Edge of Obsession Read online

  None of this was tracking, but Tyr cared less and less about that by the moment.

  Helena surfaced, slicking her hair back. She tipped her face toward the sun and the sweet dance of the late summer wind sweeping in from the evergreens and the sea, already hinting at the coming change of seasons. She spun around in the hot water to face him and the smile that cracked over her face punched a hole or two between his ribs. Tyr didn’t know what the hell that was.

  “This is…”

  But she didn’t finish that thought. As if she’d abruptly remembered where the hell she was, and who she was with. Her smile faded, but those holes in him only seemed to grow bigger, and that made no sense at all.

  Helena looked down at the frothing surface of the water again and Tyr hated it. He should interrogate her right here, naked and vulnerable, and get it over with. But he didn’t. Instead, he reached over the side of the tub and grabbed one of the tubes that the girls had arranged there, and rolled it in his hand.

  Tyr reached over and pulled her to him, settling her down before him on the wide bench, between his open legs with her back facing him. He squeezed out some of the crap inside the tube, the scent of rosemary and summer flowers suddenly sharp in the air between them, another thing in a long list that shouldn’t even register, for god’s sake.

  He ignored it, because it was that or hand over his apparently limp cock to his brothers and see what they made of it. He took the stuff in his hand, rubbed it between his palms, and then worked it into her hair.

  He told himself this was simply a more subtle approach, and he ignored the small voice inside of him that called bullshit on that even as he thought it.

  Helena stiffened at his first touch, then let out a shuddering sort of breath and eased back into him. Tyr arranged her how he wanted her on the bench, her bent knees clasped before her and her head tipped back, and he worked the foaming soap deep into that thick black hair of hers that fell over her shoulders and floated in the water between them.

  It was mesmerizing. And he was going to have a lot to think about when he finished this job, he knew. He would swear before the whole clan that he was working an angle here, but the truth was something else and Tyr had never been the kind of man who spent much energy lying to himself. It was a waste of his time and he’d always figured that with the average lifespan of a brother being what it was, short and harsh, he didn’t have any time to waste.

  But he didn’t get into that now. He soaped up her hair, learning the shape of her skull and finding the pressure points that made her shift and sigh, as if she’d had a stressful trip over the sea, what with no actual labor and nothing to do but sit around with the camp girls and learn a whole bunch of raider secrets mainlanders didn’t need to know. Especially mainlanders like her, with too many people interested in her and for reasons Tyr still didn’t understand.

  So many secrets. He was sick of them. He was sick of all of this.

  Bullshit, he scoffed at himself. You want to fuck her. The only thing you’re sick of is waiting.

  He stopped massaging the soap into her scalp then, but he didn’t say anything. No hard questions while she was lulled into letting down her defenses, the way he could have. He just dropped his hands and she sat there for a moment, goose bumps all over her shoulders where they rose above the water, and then she launched herself forward and into the water again. That she was escaping him as much as rinsing herself off was perfectly clear. He let her.

  It was better, all things considered, before Tyr turned into even more of a goddamned bitch than he had already today.

  He fished out a different tube from the side, this one without the girlie flower scent, and took care of himself. He was far more pissed off than the situation merited. He knew that. He dunked his head and washed himself clean with a ruthless efficiency that still didn’t make up for the head massage he’d just doled out to a captive he should have been hammering with questions. When he surfaced at last she was sitting across the tub from him, her gray eyes solemn.

  Tyr slashed a hand over his face and he didn’t know what the hell was happening to him. This wasn’t him. He was the war chief to the raider king, not a little bitch whose testicles hadn’t dropped yet. What the hell was he doing pansying around with shampoo and hot water and whatever the hell this was? He knew exactly how to get her to tell him what he wanted.

  He didn’t want to do it. Or maybe he wanted it too much, if not for the right reasons.

  Helena wasn’t a camp girl. She wasn’t built like that. Some women—hell, some people—just liked sex, wherever and however they could get it. It wasn’t as emotional for them as it was for others. It was exercise with orgasms, a tension release, and they could laugh their way right through it. Tyr knew because he’d been one of those people for a long time. His whole life, in fact.

  But not this one. Not Helena. Tyr could tell. He’d known it back in that compound before she’d ever laid a hand on him and sealed her fate—before she’d made it clear she had secrets to keep and had turned out to have quite the interesting going-away party.

  Helena was going to cry, get emotional. She was going to tear herself inside out while she came apart beneath him. Her walls and her shields were going to tumble down into rubble all around her, and he’d have no issue whatsoever getting what he wanted out of her. All he had to do was make her come apart in his hands, which was what he’d wanted to do almost since the first moment he’d laid eyes on her, so this shouldn’t be any kind of problem for him, should it?

  The trouble was, it only led to more questions. If she was Krajic’s whore, for example, none of those things would be true about her. She’d be harder, tougher, like the women who’d volunteered to follow the raiders back home to the eastern islands. Was it that he didn’t believe she could be his enemy’s woman, or that he didn’t want to believe it?

  “I don’t know how to do it,” she said then, and her voice was softer than before. Almost breathless.

  “Do what?” Tyr didn’t try very hard to make his voice anything but harsh, as if maybe that might remind him who the hell he was. What he was supposed to do here, no matter how many goddamned holes he had in his chest or how confusing this felt when it shouldn’t have been. “Wash your hair?”

  She didn’t smile. Not quite. But he could see the echo of it in her eyes, along with something much darker and hotter. She was watching him so closely it almost felt like a touch, and he realized that her nipples were standing hard against the water, as if they were trying to act tough the way she was. As if they wanted his mouth.

  “Beg,” she said, and her voice was too husky. Too raw. “I don’t know how to beg. But I want to.”

  He felt that pulse in him. Hot. Hard.

  Victorious.

  “Tell me how to beg,” she said, as if she thought he might deny her. Then she sat forward on the bench across from him like she wanted him to teach her a lesson.

  He could do that. He could certainly do that.

  “For what?” He sounded the way he should, distant and forbidding, which was at complete odds with that wild riot inside of him. “What do you want?”

  “You,” Helena said. He didn’t imagine it. It wasn’t just his dick getting delusional. And she kept going. “I want to beg you, Tyr. The way you told me I would.”

  He let himself smile. Dark and triumphant, as if his cock wasn’t a little too close to outright agony at this point. As if he’d never had the slightest doubt.

  And in that moment, he didn’t care why she was doing it. Or why he was. Enemy, friend—it no longer mattered.

  “Don’t worry, baby,” he told her, reaching for her at last. At last. “It’ll come to you. I promise.”

  And then Tyr had his hands on that sweet body again, those sensitive little tits, his mouth on hers as if he owned her the way he already felt he did—no matter what the hell she was doing here—and everything finally started to make some sense.

  8

  He’d washed her hair.
>
  His big hands, scarred and battle worn, had been so careful and gentle as he’d handled her even though they both knew how easily he could hurt her if he’d wanted. The quiet, almost grumpy way he’d performed such a surprising, nurturing act, as if he’d never done it before. As if he’d never meant to do it to her and it had happened by mistake. It had tipped over an aching little knot inside of her into a bloom of vibrant life that had started to hum. Dangerous. Electric.

  It felt entirely too much like she was safe here, when she knew very well she wasn’t. At all.

  Then Tyr had been underwater for what seemed like a long time and it had been so quiet, high up on this private balcony with the world she knew somewhere far over the other side of the horizon, out of reach, almost as if she’d imagined it. There’d been nothing but smoke and drums and far-off laughter in the sharp, cool sky, mixed in with the scent of pine trees and salted green things on the breeze. Then he’d come up for air as if he was one of his own raider gods, water coursing all over him like one of the camp girls around the fire. He’d looked sculpted from steel as he stood: all sinew and hard-packed muscle in golden skin, those fascinating tattoos and the bold heft of his hard cock.

  And Helena stopped lying to herself.

  Maybe something was wrong with her, deep inside, the way she’d always half suspected. Maybe she was built wrong, unnatural, as Melyssa had always told her. Maybe that was why she’d never cared about the things her sister had cared about—the things everyone outside her family had gone to great pains to tell her she should care about. What did any of that matter now? Missions, lights, power—it all seemed so distant. She’d wanted this man since the moment she’d seen him jump down from the outer walls of the compound and swagger into Ferranti’s courtyard like he owned it, before he’d even bothered to conquer it. She’d been up in her room then—really more of a cell, if she was honest, because Ferranti had wanted her to think hard about defying his wishes without any distractions like furnishings.

  And Helena had been struck dumb, staring down into the courtyard, unable to believe what she was seeing. Tyr had tossed one of his heavy blades in the air, grinning with deadly intent as he’d closed in on the guard. The gleaming blade had spun end over end, mesmerizing her. Then he’d caught it and spun himself, the way he moved shockingly fast and graceful for a man of his size and might, taking the guard out with a single stroke.

  He’d been even more hypnotic up close, when they’d all been herded out to cower at his feet in the rain. More wolf than man.

  She’d had a lot of reasons for what she’d done then, and they were all still valid. Krajic was coming for her—that had been undeniable, with smoke from burned-out settlements on the wind for days before, like a thick, black warning. She’d needed to get away from Ferranti and what she’d suspected he’d had planned for her, even if Melyssa never had told him the family secrets. But she never would have dared to do anything if it hadn’t been for that thing inside of her, that white hot ache low in her belly and sharper by far between her legs when Tyr had looked at her—and it wasn’t any better now that he’d made her come apart twice with what had seemed like minimal effort.

  If anything, it had gotten worse.

  So just as she had in that courtyard so far away now, on the other side of the world, Helena thought: What the hell.

  Begging was nothing more than asking for what she wanted. In the way most likely to ensure she got it.

  And his mouth was on hers now, dark and demanding while his thumbs made drunken circles over her nipples, making them pull tighter and tighter into needy little points that seemed electrically wired straight to her pussy—

  Tyr pulled back then, his dark gold eyes blistering hot, his hard face stark. “You in your head or with me?”

  She couldn’t make any sense of that. Her lips felt swollen and she wanted more of these things she couldn’t entirely name. Not more words. “What?”

  “You’re thinking too loud, woman.”

  Tyr bent and hauled her up out of the water, holding her against his powerful chest. Then he climbed out of the tub, letting the water stream where it would, and Helena shivered—though she couldn’t tell if it was from the bite of the cold air against her flushed skin or from sheer reaction to another offhanded display of his strength.

  Both, maybe, she thought as he shouldered his way through a glass door much closer than the one they’d walked out, carrying her directly into his bedroom. She had a hectic impression of the same kind of thing she’d seen in the main room, large and distinctly male furnishings with clean, blunt lines and surprisingly colorful rugs on the walls.

  And there were no piles of bones or severed heads, as he’d promised and as she’d half expected, even if he wasn’t quite the fairy-tale villain she’d imagined all raiders were. Or not entirely that villain. There was a very large, very wide bed sitting low on the wood floor but piled so high with furs it looked decadent and exotic to Helena, who’d always counted herself lucky if she got to bed down with a synthetic blanket or two come the cold.

  He tossed her straight into the center of it and laughed when she bounced, then slid a little bit, her wet skin against all that glorious fur, wolf and bear and smaller, fluffier things she couldn’t identify.

  “You need to get your head in the right place,” Tyr told her, a lazy hint to his voice that washed straight through her like a long, slow burn. “You’re not supposed to be thinking about other stuff. This isn’t one of your winter marriages.”

  “This is a privilege, yes.” She tried to sound dry, amused. In control of … something. It did nothing to make her heart beat any slower. Or make her throat feel any less tight. “I think you mentioned that.”

  Tyr loomed there at the end of her bed like every nightmare she’d ever had. Well. She couldn’t exactly call them nightmares, those dizzy dreams of powerful men carved so tough and so unyielding, and the twisted things she’d imagined they’d do without waiting for permission or formal arrangements or the September equinox. He was huge, his dark braids a frame around his hard warrior’s face and shoulders wide enough to block out the rest of the world. His tattoos shouted out who he was and his network of scars made the life he lived that much more real. He was a walking tapestry of his own ruthless power and she felt it pulse in her, long and low, making her feel restless and slippery and desperate at once.

  And he knew it.

  She could see it in the way his dark eyes gleamed, the way that harsh mouth of his nearly curved in one stern corner.

  “This is a lesson,” he said, his voice as fully lazy then as it was dark, kicking up storms inside of her with every syllable. “The privilege is if I let you come again, Helena. I haven’t decided if you’ve earned it.”

  “I…” She was paralyzed. That was the only explanation. Sprawled out on a giant’s bed of furs, stark naked, and she couldn’t even seem to care that she was living out one of the stories she’d been told about monsters when she’d been a child. She was sure he could see how wet she was, how needy, as easily as he could see the red flush that seemed to burn her more with every breath she tried to take. “I want to.”

  There was a flash of that grin of his, dark and intent. “I bet you do. But me first, sweetheart. That’s how this works, didn’t you get that? I’m a greedy bastard.”

  He reached down and cupped his heavy balls in his big hand, then slid up to grip his cock, his hard gaze never leaving her while he did it. All the air in the world disappeared. Helena was a red-hot pulse, a desperate, searing need and nothing more. She felt her lips part as if she could breathe when she knew full well she couldn’t. She felt her whole body quiver as if he was touching her when he pumped his hand all the way down his thick, hard length, then back. Then again.

  “Come here.” It wasn’t any kind of request, and he didn’t sound the least bit lazy anymore. “I want your mouth.”

  Helena heard a sound, somewhere between a sigh and a moan, and she knew she was making it. She couldn�
�t recognize any of herself in it, but she knew it was her all the same. She was shaking. Images flooded her head, each one scalding hot and worse than the last. Scenes from the bonfire, tumbling around and around inside of her. Women kneeling in front of very big men, mouths open and hard cocks plunging deep inside them. Women draped in different positions, with hard raider hands holding them fast, then pounding into their open mouths again and again.

  She couldn’t possibly do that. Not because it was noncompliant, though it was. Oh god, it was. It was exactly what the priests insisted they must never, ever do. But because …

  “I don’t know how.” She hadn’t meant to move, much less speak, but somehow she was sitting up, her heart so hard and fast in her chest she felt almost dizzy. Or maybe that was Tyr, standing like a sentry at the foot of the bed, his hot, dark eyes fixed on her like he’d already devoured her.

  “I know you don’t. Quit stalling.”

  His voice was so damned hard. So ruthless. It should have scared her, but it didn’t. It made her pussy swell with another rush of wet heat. It made her breasts ache. It made her crawl toward him without any conscious thought, as if that hard hand of his was still wrapped around her neck.

  She stopped moving when she reached him, though she couldn’t keep still. She was still quivering as if she were plugged into some kind of generator and the hum of it was just beneath her skin. She couldn’t get over what she was doing. On her hands and knees on this low, wide bed, at eye level with that massive cock he was still gripping, his big hand still moving up and down, up and down. It made her mouth water.

  “Start with your mouth.” Tyr’s voice was hypnotic, a dark rhythm inside of her. “Don’t use your hands without permission. Suck on the head, then use your tongue. Got that?”

  Helena didn’t have the slightest idea why she wanted to do any of those things. Why anyone would want to do those things. But she did.

  God help her but she really, really did.

  She didn’t understand the mechanics, but Tyr didn’t seem to care, and if anything, he looked impatient as he waited for her to get on with it. She shifted forward, putting her face right there. He smelled rich and right, male and powerful, and his cock was so huge and so hard. She’d never been this close to one before—not with her face, anyway. Her breasts ached and her pussy felt wetter and hotter by the second, as if she was as connected to the act she was about to perform as she had been to any of things he’d done to her back on the mainland.