Warlord and the Waif by Chloe Parker

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ELLA

THAT’S HOW WE operate for my first month at Kaer Idunn.

I learn how to work in the kitchen, what needs to be tidied and taken care of. Portia shows me everything she knows, even illustrating a few fight moves in our free time. I ask her endless questions, and she’s happy to answer, telling stories about her time as First Mate aboard Freyr’s Fury. I even start to like Lucien, cold as the butler may be.

But Calder and I continue to clash.

He makes his demands, orders me around, tells me I’m stubborn. I question him, challenge him, and provoke him.

He threatens to send me back to the market, to be put back into stasis for another hundred years.

But he never does.

Thus, we fall into a kind of grudging respect. I serve him, while still breaking a dish every so often and always speaking my mind. And he keeps his hands off me.

His eyes are an entirely different story.

It would be impossible not to notice the way he watches me while I work. He isn’t shy about showing his appreciative stares, his attentiveness nearly tangible on my skin. When I serve him his drinks every night, his alcohol-hazed blue eyes cover my cleavage in ocular kisses, leaving me breathless and hiding in the kitchen.

And my dreams are even worse. Spectral hands between my legs every night, doing things I’ve never experienced before. His voice in my fantasies, deep and growling, telling me I belong to him. I’ve woken on the brink of orgasm more than once, talking myself down only through sheer stubbornness.

But I’m starting to break, because everything about my life has gone wrong, and the one thing I know I feel is this deep, all-consuming desire.

That’s why I’m so hesitant when he invites me to his quarters one stormy afternoon.

I’ve danced around him successfully because I’ve stayed away as much as possible. But here, I don’t know what will happen. Portia and Lucien normally tend to his more personal needs, but today they’ve gone into town for errands, leaving me alone in the castle with him.

I hesitate at the heavy wooden door, raising my fist to knock. I can’t seem to bring my knuckles to touch the wood, uncertainty weighing heavily on my shoulders even as excitement bubbles in my stomach.

The door slides out of the way, surprising me, and I stumble inside.

His quarters are opulent in the ways I should have expected from a space viking. The room has vaulted ceilings and stone walls and floors, a massive stained glass window overlooking the city beyond. The scene it depicts is one of a massive, three-eyed stag with massive horns surrounded by dense woods, with a retinue of Skoll in hot pursuit. Even though it’s dim and raining outside, it produces a strange effect on the room, warming it up and painting it with color.

The light falls on a variety of horrific alien monsters mounted against the walls, with too many eyes and too many teeth, while a giant bed in the back left corner is coated in their furs. It looks comfortable, big enough for two.

Stop, Ella.

A stone basin is set into the floor in the middle of the room, steam rolling off the water inside. Calder sits in the bath with his back to me, his golden hair taken out of its normal plaits to leave his long locks tumbling over broad shoulders. His arms are out of the water, draped over the wall behind him, his tattoos charred and raw. The antlers that rise from the crown of his head are majestic and sharp, gleaming with a mosaic of light from the stained glass.

I can see the scarred tattoos on his rust-colored skin in vivid detail, and imagine they must hurt in the hot water.

He doesn’t move as I stand frozen in the doorway, unsure of what’s about to happen.

“Come closer,” he orders, his voice deep and gravelly.

“What do you want?” I respond.

He turns to look over his shoulder, and I catch a glimpse of his bright blue eyes, like the core of blue light in an inferno.

“I need assistance with this salve,” he says, gesturing toward the edge of the bath. “I would ask Portia, but she’s in town, and…”

He trails off.

Something in his tone—maybe the vulnerability in his request—softens me toward him, and I nod.

“Of course,” I say, “I’ll help you.”

I swallow hard and step forward.

He doesn’t look at me as I come closer to kneel at his back. Normally, he’d be leering at me and cocky with his attitude, so certain that I couldn’t resist him. But now, he seems shy, almost reticent to ask for my help.

I can feel the heat of the water on my skin, and when I roll up my linen sleeves, condensation builds up in dewy drops on the fine hair of my arms.

“Apply the salve to my scars,” he murmurs, staring straight ahead.

“Won’t that hurt?”

“It always hurts,” he snaps. “But this is a concoction given to me by the Hyperboreans. It should soothe the ache, at least for a time.”

I pick up the crystal jar, examining the contents. The salve is a thick blue paste, with a consistency like lotion. I pour some out and rub my palms together, anxious about putting my hands on him. The feel of the salve is actually quite soothing, cool and comforting, and I focus on the sensation of it between my fingers.

“What are you waiting for?” he bites out.

“Give me a minute,” I mumble.

I watch his shoulders tense. He wants to lash out. But he’s never hurt me, and I’m starting to think that he wouldn’t lay a hand on me, no matter how angry I made him.

Taking a deep breath, I press my hands gently against his shoulders. He tenses under my touch, the bulging muscles hard and unrelenting. I’ve never considered myself a particularly gentle person, and I hesitate, worried that he’ll be angry if I hurt him.

“Is this alright?” I murmur, keeping my hands still.

The muscles relax, still hard but with a little more give.

“Continue,” he rasps.

I know the tattoos cause intense pain, sometimes so bad that it leaves him doubled over. So I’m careful with him, easing my hands along his shoulders, tracing the lines onto his chest and delicately into the grooves of his scars. I roll my hands over his shoulders, brushing his collarbone, and he sucks in a breath.

“Sorry,” I blurt out. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

He just groans in response, easing into my touch and leaning his head back.

I know he’s almost certainly naked under the water, but I don’t dare look. The steam is so thick that I wonder if I’d catch a glimpse of anything anyway. And do I even want to know?

Maybe I do.

Despite myself, I start to enjoy the feeling of his hard body under my hands. I’ve had only a tiny bit of physical contact since I woke up here two weeks ago, and nothing resembling intimacy. And since I’ve been in stasis for a hundred years, that means I haven’t been this close to someone in over a century.

I close my eyes and imagine I’m somewhere else, maybe in bed with my only lover from college, or the high school boy who felt me up in the backseat at the drive-in. But Calder feels so different from those boys, hot and muscular and so much more manly than they ever were. His muscles contract and relax under my hands, and my joints seem to move of their own accord as I press my fingertips into his flesh.

This shouldn’t feel as good as it does. I never wanted to be here. Calder, in spite of being a prisoner himself, is my captor.

But it feels so damn good to be this close to him, and touching him gives me the chance to live out my nightly fantasies.

I try to focus on the task at hand, following the lines of his spiraling scars down his arms. I keep my eyes open, staring hard at his alien features to remind myself that what I’m feeling is strange and wrong. But as I trace the tattoos down to where they curve like shackles around his wrists, I see that his fingers scrape against the stone just as mine do on his skin.

He tilts his head back until it's resting at my breast, his eyes closed, the first branch of each of his antlers pressing into the sensitive flesh of my chest. The horns curve up over my shoulders and around my head, like a halo or an embrace.

We are already entangled.

I keep working the salve into his skin, praying that he doesn’t open his eyes as a fire lights in my chest.

Thunder rumbles outside, the lightning setting the stained glass window aglow, and Calder opens his eyes, that impossibly bright blue staring up at me. He looks hungry, like he could turn and devour me at any second.

“You enjoy this,” he growls, a statement more than a question.

I release a shuddering breath, urging my body to stop telling me this feels good. He doesn’t make a move to touch me, letting me do the work as he drinks me in with his gaze. He rests his head fully against my chest, and I can’t suppress the voice in my head that wishes he would turn and press his mouth to my breast, to yank my bodice down, and suck a nipple into his mouth.

I never had a dirty mind before I met Calder.

“No,” I say, even as my body screams yes.

“Don’t lie to me, woman,” he says, his expression measured. “Remember that I can hear your heart racing in your chest. I can feel your breath quicken. I see the rosy blush across your cheeks.” His muscles tense. “Your body tells me what it wants, no matter what that pretty mouth says.”

I bite my lip, and it’s never felt so exquisitely painful.

Everything he’s saying tells me that he’ll take me, no matter what I say. But he doesn’t move, waiting for me to give him permission. If I were a self-respecting girl, I would get out of here. Nice girls like me aren’t supposed to do things like this. Even when all my friends got into free love, I thought it was sweet to have my monogamous relationships and long-term boyfriends.

Calder is anything but sweet.

I draw my hands back up his shoulders, over his chest, leaning in until his horns press almost painfully against my collarbone. I breathe in deeply, filling my lungs with steam and with the heady scent of pine and scorching heat rolling off him.

“If that’s what my body is telling me, why don’t you just do what you want with me?” I challenge.

His fists clench against the rock, but he keeps his gaze steady on mine.

“I derive no pleasure in taking something so precious when it is not freely given,” he rumbles, and his voice is so low that it seems to vibrate in my chest. “But if you say yes, I would take great pleasure in making you come until you beg me for more.”

My mouth falls open at the filthy things he says, and I can’t stop the sigh that puffs out of my throat.

“Say yes,” he growls, and I know it’s a request and not an order.

I gulp before I nod.

“Yes.”