Matylda could hardly breathe.

Then again, when Zavier appeared perfectly capable of seeing straight through her with eyes so blue they seemed to be part of the impossible sky all around her, she thought it was entirely possible that breathing was overrated.

She was sure of it, in fact, when he did no more than gaze at her for a long, hot, narrow moment. Then another. The hand he held at her neck seemed to grow heavier, but then it was gone. He reached down and took her bag from her hand, hoisting it in his much larger one as if it weighed nothing at all—which had the strangest effect of making her feel as if she was equally weightless.

Or maybe that was just the words he’d said, echoing around and around inside her head as if they were etching themselves deep into her bones.

She understood exactly why his former brides had reported that he was too intense. Too demanding. Too overwhelming. Everything he’d said and done proved he was all of those things. She found it hard to imagine what it was like to live with this man, if he did even half of what he said he would.

Matylda knew, somehow, that Zavier didn’t say a thing he didn’t mean.

Just as she knew, on a level that had nothing to do with her brain and everything to do with that blazing heat low in her belly, that he absolutely planned to do every last thing he’d promised to do. With her. To her.

Every single day.

He said nothing, he only began to walk, and it took Matylda a moment to realize that really, she ought to follow him. His legs were long, his stride as intense and demanding as everything else about him, but she found she could keep up if she hurried. And if she ignored the fact that her own legs felt wobbly beneath her.

All you have to do is fuck me, Matylda. A lot.

She couldn’t seem to get his voice out of her head. Much less her impression—call it a deep certainty—that when Zavier spoke of fucking, he was not talking about the sort of cordial interactions Matylda was used to conducting in the bell towers.

It was possible she didn’t have the slightest idea what he meant. But there were those shudders, down deep inside of her, and she suspected that whatever he was talking about, it would be dark and intense and just as demanding as he was.

She told herself, piously, that none of that mattered. She had no choice. He could be a deviant and she would still have to find a way to submit to his will and keep him happy. That was her one and only objective here.

Does making yourself a martyr make you feel better? a sly little voice inside her asked. What would you do if you didn’t have to do it?

But Matylda didn’t want to face that choice. She wasn’t sure she’d like the answer.

Zavier headed for the bus, and the driver who stood there waiting as the last of his passengers climbed on board. There was a buzzing in Matylda’s ears, drowning out everything but the things she didn’t want to let herself admit. She was completely incapable of paying attention to what was being said right there in front of her. All she could seem to do was feel. As if each one of the words Zavier had said to her were hands—his hands—moving all over her body in all those slick and sensual ways no one would ever dream of doing in the bell towers. It wouldn’t be polite.

And tithing was supposed to be polite. If not exactly lighthearted and easy, certainly not particularly onerous, either. A regular chore, that was all. Like cleaning, or laundry, or anything else.

The things Zavier had said didn’t make her think of tithing. Instead she thought of all the nights she’d spent on her little cot in the tiny room she shared with Nicoline. When she shut her eyes and curled herself into her pillow, and then imagined her tithes . . . Differently. While she rocked her hands between her legs, muffling any sound she might make beneath her sister’s soft snores.

It was her secret shame, a private thing without a name. Something she’d obviously never told another living soul, or imagined admitting to anyone, and yet the way he looked at her . . . The things he’d said . . .

Matylda had the strangest notion that he knew exactly what she could do with her hands between her thighs.

She felt red and silly. Breathless with what she wanted to call embarrassment, but suspected was something else entirely.

And then the bus driver was waving a paper beneath her nose, and requiring her to respond verbally to the usual questions that he fired at her without even pretending to hide his impatience. Did she understand the contract? That her fertility price had been paid in full, allowing her to marry while she was still young enough to bear a child for her lord, which rendered her and her husband the sole caretakers for any potential offspring? Did she understand that frontier marriages like this one with mail order brides like her had an exit clause that permitted a no-fault dissolution of the contract at the next good weather solstice or equinox, with an option for an exchange of bride to be carried out at the groom’s discretion?

“That means June,” the bus driver told her.

“Yes, thank you,” Matylda replied, but a beat or two too late, which made her flush even hotter when both men eyed her, Zavier with something that glittery and hard in his blue gaze. “June. I was just wondering if the exchange option exists for me, too.”

The bus driver frowned at her as if she’d spoken a different language. “For you?”

“I might enjoy the frontier life but not my exact circumstances,” Matylda said, and she realized she’d let her mouth run away with her. But it had already happened, so there was no stopping it now, and no matter that Zavier was studying her in a way that boded ill. “I should have the opportunity to trade one husband in for another, surely.”

“You do.” Zavier’s voice was a smooth sort of steel that made her gaze move to the wicked blades he wore attached to his chest, like some kind of fairy tale boogeyman. “You might find yourself widowed. Or divorced. In either case you can petition to remarry. That’s your recourse, sweetheart.”

All she could see was blue. His gaze. The sky. It seemed to swell in her like a long, sweet note of music, though there was no song in the air.

“But no trade-in for me.”

That glittering thing was in his gaze again, making her feel daring. Reckless. Entirely too exhilarated for someone who was standing next to a dirty old bus two weeks away from anything even remotely resembling civilization and all she knew.

“No.” Zavier was pitiless. “If this is upsetting to you, you can take it up with your local lord when I send you back down the mountains in June.”

Matylda felt that like a slap. She blinked, but managed to keep from otherwise reacting. Of course he assumed he’d be trading her in. He had no way of knowing she was different from the others. She was going to have to prove it.

Somehow, she was going to have to prove it to him. Every day for the next three months.

The bus driver cleared his throat, and Matylda told herself it wasn’t a relief to look away from all of Zavier’s simmering intensity. Exactly. But it gave her the opportunity to calm her breathing. She could admit that much.

“Do you both understand that outside the trial period this marriage can only be resolved by death or by petitioning for divorce to the local lord who paid the fertility price and likely repaying his investment in full?” the bus driver asked.

Zavier grunted an assent. Matylda murmured her own.

And that was it.

The bus driver made them both sign, signed himself, and then folded the contract into a square and put it in a small pouch.

It was done. Matylda was married to a stranger.

A stranger who intended to treat her as his wife—in his very particular interpretation of that term—and turn her in come the June solstice.

It was lucky that she had the end of her marriage to worry about, she thought then, or she might have been tempted to have a panic attack about the start of it.

And then Zavier’s hand was on her arm, and he was guiding her away from the bus.

“Shouldn’t we say something?” she asked, still more than a little dazed—though that might have had something to do with the feel of his bold, heavy hand on her arm. She could feel the heat of his palm through the thick fabric of her coat. It made something knot inside her, then seem to hum a little.

“If you want to say something, wife, just say it.”

Wife.

But Matylda shook that off.

“I don’t know what to say. I thought you might. After all, you do this all the time.” Zavier slid a look down at her from all his towering height, and Matylda flushed again. “Or not.”

“Not,” he agreed, in that low rumble that had everything inside of her spinning out in a burst of flame and then seeping into that knotted thing in her belly, making it glow.

Matylda tried to order herself to stop. To be . . . less rattled, maybe. She heard the bus start up behind her and she knew that it was her last link to the life she’d known. To her sister. To everything she’d thought her life would be before her sister had gone and fallen in love so recklessly.

But she didn’t look over her shoulder. She was too captivated by the way the strong, forbidding man beside her led her down the main street of the village without breaking his stride, making the few other people around scatter to get out of his way. As if they were scared of him.

Maybe that was what that knotted thing was, she told herself. Maybe it was fear.

But Matylda knew it wasn’t. Or it wasn’t only fear, anyway.

Zavier walked without speaking and for once, she let the silence stand between them. It was soothing. She was still trying to process the enormity of the fact she was now a married woman, with all the things he’d promised her piled on top of that. She thought about what the bride coordinator had told her about Zavier’s previous wives and all the complaints they’d lodged about his “appetites.” She realized that all the tithing in the world couldn’t possibly have prepared her for a man who took his sexual demands so seriously. Three times a day when she was used to twice a week at most—and with far less intimidating men? Her head spun.

But not because it scared her, she was forced to acknowledge, because this didn’t seem like a great time to start lying to herself.

Between her legs she was already slick, as if she’d rubbed herself with oil in preparation for a tithe. Or a long day of paying off a standing debt of tithes.

“We have a good many hours of daylight left,” Zavier told her, as he led her to an old truck that was parked down the road from the lodge, on the way out of town, as if he’d been ready for a quick getaway. He opened the passenger door and threw her bag inside the cab, then nodded for her to climb up after it. “We’ll try to make a little headway on the trip home.”

“How long will it take?”

“A week, more or less.” He studied her face in the crisp sunshine, that merciless glint in his eyes. “You won’t see civilization for some time, sweetheart. If there’s something you can’t live without, this is the time to say so.”

She didn’t know why. She imagined it was highly unlikely he’d give it to her.

“It might surprise you to learn that not everyone considers a village of this size civilization,” she said lightly. Or anyway, she tried to sound light. Airy. Not at all shaken. “I prepared for the end of the world in the lower elevations.”

If Zavier appreciated her lightness and airiness, he didn’t show it. He only shut her door behind her when she climbed inside the truck and moved around to the driver’s side, looking all around as if he fully expected an ambush.

And the bride coordinator had been very clear.

You need to prove yourself to him, and you need to do it quickly, the man had told her matter-of-factly. This is not a man who trusts that anyone we sent him will suit him at all, and everything you do will be evidence to support what he already believes. You can assume you’ll have to prove that you’re different from the start.

Matylda had assumed she knew what the pinched-face man meant. She’d had two weeks on that bus to practice the obliging, capable, sunny personality she’d been sure any hard-as-nails frontier man would want in a wife. It wasn’t a big stretch from her usual personality. That would be unsustainable. But she’d resolved to be more meek. More acquiescent, no matter what she really thought.

More like Nicoline was, all shy smiles and If you think so. Less the fired-up older sister she’d been when she’d marched the pair of them up from the coast and set about securing them a life.

But now, after what Zavier had told her, she realized she’d been going about it all wrong.

He probably didn’t care that much if she was light or airy. He likely assumed acquiescence anyway, or would insist upon it, which was more or less the same thing. Either way, she suspected he would be far more interested in the increasing dampness between her legs.

He swung himself into the driver’s seat, and slammed the door. And then raised an arrogant brow at her when she put her hand on his arm. His hard, corded arm. That seemed entirely hewn from rock.

“We are married now, officially.”

If possible, one golden brow rose further. “Do you regret it already? You’re not the first. But I’m afraid you must still wait until June. Or at least until the next bus makes it up the mountain, which could be some time. The weather is unpredictable this time of year.”

“No.” She summoned all her courage, then she took her other hand and slid it onto his granite thigh. “I don’t regret it.”

And somehow, every single part of him became harder. Denser. As if he was made of rock, yes, but encased in steel.

“I want to honor my new husband,” she whispered, because she couldn’t seem to make her voice sound the way it usually did, so calm and easy. Not when she was this close to him. And touching him. And the world seemed to fold in on her, as if it was nothing next to all that blue. Or that white hot knotted thing inside of her that seemed to burn her alive. “In the old way.”

Zavier studied her for one shuddering beat of her heart, and then the next.

And then slowly, very slowly, as a wild heat gleamed in his blue gaze and made everything in her pull tight and hot, a corner of his hard mouth kicked up.

He didn’t speak. He slid out from behind the steering wheel, into the center of the truck’s wide bench seat. Matylda had the jumbled impression of his blond beard and his piercing eyes, and then he was lifting her. He pulled her onto his lap, tilting her so she had no choice but to brace herself on the dashboard or tip straight into it.

It was just a tithe, she told herself. Just a simple tithe, no matter the rock hard body beneath hers that made her want to soften. Melt. Dissolve into something sweet that could pour all over him.

Sometimes the men in the bell towers got a little creative, she reminded herself as she tried to calm the riot within her. And that was always fine, if maybe a little bit less fun for her than they seemed to imagine.

She felt Zavier’s hands on her long skirt, even as the hard wall of his chest pressed into her from behind and made her feel too hot. Too enclosed. Too much of too many things she could hardly name. She felt the material of the heavy skirt slide over her legs, like a kind of caress, as he pulled it higher and higher, revealing more of her thighs and her nakedness beneath as he went. She wasn’t bleeding, so she wasn’t wearing the confining panties that everyone used at those times. But she’d never been so aware of her body before. She’d never thought much about the fact that she was so naked and accessible beneath the skirts she wore.

She stripped down completely in the bell towers and she never felt like this. And all Zavier was doing was lifting her skirt, and she felt more vulnerable than she ever had before.

Matylda was grateful, suddenly, that she wasn’t facing him. That he couldn’t see her expression. That she could keep that hidden from him.

Suddenly, she couldn’t think of anything more important.

He lifted her again with an arm wrapped tight around the narrowest part of her corset. He reached between them with his other hand, but she was breathing too quick and too loud on her own to hear what he was doing, and then it didn’t matter.

She knew.

Because he was maneuvering her back down, that strong arm tight and sure beneath her breasts, lowering her with absolute skill and mastery directly onto the head of his cock.

He was enormous.

Zavier laughed, very low and entirely male, and Matylda realized she’d whispered that out loud.

She flushed again, hot and bright and humiliated, and he laughed again as the wide head of his cock spread her folds. That one arm held her while his other hand gripped her hip, and he didn’t pause. He didn’t test her or fumble or ease his way in.

He kept on, working her down onto the head of his cock, then further, inching his way into her, and splitting her wide open as he went.

Matylda had never felt anything like it in all her years in the bell towers. She’d never felt anything close.

He was so big. He was huge.

And he didn’t give her time to breathe her way through it, or argue, or even stiffen herself against his inexorable entry.

He simply pressed his way inside, huge and demanding, giving absolutely no quarter.

There was something about it that made her tremble, and not in fear. She felt like one big, wet ache, everywhere. She was too hot and he was relentless, and the wildfire intensity of it rocked over her, taking her as surely as he did.

As if he planned to keep every promise he’d made her, right here and now.

The notion made her shake a little as her tight sheath fought to accommodate him. She felt him everywhere, so thick and hard and long, as if there was nothing in the world but the man who held her and the cock she was impaled on.

Nothing at all but Zavier.

And then he began to move. Not himself, but her.

She braced her hands on the dashboard, staring out the windshield at the ramshackle little town spread out before her, and those impossibly steep mountains looming in the distance, but she didn’t see a thing.

Because Zavier was lifting her up and then slamming her back down, again and again.

As if she was nothing but an instrument for his pleasure, and something about that idea made her shudder, that knotted thing inside her catching and melting more with every stunning thrust. He held her and he moved her, rocking her down all the way as if she’d taken a man his size a thousand times. Or as if he expected her to take him without complaint, no matter what her experience, just as he’d told her.

She didn’t know why that notion made her feel so . . . feverish. She only knew that each time he slammed her down on him with the exact same intensity, something in her unraveled and pulled tight at the same time.

He kept going, as if he could do this all day, and exactly like this. Thrusting into her over and over as he hauled her down onto him to make sure she took every inch of him, until she wondered how she’d ever thought that the sex she’d had in a bell tower, or a faraway beach shack, was even sex at all.

Because it was nothing but a pale shadow of this.

She felt him everywhere. Her toes in her lace top boots, her bared legs and thighs, and the way he stretched her between her legs. Each deep thrust was so full, so hard, she thought it almost hurt—it should have hurt—and yet instead it sent a different sort of red-hot heat blooming and rebounding all the way through her.

He pulled her tighter to him, so that his wide rock expanse of a chest was like an untended fire at her back. Then, more astonishing, she felt his mouth at the crook of her neck, tasting her. Testing her.

Driving her mad as he stopped moving her in that wicked rhythm, letting her settle there, her arms locked out against the dashboard and her head almost to heavy to keep upright.

Then he picked up his pace all over again.

He hammered into her, and this time he wasn’t moving her. He was doing the thrusting, redefining deep and hard and hot with every slick thrust. The hand on her hip moved beneath her skirts, and then he found it. That place where Matylda always ached. Where she was always so greedy, so unfulfilled. The place she tried, over and over again, to use in all her tithing sessions, but often failed when her partners didn’t seem to understand it was there. She’d long since accepted that only she seemed to know what a little touch and attention could do—sending her spinning off wildly into bliss.

But Zavier knew.

He found her unerringly. He pressed down in the same instant that he slammed himself into her, and it was too much.

She thought she screamed. She knew she shook. But Matylda didn’t care, because she was shattering.

Again and again and again.

He bent her forward, and he slammed himself into her, throwing her from one wild explosion to the next, and then one more, and then, when she thought she couldn’t take another moment of it, he threw her over the edge again.

And this time, he pumped himself into her one last time, and then, finally, followed.