Page 61 of Her Viking Guardian

I wanted, with a hunger that dissolved several layers of self-deception in a single instant, to descend more deeply into the non-miraculous mystery of the vǫlva: how a woman was trained to submit… to display… to suffer the greatest indignity, her master’s hardness in her most intimate place… to climax on command…

I wanted to know how she could find in that condition, whole regions of perception and understanding normally hidden from herself.

I felt my breathing change. My pussy had begun to pulse. I knew, with mortification and with a strange almost scholarly awe, that I was becoming wet simply from standing in the cave, looking at the ship, and knowing what they all knew about me now.

Henrik turned.

His eyes found me at once, as if whatever had awakened in me had indeed called to him and he had heard it in a register beneath language. I don’t think I moved. I think my body simply gave itself away in posture and breath and face.

He came to me in three strides.

“Look at you,” he said, but the words sounded unlike his usual words. Rougher. Lower. Less like an executive and more like the carved men on the wall, the ones who did not need to justify use because use was already part of the order of things.

I swallowed. “Herra⁠—”

He caught the front of my sundress in both hands and tore it straight down.

I gasped. The sound seemed very loud in the cavern. The cotton gave way with shocking ease. Cool air hit my skin and then his hands were on me. He stripped the ruined dress from my shoulders and down my arms, dragged the pink bra away, hooked his fingers in the lace of the panties and ripped those too. The tiny pretty things Giovanna had put on me became shreds in moments, their civilized femininity annihilated by male impatience.

I heard Giovanna take a breath behind me. Mateo said nothing.

I stood naked in the cavern again but for the pendant, warm again at my neck. Wunjo… for vǫlva, now and from this moment forward. My skin rising in gooseflesh, my breasts bare, my hairless sex exposed and already embarrassingly slick. Henrik looked down and made a sound that went straight through me.

“Yes,” he said. “I thought so.”

I covered nothing. I didn’t know if I had forgotten, or if I knew better than to try to hide from my Viking Herra.

He took my arm and turned me, then propelled me toward the ship. I stumbled on the last step because my knees had gone uncertain. The bench met the front of my thighs. He pushed, and I bent over it at once, palms catching on the worn wood, my cheek nearly touching the same surface I had laid myself over, and then my dream body had known as my deflowered body had slept. The old smoothness of it against my skin sent such a vivid rush through me that I whimpered.

My body remembered. The pendant dangled away, over the end of the bench, leaving the memory of its warmth behind, in my chest.

Henrik’s hand spread over the small of my back. Another took hold of my braid, pushing at the back of my head to bend me lower. I could feel the open exposure of myself behind, the vulnerable spread of thighs, the ache of need. I heard his zipper, the rough drag of fabric. Then his palm came down once, hard, on the already marked flesh of my bottom.

I cried out.

The blow seemed to complete the circuit. Pain flashed over the lingering welts from Giovanna’s mastix, and under it my pussy… my cunt… my fisse… I clenched and flooded with fresh wetness so shamelessly that I could feel it.

“Henrik,” Giovanna said behind us, her voice very calm and therefore somehow more intimate with what she was witnessing. “You weren’t exaggerating.”

“No,” he said.

Then he thrust into me.

CHAPTER 30

Ilsa

I had thought myself ready because I had craved it so desperately. I had not been ready at all. The hard invasion of him over the bench, in that place, under those eyes, with the ship looming around us and the carvings in the dark, tore a cry from me that had pleasure braided inseparably through its pain. He gave me no slow accommodation. He took me with the authority of a man obeying an instinct he recognized as right and just.

The bench pressed hard against my thighs with the force of his first thrusts. I clutched at the wood. My hair fell over my face. He drove into me again and again, and with each stroke the need in me that had been building since we entered the cavern changed from ache to consummation. I was so wet that the sounds of it filled the chamber obscenely.

“Oh… oh… Master…” I heard myself say. “Oh, Master… please…”

“Yes, lille en,” Herra Henrik said behind me, his voice like gravel. “I’ll give you my hardness this way whenever I choose.”

A soft chuckle came from Giovanna’s direction. I couldn’t tell whether it held mockery or admiration.

My Herra’s hand left my hair and moved under my hip and down between my thighs. He found the swollen center of my need at once and worked it with brutal accuracy while he fucked me. The combination took away my language immediately. The bench, the ship, the cavern, the undeniable observational presence of Giovanna and Mateo, Herra Henrik’s body simply claiming mine… taking mine… using mine—everything gathered into one overwhelming fact.