Ravished by a Viking (14 page)

“I don’t need love,” she said, infusing haughtiness into her tone to tweak him. “That emotion only interferes with a warrior’s focus.”

He grunted. “You are with Dagr. Since you aren’t of his clan, are you destined to marry him?”

“Freya, no!” she said, her heart beating fast because she had suffered one moment, back in her father’s keep, when she’d wondered what it might be like ... “I am promised to his brother.”

Baraq groaned and squeezed her breast again. “This can’t happen again.”

“You complain too much.” She rubbed her bottom against his cock, enjoying the sound of his ragged breaths. “I think it’s because you haven’t taken your ease.”

“Just be quiet and don’t talk about it,” he growled, a hand clamping on her buttock to hold her still.

“Your body is so hard, your muscles tight, you will never rest,” she said softly, innocently.

“I am the master of my body.”

“Truly?” She dragged his hands off her breast and hip and turned inside his embrace to face him. “Let me explore. I’ll satisfy my curiosity, and you won’t be left quite so grumpy.”

He held still so long, she knew she had him, even after he thinned his lips and shook his head. Sweat beaded on his face and chest.

Birget placed her hand alongside his cheek and rubbed her thumb on that tightened lower lip. “I’d like a kiss before I sleep,” she whispered.

His gaze narrowed. “I don’t trust that look in your eyes.”

She grinned, enjoying flirting, acting the woman for once. “Are you afraid of me?”

He shook his head, his lips curling in mild disgust. “Afraid for my life and my balls, and I’m not too sure which I prize more at the moment.”

She slid her hand down his throat, past his chest, and scraped her fingers through the silky black hair arrowing down his lower abdomen. When she reached the erection thumping against his belly, she ran a fingertip slowly down his length. “How can you feel so soft and so hard at the same time?”

She wrapped her fingers around him like a gear stick on a snow-eater and glided her thumb over the smooth, cushioned head. She glanced back up to find his dark gaze staring at her face. “I can do this quickly. Show me what pleases you.”

His eyes fluttered closed and he groaned.

She smiled, letting him see it when he speared her again with his intense gaze.

“You’re lethal, Princess.”

“Not something I haven’t been told before, but in an entirely different light.”

A strangled laugh escaped him, and he cupped the back of her neck and brought her close. His kiss was quick, hard, and then he pushed on the top of her head, urging her down the mattress.

He didn’t give her time to savor her victory or to lick the many places she wanted to taste along the way. He pushed her down until her face was even with his cock, but then she didn’t care that he’d deprived her of the journey.

Birget ran her nose along his steamy shaft, smelling his musk and her own. Her tongue followed, licking tentatively, then lavishly once she decided she liked it.

“You’re killing me,” he moaned, lifting his buttocks and rubbing his shaft against her cheek.

She liked the way his hands cradled her head, the way his fingers dug into her hair and tugged. She sensed the violence he could unleash and decided then and there that she’d have that for herself. Just once. She was promised to Eirik, after all.

For now, she needed to enslave Baraq. Learn how to control a man with her womanly wiles.

Warming his cock in her hand, she scooted down and stroked his balls with her tongue. Something Ilse said could make a warrior tremble.

They’d joked that it was as much from worry about having teeth so close to a man’s most precious jewels as it was from pleasure, and the wicked glint in Ilse’s eyes had intrigued her.

As her tongue laved his balls, wetting them thoroughly, she had the urge to fill her mouth with them, and she opened her lips to suction, and then pulled them inside where her tongue continued to slide over them.

Baraq groaned loudly, the tension in his voice spurring her on. And now those fingers clutching her hair pulled her closer, telling her of the pleasure he was incapable of describing with words.

She suckled his balls, rubbing her tongue on them, and felt the subtle changes, the way they hardened, the way they drew up closer to his groin. Releasing them, she came back up his cock, and eagerly opened her mouth to clasp it around the tip, her tongue torturing the sensitive skin just beneath the ridge encircling it.

His fingers gently guided her down his shaft, and he stayed still while she sank and rose, taking a little more of him every time she dove.

Birget glanced up and found his dark, gleaming gaze staring intently as she took him. His cheeks were reddened, the bone beneath more pronounced by the tightening of his features, and sharpening by the second.

His breaths were ragged and coming faster, and she noted that her own weren’t exactly even. Her pussy was quickening again, moisture trickling from inside and wetting her lips and thighs.

“Birget,” he said softly. “Are you aroused?”

She nodded, his cock still trapped inside her mouth.

“Would you like to orgasm?”

She sucked harder on his cock.

His eyelids fluttered, and he shook his head. “Bring that pretty ass of yours around, darling. We can pleasure each other.”

Without removing her mouth from him, she slowly crawled around, guided by his strong hands, until her thighs were spread over his face, her pussy hovering above his mouth.

At first, she couldn’t move, struck still by the wicked flicks and strokes of his tongue. He climbed the length of her furrow, lapping with broad swipes of his tongue. Then he gently suckled her lips, teasing them with gentle bites that made her quiver. When his fingers rimmed her entrance, her pussy squeezed, trying to trap the digits.

He slipped one inside her. “Does this hurt?”

She came off his cock, gasping. “No.”

“Do you want more?” His voice was as tight as the rigid body beneath her. How odd when her own body was becoming fluid, her pussy softening.

“Please.”

He slipped another inside, and then pressed his lips against the top of her pussy. A gentle touch that soothed, until he started to suckle the spot, lips pulling. Blood rushed to that spot and her pleasure knot swelled, tortured by the flick of his tongue inside his mouth.

“Ahhh.” She groaned, rubbing her face on his cock, undulating her hips in shallow motions until he cupped her ass and squeezed hard to hold her still.

Which maddened her. She opened her mouth and drove down his cock, sucking him as deep inside as she could, stopping only when his blunt head met the barrier of the back of her throat. Then she clasped him hard with her mouth and drew as strongly as she could, sucking relentlessly, her tongue lashing him furiously while he wagged his head between her legs and pulled her clitoris.

The explosion when it came surprised her so much her teeth bit down.

She caught herself before she did damage, but Baraq’s whole body seized. When she wrapped her teeth with her lips and resumed sucking, he shouted and rolled his hips up and down, up higher, slamming into her mouth, then erupting, spurts of salty seed coating her tongue. She swallowed it down, greedy and triumphant while her own body’s release ebbed.

When his bucking quieted to gentle tremors, she came off his cock and licked it up and down, enjoying this phase of sex as she watched his shaft soften. “He is not nearly as impressive now.”

He grunted. “Come here.”

She crawled clumsily around, her knee slamming his nose, then bumping too close to his balls for him to hide a wince. When she lay pressed against his side, her head on his arm, she sighed.

His eyelids were drifting down. Then he darted a glance her way. “This can’t happen again.”

“I agree,” she said, hiding a smile, knowing her words belied her intention.

“We’ll rest a bit. But we can’t disappear for long. Someone will come looking.”

Birget snuggled closer, resting her cheek over his heart. The steady thrum was comforting and drugging her to sleep. She yawned and slid a hand across his belly.

He dragged it up to his chest. “No playing there. Sleep.”

As Birget drifted off, she thought of Eirik, the man she hadn’t met, but whose existence had spurred this journey. She wondered if he’d be as attentive to a woman’s pleasure as Baraq.

Her last thought had her smiling. Why couldn’t a princess have both a husband and her own concubine?

Twelve

The next afternoon, Dagr watched as tension tightened the features of the Heliopolites. He figured he’d better start worrying. The order had gone out minutes ago for everyone aboard the
Proteus
to grip hold of something solid. All life-support systems had been turned off. No sound other than the beating of his own heart registered.

Without the hum of machinery, every breath, every word sounded hollow. The air already grew stale and cold. No lights showed other than those glowing on the bioluminescent screen, which reflected glints of starlight bouncing off the ring of battle-ships and cruisers lined up at the perimeter of the frontier.

They’d cut engines after pointing the
Proteus
at a gap between those ships. Now they made a silent run through treacherous territory, hoping the armada wouldn’t detect the cloaked transporter.

A loud groan of metal made Honora wince.

Dagr’s attention sharpened.

“Just the hull creaking. Normal,” she whispered. “And we don’t have to worry about them detecting sounds in space, just our particle signature, which is why all systems are off.”

“Then why are we whispering?” he groused, impatient with the silence and the waiting.

Her lips lifted in a small smile. “Nerves, I guess.” She sat on the top step of the dais, her hands around a rail to keep from floating away.

Cyrus sat in the captain’s chair, gripping the arms. Dagr had chosen to rest beside Honora, also clutching a rail. Glancing down, he smiled to see his fists clenched so tightly his knuckles were white.

The slide through the wormhole the previous afternoon had been anticlimactic. The ship’s stabilizers made the journey undetectable for the passengers, although the pinpoints of starry light stretched and twisted as they flew through it. Rather like the bright flares of the Dragon’s Fire Borealis in the night sky over Skuldelev.

Thousands of leagues beyond this perimeter, if they succeeded in passing through the armada’s line without being blown to pieces, lay the feral colony where the bounty hunters’ ship was scheduled to deliver the legal part of their cargo.

Dagr focused on the destination, because for now, he could do nothing. With slow strums of his fingers, he stroked the black stone strung around his neck, then dropped it in disgust when he realized what he was doing.

If Cyrus and Honora could remain calm, and they knew the dangers they all faced, then so could he. Inaction was his bane. His muscles were stiff from waiting. It left him feeling ineffectual, something a clan-lord should never experience.

They continued to drift through the armada’s net, the silence stretching so long that at last Dagr’s eyelids drifted downward.

“Restart the engines,” Cyrus said, his command jarring in the stillness.

Head snapping up, Dagr blinked and glanced at Honora, who wore a wide grin.

“Did I wear you out last night?” she asked, her voice pitched low.

Dagr grunted, his blood heating instantly at her intimate tone. “Which of us was so spent she trembled?”

Ablush suffused her golden cheeks, but her amber eyes sparkled.

“You were not afraid?” he asked, lifting his chin to the screen and the fading glints of armada ships.

Looking chagrined, she shook her head. “I have to admit I’m finding this whole adventure exciting.”

“You missed your true calling, Lady Pirate,” he drawled.

She wrinkled her nose, then turned away as lights flickered and weight dragged them firmly to the steps.

Her smile was slow to fade, but fade it did. Her glance swept the command deck and he knew she counted her days aboard the
Proteus
.

“Why did you do it?” she asked, turning her head to capture his gaze. Her cheeks reddened and she must have felt the telltale heat because she ducked her head.

“Do what?” he said beneath his breath, although he thought he knew.

“Why did you share me yesterday?” she whispered. “You don’t seem the sort to share your toys.”

“You are right.” Dagr considered ending his response there, because he wasn’t accustomed to having his motives questioned—about anything. But her expression, so vulnerable and open—not something she was likely aware of—moved him to answer. “I don’t indulge often in group fare. But I wanted your complete surrender.” The sudden heat in her glare seared him.

“You wanted to dominate me.” Her chin jutted upward.

Her rapid change of mood amused him. “You make that sound like an evil thing. Do you not feel better now? More relaxed with me?”

Her back stiffened. “Now that I’m willing to let you lead, you mean?”

“I will treat you well, Honora,” he said softly, preventing himself from reaching out a hand to soothe her. “You will have no regrets.”

“Because you say so?” she said, her tone tart. “Do you think I won’t miss everything I strived so hard to achieve?”

He didn’t respond, holding himself still because to answer her now would only further spur her anger.

“You have no idea how hard a battle earning this berth was,” she whispered harshly. “I had so much to overcome. A tarnished name, my sex. And it only took an hour for you to destroy it all.”

Dagr cupped her cheek, running a callused thumb over her smooth skin. “Tell me what you battled to get here.”

She shook her head, then took a deep breath before she again raised her gaze. “What happens if we never find your brother?”

His stomach clenched at the thought—a possibility he shoved aside. “You mean, to you?”

“And my crew and ship ... to you and me.”

He pulled his face into a stony mask, unwilling to argue over this. “I will not rest until I find him.”

“Then you will likely die.” She sighed and her shoulders slumped. “What happens then to your kingdom? To your people? You don’t think your attack will go unanswered, do you?”

He ground his teeth. He’d thought of the consequences, but had refused to listen to the voice inside him that urged caution. Thor’s thunder! He was a Viking. The Consortium had overstepped. If the Icelanders didn’t meet them with violence, they might as well surrender again to the yoke of slavery.

Honora fell silent, her gaze dropping to the hands she held curled together in her lap. She had been an instrument in his brother’s abduction, but he couldn’t hold tight to the need for revenge that her actions justly earned.

He would show compassion. Enslave her in retribution for his brother’s abduction. Her ship was forfeit as was the freedom of all her crew.

He wouldn’t explain that to her yet. Already she’d ceded ground in their sexual war. Remembering how lovely, how embarrassed and aroused she’d been with his two men, he felt a deep satisfaction that eased the horrible tension that had ridden the back of his neck for days.

“Have you thought about how you will gain permission for us to dock at Karthagos?” she asked.

“I will tell them I’m a pirate and that I’ve captured a Consortium ship filled with pure light.”

Her one-sided smile pleased him as so many things about her did. She wasn’t one to dwell long on her problems.

“That should do it.” Her eyelids drifted down and she peeked teasingly from beneath the thick fringe. “Pirates have colorful names. Have you thought of what yours should be?”

He smiled at her teasing manner. “What do you suggest?”

“Something you might actually answer to. The Black Wolf, perhaps?”

He grunted, knowing the rude, masculine sound of it aroused her. “You like my tattoo.”

“I’ve always been a sucker for a man with skin art.”

“It’s not intended as art. The wolf is my totem.” At the arch of her eyebrows, he shrugged. “One of my concubines is a believer in the old religion. Teiwaz is my totem.” He lifted the stone amulet and pointed at the arrow. “By surrounding me with the symbol and infusing it with her prayers, she seeks to protect me.”

“Your concubine?” she said slowly. In a heartbeat, her features tightened. Her breathing hitched.

Again, he held still, his gaze searching hers. Better for her to know now than to think he had misled her. “I am a king among my people. I am entitled to many wives and concubines. I have only two who serve me. A modest number.”

She nodded—too quickly—and glanced away.

He considered telling her now that she’d have that same place of honor in his household, but something made him stop.

Too much, too soon. They barely knew each other, and there was still so much to be done.

Honora pushed up from the step. “We should have a plan,” she said, her voice brisk. “For how we will approach Karthagos’s secure airspace. They will see a Consortium ship, hear your very unlikely story that you captured it, and be suspicious this might be a trap. The Consortium has rumbled for decades about launching a new offensive to increase their territory. We should agree on a strategy now.” She paused beside the captain’s chair and gave Cyrus a pointed stare. “Cyrus, since you’re so good at subterfuge, you should probably join us.”

Cyrus’s mouth tightened for a moment, then eased slowly into a smile. “I’ll take that as a compliment, wench.”

“Talking like a pirate already,” she muttered.

When she’d passed him, Cyrus winked. “I need to pierce my ears.”

“That’s not what I’d pierce,” Honora said, giving him a false smile over her shoulder.

Dagr laughed and clapped a hand on Cyrus’s shoulder. “Find Frakki. We’ll meet in the canteen.”

Every Viking not needed to keep the ship secure ringed the table where Dagr, Honora, Frakki, and Cyrus sat.

With Turk guarded but at the controls, the rest met to devise a plan to capture the civilian transport ship at the dock in Karthagos. They’d hashed through the details of acquiring permission to dock, but now haggled over who would be part of the delegation to barter for the information they needed to find the ship.

“I should accompany you,” Honora said, bracing for an explosion.

Dagr’s glare was as sharp as his name. “You’re a prisoner. You’ll remain aboard this ship.”

Honora blew hot. She leaned over the table and tapped it with her forefinger. “A prisoner who is the captain of the hostages.” She leaned back, and took a deep breath. “They will expect you to keep me close and to flaunt my capture. And you’ll need me there to prove up your claim.”

“What do you mean?”

She knew she had him now. He might struggle with his desire to keep her, a woman, safe, but the mission came first. “They will suspect this is a Consortium trick. A Trojan horse.”

The blank look he gave her said he hadn’t a clue what she was talking about. The most famous battle in her people’s history before their exodus into space, and the barbarians had never heard of it.

“In our legends, a wooden horse was left at the gates of a great city-state as tribute, left by the warriors the city-state defeated. The horse was enormous and the Trojans rolled it through the gates, where they let it sit as a symbol of their victory while they drank and feasted. But when the celebration fires died that night and everyone slept, the men hidden inside that great horse escaped. They opened the gates and let in the Greek army, who then sacked the city.”

“They will think this ship is a Trojan horse,” Dagr said quietly. “That Consortium soldiers will sneak into their midst.”

“Yes. You can’t let me remain aboard my own ship. You need me as a hostage while you meet with the men who hold the captives to prove your strength.”

“Why can’t Baraq pretend to be the captain?”

“Because there is likely already a bounty on this ship. And my name will be out there.” She grimaced at the thought of the heads nodding, memories nudged to recall her father’s shame. “They’ll know you lie if you tell them Baraq is the captain.”

He leaned forward, his pose challenging. “Why couldn’t I tell them I killed you in the taking of the ship?”

She inhaled, thinking hard, but in the end shrugged. “Baraq is in charge of security. He doesn’t know as much about the ship as I do. It wouldn’t be believable that you killed me, but kept him alive. He’s not essential to you.” She held his stare, daring him to tell her she exaggerated to serve her own agenda.

He remained silent so long, she had to resist the urge to fidget beneath his fixed stare.

“Shouldn’t I fear that you will tell them I’m not a pirate?” he asked softly, but with each word so distinct that no one doubted his anger. “That I seek vengeance against the hunters who stole my people?”

Honora raised her chin higher, unwilling to be cowed. She wasn’t some soft, petted
concubine
. She hadn’t earned her rank by showing weakness. “You will tell them the truth. Your brother is among the captives taken by the bounty hunters, and the Black Wolf will capture a dozen Consortium ships if he must to rescue him. You aren’t a pirate because you are born to it, Dagr. You are defined by the actions you take. They believe in vengeance. They honor strength and ruthlessness.”

“Will they not think me weak if they see you unharmed, walking beside me?”

She cleared her throat, wincing at the glee he might evince at her next suggestion. “You can’t show me mercy or compassion in their presence.”