Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance) (34 page)

Riordan shoved himself out from under the steering wheel and into the middle of the bench seat. Eiryn crawled into his lap, swinging her legs over him to kneel up and press herself against him. It still wasn’t close enough. She had her hands all over him, her wrapped tits hard against him. She held his mouth to hers, kissing him dirty and wild, little sounds of lust and need and urgency in the back of her throat, driving him on. Driving him crazy.

He couldn’t touch her enough. That long, lithe indentation down her back. The flare of her hips. That high, round ass, all toned muscle and shaped perfectly to fit in his palms.

He reached between them, his hands clumsy like they’d never done this before. Like this was new, this searing, impossible fire that pounded through him and poured out of her and burned hot and precarious between them like they were their own bomb set to blow.

She was naked from the waist down, which tempted him to believe in all those over-bright gods they’d left behind them. He fumbled to get his trousers open, anticipation and need slowing him down. Making it worse. He pulled his cock out and they both sighed when she lifted up on her knees to rub herself, that steaming-hot pussy, already wet and soft and juicy as fuck, up and down the length of him.

“There’s no time to play,” he growled at her, but he nipped at her chin while he did it.

“You’re so romantic,” she muttered. “As usual.”

But he didn’t care what she was saying because she was fitting the plump head of his cock to her slick entrance and taking him in.

“Slow down,” he told her, reaching down to get his hands full of her perfect ass again, kneading that sweetness. He gripped her there, holding her back when she tried to slam herself all the way down on his thick length too fast.

The little noise of frustration she made then was so hot he almost busted his nut there and then.

“Are we going slow or are we going fast?” Eiryn asked testily, spread open over his lap and arched into him like a wet dream, only the very tip of him notched inside her pussy. Her hands digging into his shoulders like she wanted to hurt him. That demanding scowl of hers on her face while her breath came too fast. “This isn’t the time to get cute.”

And he got it then. He knew why his heat was going nuts in his chest. He knew why he was already breathing hard, like he’d run a race.

He guided her down, working her onto his heavy cock, reaching for patience he did not fucking have. She was tight and slippery. She was burning him alive, inch by excruciating inch. Her hands curled into fists as she strained against him, trying to hurry him up, but he kept her slow. He made her earn it.

He almost killed himself.

And when he finally squeezed the whole hard, thick length of him inside the blazing hot grip of her perfect cunt, he was sweating.

But she was flushed and strung out and shaking. She had her lip between her teeth and she looked like she wanted to kill him, and he could
feel
the way his deep penetration rocked her. He felt it in her spread thighs, her hard fists. He saw it in her flushed cheeks. He could smell them both, sex and lust and hunger, a sweet musk that went straight to his head.

“This,”
he growled at her. He held her still when she tried to rock that greedy little clit of hers against him, obviously sick of waiting. She did it again, and still he kept her immobile, sure that he could feel her combust beneath his hands.

Her pussy was a snug fit and insanely hot. Her cunt gripped him like a fist, and she started milking him while they sat there, clenching and unclenching her internal walls in a lush, slow roll that rocked through him and very nearly humbled him.

“ . . . is torture,” she gritted out at him. She actually hit him, two fists hard against his chest. Not a play punch, either. He grunted at the impact. “You’re all the way in. Finally. Why aren’t you
moving
? Or letting me do it?”

He reached up to push her hair back from her face because he wanted to look at her. Her beautiful face. The face that had haunted him for a decade, and it was worse now. He’d thought he’d never touch her again. Now he knew he could never, ever stop. He couldn’t pretend anymore. But this wasn’t the place for that.

“This is the first time I’ve been inside you like this in ten years,” he told her, his voice rough and harsh in the space between them. When she started to frown he reached up and smoothed it away. “Just you and me, Eiryn. No bullshit compliance to hide in. No pretending it’s a duty. Nothing but us.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath. Her eyes were dark. Her hands uncurled and her fingers dug into him.

“Bloodlust,” she whispered.

He didn’t smile. He’d never been more serious in his life. He sunk his hands into her hair and curled them into fists, forcing her head back. Keeping her in that delicious arch against him while he was sunk so deep inside her. Rubbing her hot little clit against his body and moving that ass of hers back. And still he held her gaze. Fierce and hot.

And absolutely fucking certain.

“That’s the last time you lie to me about what this is. The very last time.”

She rolled her hips and they both panted a little bit. It was too hot. Too good. Sensation screamed through him and gripped him, like claws in his gut.

“You should talk,” she said softly.

He could have pretended it was a throwaway comment. He could have let it go. He was so hard it hurt and she was slick and scalding all around him, and they didn’t have time for this in the first place. But still, he tugged her mouth closer to his.

And he didn’t even pretend to smile. He didn’t pretty up the intensity in him in any way.

“One lie, baby,” he told her, because she might not want to hear it, but he knew she could take it. She was the only one who’d ever taken it. “I told you one lie. And you cut me for it. The next time you pretend this is nothing, maybe I’ll cut you.”

She was breathing too hard. He could feel the fine tremors shaking through her, spilling over into the clenching perfection of her pussy gripped so tight and hot around him. Riordan was sure he could
see
the usual bullshit form in her smart mouth. But her midnight eyes matched the dark outside and she didn’t say anything.

He understood her anyway. He felt it too.

Instead of throwing another lie at him, she moved, and that was a far better truth. It was everything. She lifted herself up, a long, lazy slide up the length of his cock, then rocked herself back down, and everything shifted.

White hot need. Fast and fierce.

She braced herself on his shoulders, and then she rode him. Hard. He wrapped his arms around her waist and met her, hammering into her as if the whole damned church was charging up the hill and they only had a few moments left to rip each other apart.

It was desperate. It was perfect.

She was his.

The heat was blistering. Intense. The crazy friction, better each time, only drove him wilder. Eiryn dropped her head toward his and Riordan took her mouth again, palming the back of her head while he kissed her, wet and hard. Demanding and consuming.

He pounded into her. He rode her clit and he slammed her down on his full length, over and over, a filthy hard pace that would have tipped over that crowded caravan.

She threw back her head as she came in a wild rush, crying out his name while his cock battered into her. She jerked against him, so hot and slippery he thought it might kill him. He took the brakes off, letting himself pump into her like a savage until it hit him too, ripping right through him and tearing him up.

He flooded her, shooting himself into her like it would never end, and she came again or maybe she was still coming from before. She bore down hard on him and sunk her nails into his skin, whispering curses beneath her breath as she slumped against him.

It was the sweetest thing Riordan had ever heard.

And for a dizzying moment, she stayed where she was. She was sleek and liquid against him, panting hard and openmouthed against his neck. Her heart or his heart or both of them together pounded so loud it drowned out the world.

When she straightened, her gaze was dark again. Solemn. But his cock was still deep inside her. He didn’t think he was the only one who wished he could stay there. Maybe do this a few more times. Or pull out so he could get his face in all that slippery heat he could feel coating him.

His mouth watered. But Riordan didn’t say anything. He knew that if he forced the issue, she’d lie.

She climbed off him and he ached again, that fast. He wanted her heat back. He wanted
her
. But they had shit to do and no more time to waste. He pulled a cloth from his pack and cleaned them both off, forcing himself to be efficient as he touched her instead of taking his sweet ass time the way he wanted.

“Thanks.” She sounded subdued. He figured he understood that, too. He wasn’t sure he liked emotions any more than she did.

The truck’s cab was nice and warm now and smelled like sex. It pissed him off on a level he didn’t want to examine too closely that they couldn’t stay right here for a while, on a forgotten hill in Utah mountain country where no one was looking for them and no one could find them even if they were. Maybe forever.

But that wasn’t who they were. He rubbed the sigil on his chest, his eyes on the mountains in the distance, already tipped with the season’s first snow. They had so little time. Maybe they’d already run out.

Eiryn was the first to break the spell that gripped them both, though he doubted she’d admit that. She pulled on those sleek black trousers that made her look like elegant death and made his dick stir all over again. She stamped her feet into her boots. She rolled up the jeans and T-shirt and shoved them back in her pack like she’d rather burn them or throw them out the window, and then she pulled out something else. Something long and lean, wrapped up tight in a length of wool.

Riordan let out a laugh. He should have known she would never, ever go anywhere without her favorite blade. She slid a bland look his way, shrugging into the harness he also hadn’t known she’d carried with her, but again, he should have guessed. She was Eiryn, after all. She’d only ever pretended to be anything else.

“Nice to have you back,” he told her, his voice maybe a little rougher than necessary. “Compliance was cute, but I like you lethal.”

And when he sorted his own shit out and got them back on the road, she was smiling.

They drove through the night, switching drivers every couple of hours to keep up their speed. The farther they got from the Great Lake Cathedral, the less they talked to each other, too caught up in the impossible mission stretching out before them. Snow in Wyoming. Highwaymen in Cheyenne, easily avoided with a little creative off-roading. Both minor irritants en route to a much bigger problem—crossing two vindictive seas too late in the season.

And later every time they had to slow down or stop to deal with more mainland drama.

“Just ram them,” he told her when they hit their second set of would-be highwaymen, camped out beneath an overpass in the flat, rolling fields of Nebraska, all turned gold on the first day of fall.

“I want blood,” Eiryn replied. But she aimed for the cab of the highwaymen’s vehicle and slammed into it with their reinforced front grill, throwing the dickwads back down the empty highway like she was bowling.

Riordan jumped out when they stopped moving and hauled ass down to the crumpled cab, his own blade in hand, ready to help any survivors along to the quick death they deserved.

When he got back, Eiryn was playing with a couple of bandits.

“We don’t have time for you to fuck around, babe,” he told her.

She laughed, jumping back from an attempted swing at her midsection by the biggest and obviously dumbest of the two. “Yeah, yeah. I’m coming.”

And Riordan took a moment to watch Eiryn at the top of her game despite weeks without any bladecraft at all, unless he counted those Colorado sticks. Her glossy dark hair flowed behind her like an inky shadow as she took down both bastards with that dizzying speed and intricate skill that had earned her the respect of every brother in the clan and the enduring fear of their enemies.

It lodged inside of him. She did. It made his chest feel tight. It made him ache in ways that had nothing to do with his endlessly greedy cock.

They liberated two weeks’ worth of supplies from the highwaymen’s ratty-ass caravan and some clothes that might do well on the open sea, when they got wet and cold and desperate enough to overlook the smell. They topped up both their fuel tanks. Then they headed east again.

The rain hit an hour or so later, pounding the fields and flooding the highway, forcing them to take it slow or risk hydroplaning into a crash that would leave them hitchhiking down a bandit-controlled road in the middle of nowhere. Asking to get jacked. No thanks.

By the time Riordan hit the outskirts of Lincoln it was well past midnight. There was a fire up in the heights of the central tower, and the sounds of drums and shouting in the thick, wet night.

“I’m going to vote no on that mess,” Eiryn said in a low voice, slumped down in the passenger seat. “Why advertise our presence to a city full of bandit scum? If the church comes looking for us, better that no one saw us come through.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Riordan muttered.

It took a long time to make their way around the perimeter, forging their own road at times and doing too much of it with the headlights off and the windows down, so one or the other of them could scout out the best route through the outlying slums that circled the city. When they hit the coast just a few miles north of the Lincoln shipyards, Riordan parked on the sand, up next to a cliff where no one could see them unless they came looking. Then they took turns napping a little while they waited out the last of the night.

They hit a pack of rabid-ass wharf bandits as the first rays of the sun began to peek over the horizon, subduing the little cell of pierced-faced weirdos with ease. That was what happened when you slept out on the docks like dumbasses, Riordan thought. You offered yourself up as an easy target.