing the resistance of her bindings and delighting in the sensation of his hard, muscled body, so big and strong, pressing her down into the bed.
He pulled her thighs apart and settled himself between them, rubbing his thick, hot cock against her pussy, moving between her slippery folds as if he was coating himself in her cream the way he’d made her rub him with oil back in the cabin. The idea made her shudder, then arch against her restraints.
It took her long, shivery moments to realize he was toying with her. Rubbing himself against her, grazing her swollen clit with the satiny steel of his cock. Bending his head to chew on her nipples and make her arch and wriggle against him.
It took her another long moment to understand he was teaching her, not torturing her. Or not only torturing her. The point was that she couldn’t get away. She couldn’t dislodge him. No matter how she bucked or rocked or tried to angle herself to take him inside her, she couldn’t make him do a thing he didn’t feel like doing. There was nothing to do
but surrender. Utterly.
And intense shudder worked through her, starting somewhere deep within her and radiating out, so hard and long it was like a different kind of coming. She flushed with it, hot and red. She felt moisture leak from the corners of her eyes, as if they were overfull. And when it was done she was still panting with need and Gunnar only watched her, and enigmatic look on his hard, beautiful face.
“You’re mine,” he said.
It wasn’t a statement, though it rang with certainty. It was a vow.
“Yours,” she replied, half out of her mind with lust and love, the greed and the glory of this. Of him. “Always yours, master. But if you do this…”
He was propped on his elbows, his huge hands cradling her face.
“You can sacrifice yourself for me on this altar, night and day,” he said gruffly, though there was that same bedrock certainty in his gaze and a curve on his hard mouth. “That should be all the magic I need.”
She was still lost in that flush, in that exultant whirl inside her that told her she was safe at last, free at last, his at last. That this was the surrender she’d longed for the whole of her life. That this was what she’d been made for.
But she’d never be able to live with herself if it wasn’t what he wanted. If he’d regret what he’d give up here, if he slid that cock of his even an inch farther—
“Gunnar,” she said, fervent and maybe a little feverish, and she discovered in that instant that she was more selfish than she’d ever realized. She wanted him so badly. She wanted him more than she wanted to do the right thing. But she did it anyway. “It’s really okay. I always thought I was going to die. In the desert, most likely. I was raised to be a sacrifice. I’d rather it was you than the church.”