Zavier couldn’t remember the last time he’d fucked a redhead.

His cock, still cranky after a long winter out there on his desolate stretch of land with nothing but his hand for company, practically started singing hosannas at the sight of the redheaded woman who walked right up to the edge of the porch, spoke without cringing away in fear or bursting into tears, and called herself Matylda.

While issuing what he could only view as a challenge.

She was already a better bet than at least seven of the other silly females they’d sent up here to appease him. And Zavier certainly wasn’t picky, but she didn’t hurt to look at, either. Plump tits spilling over the top of one of those ridiculous corsets the women wore all over the European islands. A pale, white face that was more open than pretty, with wide set green eyes and a pleasantly wide mouth that he estimated could take his dick nice and deep, and sported a faintly stubborn set to it besides.

But it was that red hair that really got to him. She’d pulled it back into a fat, gleaming coil she’d gathered to one side of her neck, and it made Zavier want to unwind the whole mess of it and get his hands in deep, then use it to move her head exactly where he wanted it most. He could think of more than a few places already.

His visits to what the enterprising villagers here called the tithing stations—when this was lawless, unclaimed territory up here and there was no real tithing, only groups of entrepreneurial women who provided pussy and a few drinks to the passing men in exchange for the highest price they thought they could get away with—hadn’t helped as much as he’d thought it would. Sure, it was nice to bust a nut with company for a change after the long winter without a woman. The first winter without a woman since way back in the early days after Zavier had run aground on old man Esteban’s land almost fifteen years ago.

That was part of why the tithing station hadn’t really scratched his itch. Zavier came from far across the sea in the raider-held islands, where pussy was free and unlimited. He didn’t like paying for it. And he didn’t particularly like stunt fucking, either. He liked his sex comprehensive, constant, and without artificial limits like a certain time period for each payment. He liked his women to come all over him, because his favorite thing was how wet and shivery their cunts got when they were losing their shit on him, and therefore he didn’t see the point of a series of dramatic positions that were certainly creative, but didn’t lead to what he wanted.

Zavier didn’t like doing much of anything that didn’t give him what he wanted. Some called that a personality flaw—but not to his face. No one dared say that kind of suicidal shit to his face.

The raider clans he’d come from were only children’s stories here on the other side of the bitch Atlantic, but the people Zavier met in what was left of the Alps didn’t have to know who and what he was to fear him. All they had to do was look at him.

“Zavier,” he grunted by way of greeting. Even though he figured she already knew that. “Your new husband.”

And then he started toward her, down the few stairs that led down from the ancient lodge where he’d been impatiently waiting for the bus to roll up since the equinox. He was edgy and restless, wanting to get the hell away from all the people who clogged the village and back to his land, where there was nothing but the wind and the sky and the sea in the distance, showing him that he was still just as far as he wanted to be from home.

“And no,” he continued as he drew closer, watching the way her gaze went wary and her chin tipped up, both intriguing indications that she was less wet and droopy than the last one, who had burst into soggy tears on the bus last September and had been taken away the same day, “you’re not my first. They send me a new one every year, like clockwork. Do you know why?”

“The bride coordinator thinks it’s possible you have unrealistic expectations.” Her green eyes gleamed faintly, which Zavier felt in his dick. “I, of course, have no opinion on the matter. I’m only reporting what he said.”

“He keeps sending me weak little creatures who faint every time the wind blows and collapse into sobbing heaps on my kitchen floor when their feelings are hurt. Maybe it’s unrealistic to imagine there are women a little bit hardier than that.”

“I’ll make a note,” said his markedly cool bride, her coppery brows lifting. “No swooning of any kind, no matter the state of the wind or kitchen floor.”

That was different. Zavier scowled at her, not sure what to make of a woman who didn’t crumble before him. It stirred something in him. It made him interested in the parts of him that weren’t crowding his trousers.

“Is that meant to be funny?” he asked, his voice low and rough.

“I don’t think so,” she replied, and he allowed himself to feel slightly mollified by the faint hint of something a bit less cool in her voice. “I signed up to be a mail order bride, not to commit suicide via new husband.”

Zavier let his gaze move over her again then. His cock was an asshole, and stood up for anyone and anything female. And Zavier had spent more than one winter with a woman who he wanted because she was available and present, not because he would have picked her out of a pack of willing bridal applicants if he’d had a choice. He went back and forth on which state of affairs was better for the six months he’d spend with the woman in question. Fucking was its own reward. Do it enough with the same person and you learned what it took to make her a little crazy. He didn’t have to be knotted up with a greedy need to get inside her for that to be true, and the benefit to that was, there was no worry that the rush would fade or burn itself out.

Maybe his ideal wife would be a woman who he didn’t exactly lust after.

But this wasn’t going to be the year he found out, because this one, he wanted.

Badly.

And maybe that was the long, frigid loneliness of the dark months he’d just survived out there, with nothing but his thoughts and his hands, but Zavier didn’t think so. There was something about her mouth. And the faint glimpse of pale skin he could see beneath her white shirt. And the way that stupid corset molded and shaped her curvy little body the way his hands itched to do.

Hell, if she could cook even half as well as she could throw words at him, she was already better than most of his attempted wives.

“Can you cook?” he asked, baldly, pausing in his long, slow perusal of her body to flick a glance back at her face.

“It depends what you want cooked,” she replied, reasonably enough.

“Are you always so reasonable?” He shook his head when she started to answer. “You can’t possibly know the answer to that. When have you ever been stranded on rough farmland a good week away from another human?”

“Then, no,” Matylda said. “I’m only sometimes reasonable.”

Zavier reached over then and took her face in his hand, letting his rough palm scrape along the soft line of her jaw. Her cheek was chilled from the wind, but he could feel the warmth beneath. Just as he could feel her tremble when he touched her. Because bodies told truths words couldn’t.

He moved his thumb over her lips. Once, then again. Then he stopped playing and thrust the whole of it into her mouth, not exactly gently.

“Suck,” he commanded her.

Matylda froze for a moment. Her mouth was hot and soft, her tongue against his skin. Her wide eyes were fixed to his. He felt more than saw her tremble, like a bolt of heat straight into his cock.

But then, very slowly, as if she wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted, she obeyed him. And sucked.

The March wind kicked up around them. Zavier was aware of the people moving around them. The villagers who lived here in this valley and provided what few services they could, as a kind of way station to the rest of the frontier lands, wild and untamed and sprawling into the north. Other men like him, who held land out in the wilderness and only came into town when it was unavoidable. The bus that sat in front of the lodge, loading up with the weak and the broken who’d found a winter in the Alps was much, much harder than they’d imagined and wanted to skulk back down to the softer, more settled hills and start over again.

He was aware of all of it, but his attention was on her. On her delicate mouth, like a hint of fire, moving against his thumb. Mimicking a far more tempting act he had every intention of teaching her soon, if her hesitance was, as he expected, sheer ignorance. He’d never been down into the lowlands to explore the odd civilizations that had sprung up in the mountains of what had once been a place called Europe. But all of his ten previous wives had talked, and so did the people he couldn’t help but overhear in this village and the handful of others like it. He knew that the people here didn’t make sex boring the way they did back on the mainland near his home, where the church required winter marriages and no enjoyment. Tithing stations weren’t joyless exercises. They were, as far as he’d been able to tell, mostly decent experiences with a lot of different kinds of sex with a whole lot of different people.

The raider in him approved.

But they were still focused on making babies to repopulate the ruined earth, and that meant precious little cocksucking. One more reason Zavier preferred things his way. Fuck one woman enough, and she could feel confident that she was contributing to the greater good by trying her best to get pregnant while also having the opportunity to play around with all the non-procreative good stuff.

He pulled his thumb out slowly and held Matylda’s gaze while he did it.

“Ever sucked a dick?” he asked.

She swallowed, hard, which didn’t exactly help his poor cock.

“No.”

“That’s going to change.”

Matylda pressed her lips together, but didn’t cringe away from him. Or cower. Or make the disgusted face several of his short-lived wives had at the very prospect of such a thing.

“I can’t decide if I’m meant to be upset by all these threats, or take the opportunity to prove that they don’t bother me.” She smiled at him, or moved her lips into a tight version of a smile. “And I want to make you happy, I do, so you’re going to have to tell me which it is.”

If he wasn’t entirely mistaken, that faint bite in her voice meant she had a little bit of a backbone. He watched her straighten it as she stood there and held his gaze, which was impressive in itself. Spine was nothing but a good thing in a woman coming to live out in the extreme isolation and loneliness of the far Alps. And it was a necessary requirement for anyone who thought they could survive any exposure to him.

“I don’t want you to make me happy,” he told her. “That’s not your job. Your job is to follow the rules and meet my requirements. That’s all. Does that sound difficult to you?”

“Do you keep changing your rules and requirements?”

“They’ve been the same for over a decade.”

“And not one of the women who’ve been sent out here have managed to meet them to your liking in the six months they usually have to try.” When he only nodded, she blew out a breath. “I only have three months.”

Zavier shook his head. “Are you already making excuses, Matylda? Do you think that because you’ve come to me now, instead of last fall, my standards should be lowered for you?”

She blinked. “No.”

But he thought that probably, she would have preferred to say yes.

“The standards are the standards,” he told her quietly. “You either meet them or you don’t. It’s that simple.”

And that complicated. But he didn’t bother to tell her that now. In his experience, the hardier women always felt full of themselves here in town. They always imagined they could handle him. It was something about the trappings of civilization, he thought. Get them a little further away from people and the two or three shops in this valley and it turned out they found him a whole lot more overwhelming.

And worse, they’d told him and more than once, relentless.

Zavier wasn’t going to apologize for that. He knew exactly who he was. He was neither an honorable man nor a good one, or he wouldn’t have betrayed his clan by walking away from them and the asshole king he refused to serve. He would have stayed and fought, as the tattoo over his heart demanded.

Instead he’d taken one of the clan’s ships and he’d headed east, away from everything he knew and everyone who knew him. But the geographic cure didn’t work. He’d brought himself right along with him, all the way across the seething, bitchy Atlantic.

He was a relentless motherfucker, all the way through. He suspected no woman could handle him, not really. Not for long, anyway. He was too demanding. Too unyielding. He allowed no room for error or mood or any other possible excuse. Not from himself and certainly not from the wife who was supposed to be there to support him.

“The lord’s majordomo and the bride coordinator both explained your requirements to me,” Matylda said after a moment. “But, of course, that’s all filtered through what they’ve been told by the brides you’ve rejected. Why don’t you tell me what you expect right here and right now, so we can both be absolutely clear about it later. No miscommunication. No confusion.”

“Because you think you’ll be the one to last.”

Her expression turned faintly challenging. “I’m sure of it.”

“I like to fuck,” he told her in a low growl, watching in sheer fascination at the way her pale white skin flushed with an obvious heat that inched down her neck and into the depths of her shirt. Was she really that simple to read? That easily hot and that obvious? His cock twitched, then pressed heavy and greedy against the front of his trousers. He wanted to see how far down that heat went. He wanted to taste it. He wanted to conduct an experiment or two with a woman whose body couldn’t lie. “A lot.”

“I’m not exactly opposed to it myself,” she replied, and none of the heat he could read on her skin was in her voice, which, perversely, made his cock feel that much heavier. “Is that really the standard no other woman could meet?”

Zavier laughed a little. “Baby, I’m not what you’re used to in your tithing stations. No tender shower to wash the day off. No plush robe as you walk to a heated little cubicle. No music playing to mask the sounds of the humping next door. No oil unless I feel like it, because I want you wet on your own.”

He could see the pulse in her neck and the way it went a little mad at that, but she didn’t step back. She didn’t back down. She didn’t even look away.

“I’ve always enjoyed tithing,” she told him, a kind of resolve in her voice.

Zavier laughed again, and slid his hand around her neck, to feel that wild pulse and the red hot stain on her skin. It was like a dance of flame beneath his hand. It made him want to strip her where she stood.

He didn’t know how he didn’t.

“All those bored, soft men offering their tithes to their lord aren’t fucking you, sweetheart,” he told her then. “Not the way I’m going to. I’ve told my wives this before. Every time I get one. If I were you, I’d believe me.”

“How are you going to do it, then?”

Curious, he pressed a little against her neck and was rewarded when her lips parted a little.

“Properly,” he promised her. “Morning, noon, and night. And that’s just to take the daily edge off.”

And this new wife of his didn’t gasp the way some of the others had. She didn’t go pale and accuse him of possessing unnatural demands. She didn’t cry quietly and whisper that he was a monster.

Her pale cheeks glowed with that same fire that made him want to drop to his knees and get his face in her pussy, to see if he could taste that same heat. Her green eyes looked a little glassy.

“I don’t like games,” he told her. “If you’re pissed at me, that’s fine. You can talk to me about it or yell at me about it, or give me the silent treatment. I don’t give a shit. But I still expect you to fuck me. Whenever and wherever I want.” She blinked at that and he tightened his grip a little, just to focus her attention. “I don’t want a friend or a roommate or a servant. I could have ten of each if that was what I needed. I want a wife. I won’t pay you. I won’t go out of my way to be nice to you. I won’t treat you like some kind of princess, but the flip side is I won’t treat you badly, either. All you have to do is fuck me, Matylda. A lot. And don’t burn everything you cook. And in return for that I’ll protect you and keep you warm when the snow buries us and the rains beat the shit out of us, and while I’m at it, I’ll make you come. And come. And come. Until you think you can’t come again, and then, sweetheart, I’ll do it all over again.”

She looked dazed when he finished, and Zavier didn’t understand why this one was so different. Why he was actually . . . a little too worried about how she might reply to that. Why he didn’t let go of her, but held on to her and her deliciously flushed skin as if he could imprint the feel of that soft heat into his hard palms.

Matylda shook her head slightly, as if to clear it. Then she smiled at him.

Actually smiled, bright and real, which changed her open, appealing face entirely and made her shockingly, astoundingly pretty. Something Zavier felt in more than just his overeager cock.

“Well, then,” she said briskly. “It sounds like we’d better get started.”