Page 82 of Her Viking Guardian

His expression changed a little, growing graver. “You don’t have to work today.”

I smiled despite myself. “I know.”

He kissed the corner of my mouth. “Do you? You’ve been very obedient about pretending to rest. Not always successfully.”

That made me laugh softly. It also made me want to kneel before him and serve as I should, my mouth full of my Herra’s hardness.

“I’m serious,” he said, not harshly. “You’re not on vǫlva duty.”

The word duty, applied to something so intimately perverse, sent a pulse through me. I lowered my eyes. In six months the title Sister of Freya had become attached in me to meeting schedules, intelligence summaries, pregnancy monitoring, nursing consultations with the matres and the mœðr, and also, inseparably, to the humiliating bodily means by which the men expected their intelligence and visions improved: my anus stretched around my master’s cock atop his bride saddle, rising into the upper boughs of the Worldtree as he enjoyed my bottom’s tightness. The practical and the obscene had long ago fused.

“I know, Herra,” I said.

He stroked my braid once, then my neck. “Good.”

I should have left it there. Instead I heard myself say, “Will you use my bottom anyway, Herra?”

His hand went still against me.

The words had come out with less hesitation than they once would have done. That, by itself, fascinated me. There had been a time when merely imagining myself asking for so shameful a thing would have made me want to disappear into the floor. Now the shame remained fully alive, but it no longer blocked speech. It had become a roadway through which desire and need traveled.

Henrik searched my face. “For pleasure?”

“For a vision,” I whispered, then corrected myself because the distinction no longer held cleanly. “For both.”

His eyes darkened.

I wet my lips. “Put me on the saddle.”

“No.”

His refusal came instantly.

I think some old reflex in me still expected to test boundaries, because disappointment flashed up at once, irrational and hot. “Henrik… please?”

“No.” He cupped my jaw, not roughly but with complete finality. “You are not going on the bride saddle like that.” His hand slid from my face to my belly. “Not now.”

I let out a breath through my nose. There was no arguing with the calm certainty in his voice, and in truth some part of me had known he would refuse. Pregnancy had not made him less dominant. It had made his protectiveness another instrument of command.

Still, I looked at him with what must have been a plainly pleading expression, because his thumb passed once over my lower lip and his tone softened.

“I’ll give you what you need,” he said. “In the bridal chamber. On the furs I brought for you.”

My whole body answered that. It was so immediate and so complete that I felt heat rise into my face.

“Yes, Herra.”

He rose and helped me to my feet. The ship creaked slightly under our movement, though it did not move at all. The old irrationality of the place pleased me. He kept his hand in mine as we went into the narrower chamber, carrying the bag in his other hand. The bridal room felt smaller than I remembered, and more intimate. Perhaps that was because I knew more now. Perhaps it was because my body had already begun to anticipate the exact route by which shame would become sight.

He spread the furs with care, making a layered softness over the old stone. Then he turned to me and undressed me almost ceremonially. My dress went over my head. My bra unclasped. My panties slid down my thighs. He helped me step free of them one foot at a time because of my altered balance.

The difference from the way he had ripped my clothes off the last time we had been in this sanctuary could not have been starker, but my Herra’s ownership of me felt no less complete for the care he took. I stood before him with my belly rounded, my breasts heavier than they had once been, my sex already slick and my bottom destined for him if he chose.

He looked at me for a long moment.

“Beautiful,” he said.

No elaborate praise could have moved me more. Beautiful in this state. Beautiful because of it, perhaps. I touched my pendant and then let my hand fall.