He moved so quietly for such a large man. She didn’t hear him again until he was filling the open door once more. And the heat seemed to rise by the minute and not all of it because of that look he leveled at her. Some of it was the June morning, she told herself. Surely it had to be the mountain they were on, so much closer to the sun.
“I’m going into town.” His voice felt abrupt to her. Like a slap, when she could tell in some other, distant part of her head that he sounded perfectly even. That the damned shirt was in her head and making her much too sensitive. “You’re staying here.”
She nodded. Show me your obedience, he’d said last night, and I might show you some mercy. Maud didn’t know if she required mercy at the moment. She only knew she had the strangest, near-violent urge to ask for it anyway.
“It will be too hot to stay in the truck,” he continued after a moment, and she might have taken some comfort in imagining he cared for her well-being, but she suspected the sad truth was that he thought she was too dumb to know any better than to sit in a hot vehicle and roast herself to death. It made her mouth taste sour. “Do you know how to swim?”
Maud felt … dislocated. It had been one thing to walk away from the temple last night. Another to climb into the raider’s truck. But something about falling asleep a novice nun only weeks away from her initiation—if she was lucky, that was, and not destined for the desert—and waking up somewhere green and new and with the same mysterious, compelling man and his hard, ruthless mouth made her heart flip over and over inside of her. She could still feel his steel-taut thigh beneath her cheek and she’d slept deep and long when she hadn’t slept through a night in ten years. She couldn’t seem to suck in a full breath, or get past waking up like this. With him. It was almost as if the heat of his hard thigh was still seeping into her, making her feel like screaming, or sobbing, some huge and dangerous monster of a thing inside her she didn’t dare let out. It crouched there, a thick heaviness in her chest. It made her feel fragile and obvious.
That and the man who looked at her with such old, calm eyes and that fascinating mouth of his set in a forbidding line she wanted to taste with her own.
She realized he was waiting for her answer and so she nodded, when any other time she’d laugh and tell him an unsolicited little tale about her first eleven years on the Oklahoma shore, when she’d spent whole summers in the water under the impression she was a very large fish.
“Be careful with the river.” His voice was grudging at best. “It looks safer than it is.”
“I’ll be fine,” she managed to say, as if there was nothing overheating inside of her. As if his shirt was just as shirt. As if every man in the western highlands walked around with a chest like his and the same haunted eyes.
He leaned back into the cab of the vehicle and she caught her breath, but he only fished around behind his seat again and pulled out a heavy-looking pack. He set it on the driver’s seat and rummaged through it and Maud had to quietly handle the sharp disappointment she felt that he hadn’t reached for her. One more insanity to add to the rest. He took a tightly knit gray hat from the pack and set it on the seat, then threw the pack into the back again.
And then Maud sat there and watched him as if he were in an old movie on the screen her uncle had sometimes hooked up in the caravan as he pulled all those warrior’s braids of his into a knot on the back of his head. She was captivated. The raider tugged the knit cap on, hiding the thick, knotted mass of his braids in the wider part of the hat that drooped toward the back of his neck. He pulled the front halfway down his forehead.
He’d hidden the most obvious clues that he was a raider, the warrior braids and the tattoos. Though Maud thought it would be a very foolish person indeed who failed to notice that he was deeply, incontrovertibly dangerous even so. It was in every hard-packed muscle his shirt did nothing to hide and in his distant blue eyes that looked like smoke above his black beard. The blades that hung across his chest and even his collection of wolves’ teeth were incidental to the whole picture.
He was simply, decidedly, inarguably lethal in a way that shivered through her. It turned her inside out. She was a bit surprised there wasn’t a huge, loud noise as it happened. That he couldn’t see it.
“You better be fine.” His voice was gruff, his attention on the side mirror of the vehicle. He straightened his knit hat, ran a hand over his dark beard. “I’ll be pissed if I have to drag your drowned ass out of the water.”
“That sounds like an excellent eulogy,” she murmured, making no particular attempt to keep the sarcasm out of her voice, because it was better than the inside-out, shivering thing she thought might betray her in ways she’d rather not consider too closely. “Exactly what I’d want if I drowned here, wherever here is. Thank you.”
He turned his head and Maud shivered when that cool blue gaze met hers and sliced straight through her. It made her feel small and fragile. It tore into her. She swallowed, hard.
“My name is Gunnar, little nun,” he told her in a voice that felt like a hard hand against her tender flesh. Her nipples pinched tightly into exultant little points. Her belly went taut. And her pussy flashed wet and hot with a spike of need. Holy shit. “This is Wyoming, nowhere near your fucking church. And you need better clothes than whatever the hell that is you’re wearing, unless I want every jackass who even glances our way to know exactly who and what you are. Which I don’t.”
Maud couldn’t breathe. At some point, she was aware she’d stopped trying.
“And if you take that tone with me again,” Gunnar continued, his voice echoing inside of her, filling her up, making her yearn for things she couldn’t name while his gaze pinned her to the seat and made her wish he’d use his hands the same way, “I’ll make you call me master.”
She didn’t move for a long time after he walked off, leaving her there in his vehicle with only the river rushing below her for company.
That and the monster that still hunched there on her chest, heavy and dark and pulsing crimson and hot with the same current of hunger that pooled low in her belly and deep in her pussy.
When she did move, it was because the sun moved higher in the sky and the thick heat in the enclosed cab of the truck was too much to bear. She climbed, barefoot, down the side of the vehicle to sink her feet into the wild grasses that grew along the riverside. Maud let out a long, shuddering breath. Then another. She hadn’t been out in the wilderness like this in ten years. She hadn’t stood alone in the spring sunshine, felt the soft dirt beneath her feet and a careless breeze in her face with no one watching her for her reaction, in ten years. Ten years. She could remember very long afternoons spent bored to death in the meadows in Oklahoma. If someone had told her then that she’d miss the very thing she’d wanted so desperately to escape, she’d have thought they were crazy.
Some part of her wanted to sob out all those feelings inside of her, that red-hot, monstrous hunger and her simple delight in this little bit of freedom so far from any temple, but she didn’t dare. She wasn’t sure she’d stop and besides, she was too much a product of the church. She lifted a hand and let it move over the brand at her nape, the way she always did when she felt things.
It was her touchstone. Her reminder. She knew better than to succumb to emotion. She knew the consequences were always, always dire.
So instead, Maud made her way down to the river and then out into it, picking her way from stone to stone until she found a wide, flat one where she could sit with her feet in the crisp, cold water. She let the sun dance all over her face. She listened to the rush of the water and the call of birds overhead. She felt the river foam over her submerged feet and tug at her ankles.
There were no chants. No priests. No nuns. No schedule to keep her occupied in holy thoughts from dawn to dusk. She didn’t have to pray if she didn’t want to. She didn’t have to work her way through the usual devotions. There was no one to know what she did, one way or the other, and punish her accordingly. Not one person f
rom her life knew where she was or what had happened to her last night. Did her fellow novices think she’d been carried off by some or other desert predator? Was Edyth even now praying for Maud’s immortal soul or did she think that her embarrassingly rebellious roommate had finally gotten what she deserved?
She didn’t want to think about the bishop, though it was hard to avoid it for long. He was the shadow over her whole life. She’d been his pet project since the day her brand had been judged healed. The sinner he was obsessed with redeeming, kicking and screaming if necessary. His favorite, the other novices had hissed bitterly when the nuns couldn’t hear them, and they hadn’t much cared that the bishop’s focus was anything but benevolent. Must be nice to get so much attention.
It was not nice. At all. The bishop was the reason Maud was always in trouble, though she knew he would have said it was the other way around. Her offensive pride. Her rebelliousness. Her refusal to surrender to him the way he wanted her to. His standards were punishingly exacting and he took out any infractions with the flat of his hand or his belt or a paddle—and there were always a whole lot of infractions he felt needed punishing. Correcting.
As hard as he liked. And he liked to offer his moral guidance really, really hard or, he claimed, it made god angry.
It occurred to Maud that even here, with her feet dunked in a river in Wyoming in the middle of nowhere, she expected Bishop Seph to appear the way he always did. To rise up out of the stones and demand his usual accounting of every wicked thought in her head and dark urge in her heart, the better to hurt her with later.
But her fierce raider wouldn’t have left her here if he’d believed someone would find her. Maud didn’t know how she knew that or why she was certain that was true, no matter the things he’d said to her or that shattering way he’d looked at her before he’d left.
The word master seemed to shimmer in the air all around her like a different kind of heat.
Maud forced herself to breathe. To let go of the life she’d left behind and the slow, steady, predictable progression of the days in the convent she’d been so sure she hated. One indistinguishable from the next. Classes and work, prayers and chants. She breathed it in, her former life, and blew it out again into the river as it passed. And slowly, surely, that heavy ache inside of her eased.
Slowly, surely, she felt okay.
Maybe for the first time in a long, long while.
She was still sitting there, in much the same position, when he returned some time later. The sun had inched even higher into the sky and beat down from directly overhead, and the river water had warmed along with it. She flexed her feet to cause a little resistance, then let the water surge around them. Over and over, until it became a kind of prayer all its own. Flex, release. Water and sun.
Maud didn’t hear him approach. One moment she was staring dreamily at the water as it surged around a stone and the next there was a prickling sensation stretching up and down her back, warning her she wasn’t alone.
She shifted to look over her shoulder and there he was, her raider. Gunnar. She thought the name fit him. He looked hard and terrible and infinitely tempting as he stood some distance away on the riverbank, those smoky eyes on her.
He lifted his chin at her and she obeyed him without thinking, that word he’d used earlier dancing down the length of her spine. Master. She rose to her feet and made her way to shore, rock by rock, and he was there to meet her when she finally made the last little jump to the soft earth.
He still wore his hat and the shirt that slicked all over his chest and her mouth watered. He didn’t smile. She wondered if he ever smiled, but for once she had the sense not to let her mouth run away with her. She wanted to ask him a thousand things, but everything had changed in the cab of his vehicle before he’d left. It still hung there between them, making even a simple thing like Maud standing there before him in her bare feet feel … seductive and dangerous at once. Huge and precarious, as if she was balanced on the narrow edge of a very steep cliff.
He held a bundle of clothes in his hands and he dropped them on the ground between them. Then he simply … waited. He looked like a terrible god, expectant and harsh. He looked beautiful. He looked cruel in a way that made her pussy swell and her breasts start to ache, and it hit her, then. It wasn’t the shirt or the word he’d used or anything he was doing. It was the light.
He’d been overwhelming in the moonlight. He loomed larger than the desert in her memory. But the sun made him something else again. Harder. Haunted. Grim and gorgeous, and his massive body right there in front of her made Maud feel fluttery. Everywhere.
“You bought me clothes?” she asked.
It was that or beg. For … anything.
His blue eyes were like smoke. “We can pretend I bought them if you want.”
Maud looked at the bundle, then back at him, something restless and wonderful flashing over her as possibilities chased each other through her head. “Did you raid something to get them?”
“Raids generally involve a battle. Some reason to draw a blade and an opponent worth the swing.” He indicated that big, square mountain in the distance with a nod of his head. “That’s nothing but a way station. A little town of weaklings who lost the will to go anywhere else, so hunkered down here instead.”
“A real town?” Maud grinned. “I haven’t been to a real town since I was eight or so. It was this strange little place near Oologah Lake in Oklahoma, not far from the sea though the people there said they never went down to the water. Or anywhere, but they were proud of that.”
She remembered the day perfectly. Her uncle had parked the caravan some distance outside of town, because they’d learned never to present themselves and all their worldly possessions as a target to a whole collection of strangers who were likely armed. They’d walked down an actual road, stretched out flat for what seemed like forever. Thunderstorms had threatened silky and black above them, hanging in the sky like a canopy of bruises. Maud had walked beside her mother down the empty road with nightmares grumbling at each other overhead and into the fairy-tale version of an old town. Brick buildings lined a clean, well-tended street. Tidy old trees stood politely on even sidewalks, like all the ancient stories of the happy places lost forever beneath the raging seas.
Walking into the town had been like walking back in time. As if they’d somehow been sucked back into the world before the Storms.
“They weren’t banded together in a fortress and they didn’t live off on their own the way my family always did, hoping no one would find us and mess with us. They lived right there in the town. Out in the open. They said that was how everybody used to live.” When he didn’t respond, Maud felt a certain nervousness detonate deep inside her, but she couldn’t seem to stop talking. An anxious little tic she’d thought had been beaten out of her years ago. Her ass still ached with the memories of her early spankings as the nuns had tried their best to curb her unruly tongue and teach her how to accept her place in the convent. The spankings she’d thought were harsh and cruel before she’d graduated to the bishop’s notice and realized they were kiddie spankings. Little tickles, by comparison. “You know, before the Storms.”
Her uncle Mikolaj had thought the place was creepy. He’d flinched at the shadows, convinced that much manicured prettiness had to be a trap, going pale behind his freckles at every sound. He’d suggested the townspeople might be cannibals, or worse. But Maud and her mother had loved every part of it and no matter what her gloomy-minded uncle had thought.
It would be nice to find a place where we could live without being afraid of everything, her mother had said as they walked the main street of the town, looking in the actual glass windows of perfectly preserved stores, where long-lost, fabled items like jellybeans sat in old glass jars. The town was an old story come to life, living and breathing all around them. Where people actually had time to keep it pretty, instead of just hiding and waiting for winter.
You mean fantasyland, Marie? Mikolaj
had asked in his dour way, glaring ferociously down an empty side street as if he expected an ambush to materialize while he stared. Yeah, I’m sure that would be great. Let me know when you find it.
“Bullshit,” Gunnar said now.
Maud frowned at him. “It wasn’t bullshit. I was there. It was perfect.”
“You were a kid.” He stood like a monolith, his legs planted into the ground and his arms folded over his chest as if he was trying to look even mightier. Or maybe just because he was that mighty. “You probably walked right through their perimeter guard without noticing, because believe me, they had one. There’s nothing pretty left in this world without something big and ugly to guard it and keep it that way. Ask your bishop.” He made a low noise she was happy she couldn’t interpret. “You’re lucky they didn’t use one of their dumbass guns on you.”
Maud didn’t really believe in fantasy towns where people were magically safe for no reason, especially not ones without walls or guards. She might have spent half her life in a convent, but that hadn’t exactly protected her from the reality of the world. There was no escaping the fact it was ruined beyond repair and that, as Gunnar had said, anything that appeared to be unruined was likely heavily armed. But still, in her heart of hearts, she believed that if she found such a place, a beautiful summer thunderstorm would likely be hanging overhead to show her the way. And a grumpy raider didn’t need to crap all over one of her few good memories of her childhood no matter what she might or might not have seen that day.
“Some things are magic whether you believe in them or not, Gunnar,” she told him, as if he wasn’t large and intimidating. And as if it mattered either way.
She didn’t know what response she expected, but her grim raider with the haunted expression only eyed her.
“Stop fucking around and get dressed,” he rumbled at her after a moment dragged by. “We have a long way to go.”