Page 32 of Her Viking Guardian

Herra Henrik moved, a shallow, slow push over my tongue and into my mouth that made my eyes sting at the corners.

“In our case, the old understanding of what men are and what women are, and what passes between them that makes both of them more fully themselves.”

His hand on the back of my head held me still. He thrust his hips forward, though with a gentle pressure. I took him in better than I had supposed I might, because the posts under my hands were steady and I could grip them and breathe and receive him. To my intellect’s horror, some part of me that had been building toward this since the bride saddle found the motion almost natural, though the stretch of my jaw and the weight of him on my tongue remained extraordinary.

“We have kept the sanctuaries. The longships. The bride saddles.” A pause in which his breathing changed, just slightly. “The knowledge of what a vǫlva is, and what she can do, when a warrior is there to discipline her and to use her fisse and her røvhul properly, and to guide her that way to her true potential.”

He withdrew enough to let me breathe, and I drew a long, grateful pull of air through my nose. I felt him rest the head of his penis against my lower lip. The heat from his manhood radiated against my wet mouth.

“You had a vision on the bride saddle,” he said. His thumb moved along the line of my jaw, tilting my face up toward his. I looked at him. His eyes were pale, I realized; a gray that in the torchlight looked almost silver. The scar above his eyebrow caught the light. “Without a Son of Odin present to witness it—let alone to fuck you up into the branches of the Worldtree. Without anyone to hold you through it.” Something moved in his expression that seemed very different from the possessiveness I had seen a moment before. Compassion? Care? “That tells me something very important about you.”

“What?” I whispered. The word came out before I could stop it, and I braced for his response.

But he didn’t reach down and around me to spank my bottom, as I had instantly feared. He looked at me for a long moment, the head of his cock resting warm against my lips, my hands gripping the cold iron posts, my knees on the kneeling stool of an ancient cell beneath a Sicilian city.

“That you were already looking for the tree,” he said. “Before you ever found the cavern. Before you found the mosaic. You were already listening for it.” His thumb moved along my cheekbone. “And the tree was listening back. So you will remain with us. We have arranged a prestigious fellowship for you at a Danish university. Your dig team and your doctoral advisor have been notified. Your advisor was very understanding, and congratulates you.”

Then his hand pressed gently at the back of my head, and I opened my mouth again. He pressed forward more deliberately this time, past the point he had reached before, and the sound I made around him had no scholarly content whatsoever.

CHAPTER 16

Ilsa

My Herra began to fuck my face.

As if from the top of the cell’s dome, four or five feet over his blond head, I seemed to look down on the obscene act: a tall, strong man thrusting his manhood in and out of a naked, bound young woman’s mouth.

Face fucking. Fucking her face.

I had never experienced anything so degrading. I had never watched such a thing happen to a girl, even on some terrible porn video, perhaps out of the corner of my eye on a guy’s unguarded screen.

I had heard the phrase, though… and every time I had wished I hadn’t, because of the scarlet blush it had instantly brought to my cheeks.

Hovering there, above myself, I understood, with a clarity that arrived too late to do me any good, the expression that the artist had somehow captured on the faces of the women in the carvings, in the cavern of the longship.

It didn’t really represent suffering, but it didn’t represent pleasure, either. It seemed to occupy a territory between those two things: a place where the body’s experience outpaces the mind’s capacity to categorize it, and the face simply gives up trying to manage its own appearance, as the person inside the body the man is using floats upward and gazes down upon herself as his possession.

Henrik’s hand at the back of my head had no cruelty in it. That was a thing I had not expected, could not have predicted from my prior experience of the world, which had not included anything like face fucking. My Herra held me in place firmly and steadily, with obvious certainty about his right to use me for his pleasure.

That certainty… the complete, unhurried confidence that communicated itself through his palm… brought a perverse need between my thighs that made me contract the muscles there in a shameful quest for satisfaction. Instead of satisfaction, though, I only achieved more arousal, and I sobbed around the thrusting phallus at the urgency of the sensation.

He moved slowly at first. My jaw ached with the stretch of accommodating him. I gripped the iron posts until my knuckles hurt, and I breathed through my nose in the measured rhythm Nymphobus Oceanus had taught me in the intake room.

I focused on the breathing. The breathing gave me something to do, some small agency, a task I could perform correctly or incorrectly.

“Good,” Henrik said, above me. His voice had changed again. The lecturing quality had gone. What remained was lower and rougher and stripped of its careful construction, like a building under construction, before the siding goes on. “Good girl. Your mouth feels good on my tol. Keep breathing. Take your Herra.”

I took my Herra.

The phrase assembled itself in my mind as if I were quoting it in a scholarly article: take your Herra. As if it were a line I had found in a primary source I had adduced. As if I could hold it at arm’s length on the end of an academic footnote and examine it from a safe distance.

But I was on my knees between iron posts in a volcanic stone cell under Palermo, with a Viking’s massive penis in my mouth, and his large, warm hand holding my head still, so that he could enjoy himself. He taught me his rhythm, and my body learned it, the way a body learns physical tasks… not through understanding but through repetition, the accumulation of small adjustments, the gradual discovery of what works and what doesn’t.

I squeezed again, down there, and it worked. To my absolute horror, I produced a whimpering sound in the back of my throat that I could not have described as distress.

Henrik heard it. I knew he heard it because his hand stilled for just a moment, and then his thumb moved along the back of my skull in a slow arc that seemed almost involuntary, as if he hadn’t decided to do it. As if my small, treasonous sound had reached him somewhere he hadn’t expected to be reached.

Then the rhythm resumed.