Brothers of the Wild North Sea (27 page)

He would lose against the man restored to health. The conviction of that made every tiny hair on his shoulders and spine rise, as if Fen were already touching him, brushing his palms down his naked back.

In the barn’s furthest reach, he eased the lantern into a niche in the stonework. Then he turned. Fen was standing a few feet away from him, waiting. A cassock was as impractical for hunting as for delivering cattle, but for Aelfric’s sake he and Cai had conscientiously worn them, traveller’s and raider’s clothing folded away out of sight, since their return. Either Fen was getting used to his or had found one that fitted him better. He wore it with an insouciance that was anything but holy. He was beautiful.

Cai cleared his throat, which seemed suddenly full of golden motes of dust from the hay. He said, dryly, “What are you waiting for?”

“Did it ever occur to you, Abbot Cai—these things I could do to you, these things you want and fear so much…?”

No use in denial. “What about them?”

“They are things that you could do to me.”

Cai’s lips parted. He felt all expression drain from his face, and suspected that he looked about as bright as Yarrow, and twice as astonished. Fen was holding out a hand to him. Cai ignored it. He closed his eyes—strode blind and bruising-hard into his arms.

The freedom offered was all Cai had needed. Spectral thoughts about greater or lesser men, comparative physical strength, evaporated in Fen’s heat as they landed in the hay. Cai wasn’t sure who had knocked who onto his arse this time, and it didn’t matter—he clutched Fen’s shoulders, rolled luxuriantly with him, letting the pent-up wildness surge and surge. Fen gave it back to him, thrusting to meet each wave. The heavy cassock fabric caught and restrained them, but even the friction of that was good, a sweet torture Fen brought to an end by hauling up Cai’s hem and crushing their bodies together, flesh to engorged flesh. Too hot a day for the linen-strip undergarment—Cai’s shaft plunged straight between Fen’s thighs, the place where lean muscle would grind hard enough to bring him over in a second.

“No!” Cai gasped. “Not like that. Do them to me—the things you said.”

Fen went still. Their struggle had left Cai on top, and Fen gazed at him, hands securely spread and holding his backside. The flickering lamplight met the amber fires in Fen’s eyes. “Your choice.”

“Yes.” Cai didn’t know how this creature had come to be waiting beneath him—this barely tamed man, not a bit of his wildness abated, letting him decide. It felt like embracing a storm. “This time, you show me. Fuck me.”

Fen’s pupils widened. He took Cai in for a long moment more, as if assessing him—for strength, intention, what his flesh, bone and muscle would withstand. Then he pushed up, rolling him powerfully down onto his back. “I want you stripped,” he growled. “I want to see every inch of you. Now.”

Now the cassock fabric was unbearable, a hot, tight skin. Cai sat up far enough for Fen to start ripping it off him, and they fought over girdle, sleeves, the tussle of getting the thing off over his head. Immediately Cai seized Fen’s robe to return the favour, but Fen stopped him, hand locking hard round his wrist. “In a second. Gods, Caius—let me look at you.”

Cai propped himself on his arms. He bore the inspection as best he could, although blood seemed to rise and burn beneath his skin wherever Fen’s gaze focussed. He wished he could see himself through those firelight eyes, see whatever it was that was making sweat sheen on Fen’s brow, in the hollow of his throat. All he knew of himself was that he was ordinary—hair rumpled, bits of hay caught in it, his body just the stocky, tough framework that had carried him about his business for so long in a difficult world. He was scarred. The hair that marked his chest and a midline down his stomach was black and wiry, an inheritance from Broc. But Fen was running his fingers over the old injuries, that dark line. His face was rapt.

Cai shivered. “You’ve seen it before, you know.”

“Yes. Down at the rock pools, when you decided to wash me. But I was sick then. I couldn’t appreciate it all.”

“It’s not so much. Just a hill farmer.”

“You have no idea.”

Cai released a groan. He tipped back his head and shut his eyes. Fen continued a fingertip caress down across Cai’s navel. He bypassed Cai’s shaft with a brush of his knuckles. Cai gasped in frustration, but Fen reached deeper, closing a short-lived grasp on his balls, then pushing up between his buttocks, one finger finding target.

“God!” Cai managed, with an emphasis that startled them both. “Yes. There.”

“Very tight. Not your first, am I?”

“No, but it’s been a long time.” He writhed, trying to find the beautiful touch again. “I know it’ll hurt,” he added stoically, to prove that he wasn’t afraid. “I won’t mind it. Go on.”

“I won’t hurt you.”

“How can you not? It’s not like with a woman. And Benedict’s cell was next to mine. Oslaf sometimes sounded as if he was dying.”

Fen quirked a smile. He leaned forwards and kissed Cai’s throat, then the sides of his neck, all the while rubbing at the entrance to his body, until Cai thought his heart would tear out through his ribs. “You don’t think Benedict and Oslaf found ways to ease such…dreadful suffering?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it. I…”

“Be quiet. Here, my unimaginative doctor. Look.”

Fen let go of him long enough to reach into his cassock’s side pouch. He withdrew a glimmering bottle Cai instantly recognised. “That’s the wheat oil and rosehip I get Hengist to make up for me for winter, to cure coughs and chest ailments. It lubricates… Oh.”

Fen made a valiant effort not to laugh at him. His hair had grown back, long enough for a bright bronze curtain to shield his face as he turned aside, uncapping the bottle. “I took the liberty of stopping by your supply cabinets on my way out here. And I made no assumptions, before you get your back up, you stiff-necked Celt. But the moon was full—the night so warm—and I knew you were out here alone.”

He was pouring the oil into one palm. Cai’s protest about the raid on his supplies died unspoken. The next time the touch came at his body’s entrance, it was warm and slick and he had no resistance to it, the tight ring of muscle convulsing but not rejecting the inward slide. The first pang of broaching over, the push was delicious, as if Fen were reaching for some stray fragment of heaven—the golden fruit that had suddenly grown deep in Cai’s guts, perhaps, pulsating just in front of Fen’s reaching fingers. “There. Ah, there!”

“Yes. I know about
there
.”

Cai gave a sobbing chuckle. “Not
your
first, either, then.”

“No. Many fine brother warriors. None of them anything like you.”

“And your people don’t mind it?”

“No. Not any more than yours do, outside of mad enclaves like this. It’s expected, among men who travel without women, although…” He leaned forwards and kissed Cai, lingeringly, tongue shoving deep in time with his fingers. “Although Sigurd was fretting that I’d never get him heirs.”

It was the first time he had said his lord’s name without bitterness, and Cai, although he could barely speak, tried to attend him. “Your brother, though—”

“Ah, yes. Gunnar has done it for both of us, time and time over, the women willing or not. But men fall fast among the Torleik, and Sigurd likes a brood growing up around him, of good blood and ready to replace us. Now—before you die of this, my beautiful monk—kneel for me. Up on your hands and knees. Now.”

Cai couldn’t have done it except at those soft-voiced commands. His limbs had turned to water, desire washing strength out of him. He grunted in protest as Fen withdrew his fingers. The emptiness inside was unbearable, his cock so stiff against his belly that one touch would have finished him. Fen was sitting back, stripping off his cassock, and Cai closed his eyes to that in case it had the same effect. Awkwardly he scrambled onto his knees. He
would
die if Fen kept him waiting, die of shame at being so ready, laid so open.

“Fen,” he rasped, a dream coming back to him—the dream of the wolf from the sea. “Fen, for God’s sake, fuck me now.”

The wolf had turned into a man. This man, whose advent had been written into Cai’s dreams, his very blood, before he’d ever seen him. Crying out, Cai lowered his brow to his wrists, his hands clenching and unclenching in the hay. The wait ended instantly. Fen’s thighs pressed to his. The oil’s warm musk filled his nostrils, and he knew without looking that Fen was rubbing his shaft with it. Fen’s hands closed on his hips, holding him still.

The push of that great cock inside him burned the touch of Fen’s fingers to an ashen memory. The mounting pressure would destroy him. He felt with anguished detail the gape of his arsehole to accommodate the head, and he stifled a yell as his muscles clamped down afterwards, a reflex of shutdown and repulsion. “No! Stop. I can’t.”

Fen went still. He released Cai’s hips and put his arms around his waist, the hold at once so powerful and so tender that tears blurred Cai’s vision. He kissed a hot track between Cai’s shoulder blades, up the back of his neck. “Pain?”

“No. Just…too much. Too much inside me.”

“I will stop. If you are sure.”

“No, I’m bloody not.” It came out on a sob. The only thing worse than this overwhelming pressure would be the loss of it, the emptiness of that. Fen had sounded breathless, his voice ragged. “Am I hurting
you
?”

“The muscles inside you are strong. And you’re fighting me.”

“I’m not. I want you. I…”

Fen took hold of his cock. His grip was hard. Shocks of pleasure went through Cai, undoing the iron lock of his arse around the penetration. More oil came, Fen releasing his embrace long enough to pour it over his shaft where it was holding Cai open. His fingers pushed gently against the ring of strained flesh, rubbing the oil in. Fen said something in his own language, deep and rough, and once more Cai almost understood it, the words following Fen’s touch, the fullness inside which suddenly was not unbearable but essential, perfect, the one thing that Cai had to have.

“Fuck me,” he commanded again, this time knowing exactly what he was demanding. “Yes. God, all the way, Fen. Now!”

Fen moved, a deep thrust that drove the heat into Cai’s core. Cai gave a cry of astonished relief. He stopped crushing the hay in his hands and flattened them to the barn floor, taking his weight on his palms, lifting his hips to meet Fen’s next great push, up and in, then drawing slowly back so that the strange golden fruit swelled up again beneath the friction, throbbed and threatened to burst. He moaned and shook his head, the pleasure harder to endure than the pain had been.

Fen began a rhythmic movement. He kept his grip on Cai’s shaft, wrapped the other arm tight round his waist and secured him. His breath came and went against Cai’s ear—shuddering breath and more words in that wild tongue that sounded like the sea, and then a low growl of oncoming release.

Cai couldn’t tell him to wait or to let go. He wanted both—to make the pounding fuck go on forever, and to have Fen explode into his body now. Then all choice and words dissolved as a climax like nothing he had ever felt before began to claw its way up out of his bones. It seemed to come from every inch of him—his marrow, his lungs, the place where his backside was locked and convulsing round Fen’s shaft—tearing him up by the roots, ripping raw shouts from him as bolt after thunderbolt of ecstasy hit. His cock spent into Fen’s hand, into the grip that never faltered even when Fen choked out his name, broke rhythm and rammed to completion.

They hit the barn floor hard enough to skin Cai’s belly. Fen landed on top of him, knocking the air from his lungs, and redeemed the pain of withdrawal with an impassioned clasp of his shoulders, tenderly brushing back the hair from his face with his free hand. “Caius!”

Cai grunted. His face was buried in the crook of Fen’s arm, and he never wanted to see daylight again. Fen’s skin was as fine as a butterfly’s wing beneath his lips. Life streamed in the pulsating vein. The salt of his sweat lay on Cai’s tongue like a benediction. “Yes,” he managed, raising his head a reluctant fraction. “Here. Alive.”

Fen’s laughter held a note of relief, as if he might have been in doubt. Gasping for breath, he rolled onto his back, pulling Cai with him to lie in his arms. “You bloody beautiful thing.”

Chuckling, Cai wrapped an arm across Fen’s broad chest. Unlike Cai’s it was hairless, ivory smooth except where the nipples rose, brown as hazelnuts, contracting even now when Cai’s fingers brushed them. “You’re not so hideous yourself.”

“Better than your first?”

“My first was…” Cai had to stop for a moment. His lungs were still labouring, his throat sore. “One of Broc’s lecherous old cronies, up against a wall when I was barely fifteen. So you didn’t have much competition there.”

“Oh.” Fen’s embrace tightened. He pulled a face and gave Cai a look of wry, grim sympathy. “Sorry.”

“There were others after him. Better. Nobody who…” He pushed up onto one elbow, picked a hayseed out of Fen’s hair with unsteady fingers. “Nobody who reached in and almost ripped the soul from me. Nobody who nearly stopped my heart.”

Fen took Cai’s face between his hands. Fen’s mouth was red, deliciously swollen with excitement, nothing of the wolf left in those depthless eyes but a trace of glowing amber. He drew Cai down. Their mouths met—carefully at first, almost with delicacy. Then Cai pressed passionately down. Words like flickering lamplight went through his mind. He wanted to say them and was glad his tongue was paralysed, pushing against Fen’s in a silent battle that ended only when scarlet splashed across his vision and he had to break away to breathe.