Page 83 of Her Viking Guardian

“How do you want me?” I asked, feeling my brow furrow in the familiar way it always did when the time to receive my master’s huge, hard reðr had arrived again.

“On your side.”

He eased me down to the furs himself, arranging me with pillows from the bag I hadn’t even noticed he’d packed. One supported my head. Another tucked partly under my belly, another between my knees until the whole posture felt surprisingly stable and safe. The care of it made my throat tighten. Then he bent my upper leg a little and settled it where he wanted it. The position opened me enough that I felt exposure immediately.

“You’re comfortable?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll tell me if that changes.”

“Yes, Herra.”

He kissed my shoulder. Then I heard the small practical sounds of his preparation: a zipper, fabric moving, a cap unscrewed. The scent of the lubricant was faint and clean. My body recognized it with absurd submissive gratitude.

His hand moved first over my hip, then to the curve of my backside. He parted the cheeks, and stroked there idly for a few moments, calming me or exciting me further, I couldn’t quite tell which. Then his fingers found the little place that still retained all its power to humiliate me. Even accustomed as I had become to this use, I could never feel that first slick pressure at my anus without a rush of acute self-consciousness. It was too intimate, too naughty, and too tender all at once.

I made a tiny sound.

“Relax,” he murmured.

I obeyed as best I could. His fingers worked patiently, opening and soothing, and with each gentle intrusion I felt the old contradiction intensify. I was used to this. My body knew how to yield. The ring of muscle softened under his hand far more readily than it once had.

None of that diminished the thrill of degradation.

If anything, the familiarity made it more psychologically naked. I could no longer tell myself this was purely force, purely education, purely something done to me from outside. I had learned to welcome the act. I knew what it did to me, and I wanted it anyway. That knowledge turned the shame from accident into medium. It made the blood roar in my ears and the tree stir almost at once, just under my consciousness.

“Good girl,” Henrik said quietly when my body opened for his fingers.

Then the broad, slick head of his cock replaced them.

I drew in a breath and let it out carefully. The pressure there, no matter how often I submitted to it, always felt impossibly specific. It felt like the male world laying claim to the most hidden and embarrassing point in me and making me discover, to my disgrace, that I became more myself under that claim.

He pressed forward very slowly. The ring gave way. I gasped into the furs.

“That’s it,” he said. “Easy.”

The stretch resolved into fullness by degrees. The old pain had softened over the months from a crisis into an ache, but that ache still carried enough edge to light up the same pathways. Shame flashed through me with almost chemical swiftness. My mind caught fire in the familiar pattern.

I was a pregnant woman lying on her side in a hidden Viking chamber while her master gently pushed his cock into her anus because she had asked him to.

The thought itself sent me upward.

It happened so fast that I scarcely distinguished bodily sensation from ascent. Henrik still moved with exquisite care inside me, and at the same time I felt my consciousness gather and rise through the trunk I no longer needed to seek laboriously. I had traveled the route too often now. The metaphor came when called. The canopy opened almost reflexively.

The leaves above me were green and silver with northern light.

For a moment I only hovered there, suspended in the strange doubleness I had come to know: my body in the furs, the weight of Henrik’s manhood lodged in my bottom, his hand on my hip; and also my self among boughs immense enough to hold weather and time. I expected at first some mission, some branch leading toward intelligence, some pressure of other systems touching ours.

Instead I found stillness.

No, not stillness. Summer.

The transition came with such gentleness that tears pricked my eyes before I understood why. The air changed from mythic abstraction to something I could almost smell: warm grass, salt, a sweetness like clover and sun on dry earth. The branch gave way to a slope. I stood, or seemed to stand on a meadow that tipped softly toward a blue-gray sea.

The light had the long, slanting richness of a northern evening in high summer, when everything seemed both mild and impossibly vivid. Grass brushed my bare ankles. Wind moved through it in little silver runs. Beyond the slope the North Sea shone under a pale sky, not violent now but deep and breathing and familiar in some place below thought.

Children’s voices rang out behind me.