Page 36 of The Devil's Viking

Beside Vixen, Iris felt puny and ugly; next to her eye-popping curves, Iris was an adolescent, a woman-child who didn’t even need a bra for her teeny breasts. What made it worse was that every man who came into the bar only had eyes for Vixen: men flocked to her tables, they competed for her attention, they tipped her extravagantly.

The MC guys flirted with her outrageously, and a couple of them even took her into the crash rooms and soundly fucked her. She always emerged from the rooms disheveled, her hair wild and her eye-makeup smeared, a satisfied, sated look on her face. If the noises that Iris heard coming from the rooms were any indication, Vixen clearly enjoyed whatever had happened in there with the guys: she possessed genuine strength in her sexiness, her sexuality, and it was something that Iris didn’t understand.

She’d never found any power in sex; quite the opposite actually. Vixen’s brash, brazen revelling in being openly, confidently sexual confused Iris, even scared her a bit. The thought that she could actuallyenjoya man being all around her, all over her, inside her, was alien. She didn’t think it could ever happen for her.

And just as she finished having that thought, Viking popped into her head. Again. As he did so often, especially when she was trying to imagine herself enjoying a man’s touch. A man’s kiss. The idea of a man stroking her breasts, stroking between her legs, made her sick with fear and anxiety, but when she imagined Viking doing it, she felt something else. She felt…

Turned on. Totally, helplessly, completelyturned on.

He had been sleeping down the hallway from her for a week now, and Iris was finding it hard to stop thinking about that. Despite falling into bed exhausted every night, she’d toss and turn for two hours, her whole body straining to get out of her single bed and walk five doors down to him.

What would Viking do if Iris just teleported into his bedroom in the middle of the night? Would he kiss her, welcome her into his bed? Or would he tell her to go back to her own room, to not place all her worth in her body? He’d turned her down very firmly once before, so why would she expect anything different if she tried again?

She’d thought about going down to his room on some pretext, but what the hell reason could she possibly have for wandering down the hall at midnight, setting off every motion sensor as she did, except the obvious one: that she wanted him. Wanted him here, with her, holding her and kissing her until she was breathless. Wanted him to shed his clothing, rip off hers, and do things to her body and soul that she’d never experienced, things that Zoe and most definitely Vixen knew intimately.

But he’d never be interested in her, no way and no how. She was damaged goods, and she wasn’t curvaceous and womanly. Compared to Zoe and Vixen, she was no catch, and no way that a man like Viking didn’t have his choice of women. Real women, women with confidence and poise.

She met her own purple eyes in the mirror, and as she did every morning now, she told herself to admit the whole truth.

You don’t just feel unworthy and ugly as a woman because of Zoe and Vixen. You know why you really feel that way. Come on, now – just look at it.

Slowly, she turned her back to the mirror, paused. She took a deep breath and then looked over her shoulder at the huge black tattoo on her back, the one that marked her forever as Gideon’s property. The one that – in some ways – she hated even more than she hated the man who had actually inked it into her flesh. It reminded her that even though she’d escaped the Garden, she’d brought it with her. She’d never be free.

Without any warning, there was a knock and then right away her bedroom door opened. Viking was standing there, as he had done every morning for the past week, cheerily saying, “Good morning, honey!”

She spun to face him, one arm crossing over her breasts, the other stretched the length of her body so she could cover her pussy with her hand. It was useless, though: his eyes had widened with shock, and not at her nakedness. They’d been fixed on her back, and all the color had drained from his face.

“Hey,” he said, whirling around and closing the door. He leaned against it on one large forearm, keeping his back to her. “I’m sorry, Iris. You’re always dressed by now when I come get you to start baking. It’s past six.”

“I – I know,” she managed, scrambling to her bed where her clothes were laid out. “I’m running a bit late.”

“I’m sorry,” Viking repeated. “I shouldn’t have –”

“Forget it.” She got dressed at lightning speed, one eye on his broad back. “It’s fine.”

“It’s notfine. Not by a goddamn long shot.”

“What – what are you talking about?”

He turned around to face her now, his expression angry. “I mean, I don’t need to ask who the hell did that to you – it’s obvious that it was that sick fuck Gideon. Did he do that to all the women? To mark you as his sex slaves?”

Iris was silent. Viking took a calming breath.

“Iris, baby.” Viking’s voice was the gentlest that she’d ever heard it, and despite herself, she looked at him. “You know that you can tell me anything, right? I know you don’t feel ready to talk about what happened at that place, and I get that. I do. But the more time I spend with you, the more I really,reallywant to be here for you. To listen and help you unload some of this horrible burden that I see you carrying around.”

“You do?” she squeaked. “You want to –”

“Help,” he finished. “I want to helpyou. Just tell me how. I’ll do anything that you need, anything you ask.”

She stared at him, utterly dumbfounded. In the whole of her life, no man had ever offered to help her, not once. More than that, Viking – big, huge, tall, strong Viking – was telling her that he’d do what she told him. Almost like…

Like I have some power after all.

“How about this,” he said. “Tell me one true thing.”

“About – about the Garden?”

“About the cult, or about you. Trust me with one thing only, baby.”

---