Edge of Temptation Page 2

  And that was when the creature turned and darted away, as if responding to a dangerous noise only it could hear. It lost itself in the sage and shadows, but then reappeared at the top of the next hill. Where it sat and began to clean its paws, as if it was entirely alone.

  It might as well have been.

  There weren’t going to be any signs, Maud acknowledged then, her heart pounding for no good reason as she watched the clever little thing for a few more utterly pointless moments. There weren’t suddenly going to be new choices to make. The choice had been made for Maud when she’d been eleven and the strange man dressed all in black with smooth dark skin had stood in a clearing and studied her as she’d tended the fire for her family’s breakfast. She’d never seen a priest before. She’d been mesmerized by that strip of facial hair he wore, extending from his bottom lip to his chin. He’d promised her mother and uncle such riches they’d scoffed at him and turned him away, but had spent the days afterward eyeing Maud in a way that had made her skin feel itchy. When the man had returned with everything he’d promised and more, Maud’s blood relatives had given her to his keeping while draped in furs, cozy and warm for the first time in their lives despite the crisp sea air.

  Call me Father Tiero, the man had told her, holding tight to her wrist as he’d led her away. You belong to the church now.

  And one thing Maud had learned was that the church kept what it claimed.

  A fox was a fox, not a sign or a symbol of any kind. It was nothing but a wild, thoughtless animal that lived in these high red rocks where nothing else could. Its survival had nothing to do with her.

  She felt a strange chill, then, even though the sun was still up and still blazing hot. The flowing sleeveless tunic and wide-legged trousers all the novices wore—in a faded shade of red Maud suspected was meant to remind them of the fate that awaited them if they were deemed unworthy at the solstice—were light and airy, the better to breathe in the arid air during the sizzling hot days. They offered little protection against the cold nights this time of year, when the novices were expected to sleep on the temple’s chilly concrete floors beneath the ancient pipes and give themselves over to the discomfort for the glory of god.

  Even her church-issued sandals weren’t at all useful for anything more than a short and easy walk between the temples here. They were meant to be slipped on and off when performing chores or prayers, serenely. The blisters she’d rubbed into her own feet because she insisted on these walks out in the rocky canyons were more evidence of her inability to behave appropriately, she knew. She’d told the watchnuns the angry red marks were a gift. A way to continue marking herself as a penitent in the absence of the bishop. She ran her hand over her close-cropped hair now, there in the late afternoon sun, and told herself it was a good thing to have so little of it. It was much less hot in this breathless climate than the headful of long, thick blond hair she’d have had if she wasn’t required to keep it all cut so short as yet another sign of her devotion.

  Maud was dressed as one of the faithful. She had the church’s brand burned deep into the nape of her neck like every other second-phase novice. She was supposed to be one of them, blending in with all her fellow novices so they were all indistinguishable from one another. That was the point. No novice was exceptional, no novice was unique; they were all interchangeable vessels of holiness. She’d been taught and trained in all of this by the bishop himself. Excessively. She might not have had many choices, but who did? Life was grim and short. The seas were treacherous and much too high, the rains were cruel, and the winters long and brutal. People did what they had to do. She’d never blamed her blood relatives for selling her to the church, because girls were far easier to come by than thick furs and plentiful stores, even in a time of low birth rates, decimated populations, and decreased fertility. She’d decided a long time ago that like her family before her, she wanted to survive above all else.

  Yet here she was, too far out on a walk in the desert when she knew no one else dared stray from the temple walls, trying to commune with a fox. A fox, of all things.

  Why couldn’t she make her life easier and just … surrender? The way the bishop had been telling her to do for years?

  The afternoon shadows were even longer now. There was the suggestion of the coming dark and its nominally cooler temperatures in the faint breeze, and off in the distance, she heard the temple bell ring out from the walls.

  It was the five-minute warning before the first evening chant began.

  She could just make it, maybe, if she turned back right this second and ignored her blisters and ran like hell—

  But Maud didn’t do that.

  For absolutely no reason that she could think of, except maybe that she was more suicidal than she’d ever realized, she followed the fox instead. Up the next hill and when it darted away again, over the next. And then the next.

  Away from the temple. Away from the evening chant. Away from everything she knew.

  What was funny was how easy it was. How … offhand, almost.

  There would be no going back, she understood as the sky performed feats of delirious color above her head. No talking her way out of this. Bishop Seph had been bracingly clear that she’d used up all her last chances with him, and that nothing short of perfection was expected if she wanted to satisfy him that she could truly give herself over to appropriate obedience and a life of service. He’d informed her that she’d left him no choice—though she’d thought he’d sounded a bit more satisfied with that possibility than a man tasked with the state of her immortal soul and all her spiritual training ought to have been in the face of his potential failure.

  Not that she’d been dumb enough to say that.

  She couldn’t surrender, no matter how hard she tried. And she couldn’t go back.

  And with every stupid, foolish step she took, long after the fox had disappeared into the clumps of sage and the coming night, Maud found that she wasn’t as panicked about that as she should have been. She’d spent her life on her knees.

  It felt good to walk.

  Because she’d always had a fifty-fifty chance of ending up cast out into the desert anyway, no matter what she did. At least this way, she was choosing her own fate instead of waiting for Bishop Seph to choose it for her. It was small and sad, but still, it felt like a revolution. It had her tilting her head back and swinging her arms a bit as she moved, putting more and more space between her and the temple with every step she took.

  She really was a sinner, a liar, and a sneak unto her bones. Too proud for her own good, as she’d long been accused. Maybe the problem was she’d spent far too much time pretending she could be something else when she couldn’t.

  Maybe it wasn’t any kind of freedom, out here in all the hot, red rocks with no food or water or hope of either. Maybe she’d just stopped pretending for once and it felt like the same thing.

  The sky burned above her, deep reds and bright oranges and sultry, textured pinks. Maud couldn’t see the temple anymore, no matter how high the hills she climbed. The bell should have been ringing into the night, the way it did from the first hint of twilight through to full dark, but she couldn’t hear it any longer. There was a shocking bright star low in the sky and she followed it instead, still looking for signs.

  And that was why it took her so long to realize that it wasn’t a tree waiting there before her, dark against the sunset at the bottom of the hill she was descending.

  It was a man.

  Though Maud had never seen one who looked anything like this.

  He was the size of a tree—and not a stunted little desert tree, but the ones closer to the convent near the Great Lake, towering and thick. He was tall and the kind of whittled-down lean that made her think of sharp-edged things and certain death with a brooding power coiled there inside of him, ready and waiting. His hair was not cut short in the usual style of holy men, but was long and dark and caught up in thick, lush braids that fell about his hard, pale face and fai
led to soften it in any way. He wore a full, dark beard, his stare was so intense it made her heart trip inside her chest, and his mouth was cruel and yet fascinating at once.

  Deeply, irrevocably fascinating.

  As was the fact he was half naked.

  Maud felt a kind of heat beat at her when she realized how much of his hard, muscled chest she could see—the same sort of heat that sometimes shamed her during her acts of penance, when it was always used against her no matter how involuntary a response it was. It took her one shuddering kick of her heart, then another, to recall that there was no one to see her and judge her and shame her out here. That this wasn’t about her pain and spiritual growth, out in this desert where she didn’t belong and shouldn’t have come. It wasn’t about her at all. There was only the quiet desert, the silent sky turning brighter with stars by the minute, and the immense man who watched her walk toward him, a scowl on that lean face she knew better than to call pretty, even inside her own head.

  His utter stillness echoed inside her like something very, very different from shame, though it pooled in the same place between her legs.

  It felt a great deal more like temptation.

  His remarkable bare chest was covered in tattoos. Maud had never seen so many tattoos before. Certainly not all on one man. She’d only heard about men like this, second- or third-hand, in giggly whispers in the convent dormitories at night. These tattoos looked like part of the man’s skin. Organic, as if they’d grown there of their own accord.

  They looked like art.

  There was a complicated circle over his heart and an intricate winding thing that climbed up one arm. Other tattoos that wove and danced across the vast expanse of his chest and circled his narrow hips. He wore a collection of very large, very sharp teeth on leather cords around his neck—Wolves’ teeth, she thought at once though she’d never seen a wolf up close, and then she had to repress a dark little shiver that had nothing to do with fear. And too many other marks to name were stamped all over that hard-hewn torso of his, all planes and intriguing ridges. Scars and symbols were etched right into him. He wore black trousers and heavy boots, and blades hung from the harness he wore as if they were as much a part of him as his tough, corded arms, those mesmerizing tattoos, or the grim line of his hard mouth.

  Warrior, a voice from deep inside her whispered.

  And then, from a wealth of knowledge she hadn’t known she possessed, another word she associated with long-lost childhood monsters and whispered stories over crackling bonfires drifted up and took her over, turning her inside out.

  Raider.

  Maud should have been terrified. She should have run, screaming, back toward the safety of the temple and who cared if her possible death waited for her there. This man was a certain bloody death on one of the wickedly sharp blades he carried she had little doubt he knew exactly how to wield. This man was mayhem and madness packed into that hard, lethal body like a promise.

  This man was what nightmares looked like and he was looking straight at her.

  Maud should have run.

  But instead she followed the urging of something so deep inside of her she couldn’t name it, and walked toward this terrifying man until she could see that his heavy, intimidating stare was a cool blue, as complicated as the night sky. Blue. It moved in her, as harsh and demanding as whole sermons from a furious priest.

  Except this man’s air of total command felt like a kind of poetry, not a punishment. Like the portent she’d been hoping for.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  Maybe this is a dream, Maud thought. Maybe she’d never seen that fox at all. Maybe she’d fallen and hit her head back there and this was all that was left of her, some fevered raider dream in the middle of the hot red desert, where everyone knew raiders never ventured. They stuck to the seas in their quiet, terrible ships that appeared out of nowhere in weather no one else dared risk. They stole over the wet walls of seaside compounds and helped themselves to whatever they found, taking what they liked and cutting down any fools who stood against them. They were stories told around the summer fires and bad dreams calculated to keep children from wandering off in the night.

  He had to be a dream, because raiders weren’t real. They couldn’t be, not outside a few scattered tales that had as much basis in reality as stories of ubiquitous airplanes and shopping malls. If monsters were truly men, then the whole drowned world was far more precarious than Maud wanted to imagine.

  But the good news was, if this was a dream, she had even less to lose than she did as a runaway nun.

  He was stark, harsh. He seethed, hotter and more lethal than the desert they stood in. She didn’t know how he managed to make it seem as if he held up the whole of the sky while he stood there.

  Still she walked toward him, until she was well within the grasp of those big, battered hands he held loose and ready at his sides. And he did nothing at all but watch her come, stern and forbidding in a way that made everything inside her … melt.

  Maud stopped there, so close that if she’d dared, she could have reached out a hand and touched that intriguing circular tattoo over his heart. She didn’t. It turned out she didn’t quite dare.

  For a moment it was so quiet she was sure she could hear the sun going down.

  “You look like a fucking nun,” he gritted out.

  It sounded like an accusation—and something else. His voice was gravelly, as if he hadn’t spoken in a long time. He sounded as if he was made of broken shards of rock and the harsh cast of his face looked like stone as well, and there was no reason at all that should make her feel like sobbing.

  “I am a nun,” Maud said. She blinked. “Well. Almost.”

  “What the hell does ‘almost’ mean?”

  She stood there as if this was a normal conversation, like any of the ones she might have had with a priest in the convent as she moved between her classes and chores and endless confessionals. She stood there as if her heart wasn’t kicking at her so hard it made her feel light-headed. Then again, maybe that was the heat. The lack of water. The exertion of her long walk.

  But she knew very well it was him.

  “It means that come the solstice celebration, I’ll either be made a nun in full or I’ll be left to rot in this very desert,” Maud said brightly. Casually, even, as if he wasn’t death on two feet staring back at her, his cool blue gaze making her feel edgy. Needy. Strange straight through, in a searing lash of sensation that made her toes ache in her insubstantial sandals and her pussy clench hard against it. “I’m not clear on whether they simply turn out the unworthy novices to wander about until the wild things hunt them down and eat them whole, or whether they stake us to the earth to hasten the process with a little dehydration and heat sickness. Either way sounds like great fun, of course.”

  She only realized she’d expected some sort of reaction to that when she got none. The raider merely stared back at her, stone all the way through.

  “Death finds us all, little girl.” His voice was as harsh as the desert and much less inviting. “The question is not whether you will die, but when. And how.”

  Maud swallowed hard. She hardly knew herself. Or why she couldn’t seem to look away from the raider with the sad, beautiful face and nothing but that terrible darkness in his eyes.

  “Is that an offer to do the deed?” she asked. Her voice was so dry it sounded nearly choked and she could feel her pulse hammer at her, but she wasn’t afraid. Or more accurately, she was something like terrified but she couldn’t seem to mind.

  If anything, the raider scowled harder.

  “Do you know what I am?”

  “A man.” Goose bumps prickled all over skin despite the heat and she knew, somehow, that he could see it. More, she thought he liked it. “A raider.” She tried to smile and his expression changed, became more guarded—as if her smile was an attack. “I thought they were a myth.”

  “Raiders are as inevitable as the winter rains,” he growled. “And unf
ortunately for all you scared little mainlanders in your dumb little compounds, just as real.”

  Maud laughed at that, then bit it back, steeling herself for the sort of response the bishop always had to what he called inappropriate displays of levity. Her nipples hardened as if they expected that cruel duel pinch the bishop loved to bestow on them so much, and it occurred to her that of course, the raider could see that as well as she could through the light drape of her tunic. His raider’s gaze narrowed and seemed to heat, but he didn’t touch her. He didn’t hurt her.

  What was that thing in her that twisted all around at that—as if his not hurting her was some kind of loss?

  “Do I amuse you, little nun?”

  Maud felt the threat in his voice then. It was wound through him, an unmistakably thick, dark thread. She couldn’t tell if she was so terrified she’d lost her mind, or if she’d lost her mind so much that she wasn’t as terrified as she should have been.

  “It’s just … this is the high desert,” Maud said when she thought that way he was looking at her might kill her. Or something far worse, that thudding hot heartbeat suggested. “It doesn’t rain much.”

  And then, for no reason she could imagine except a sudden flashing contemplation of what far worse might be like with a tough, hard raider, she flushed.

  Hot. Red.

  Bright and unmistakable.

  The raider reached over and took her chin in his hand with an easy authority that made her knees feel weak. His fingers were as hard as she’d expected, and far tougher than she’d imagined. His grip undid her. She felt the touch of it everywhere. From her ears to her still-hard nipples to deep in the pit of her belly, where something throbbed, a sharp and brilliant longing.

  She didn’t jerk away from that hold, or from him. She felt more vulnerable than she had in years, suddenly, and she couldn’t seem to look anywhere but at that mouth of his. Fierce and close and cruel.

  Maud had never wanted to taste anything more.

  She had no idea where that urge even came from.