Sometime later, when she stopped spinning off into nothing, Matylda was surprised to find that she could still breathe.

And then, when it seemed she really could, that it wasn’t a fluke, she discovered that she was still bracing herself on the dashboard as if her straightened arms were what was keeping her from sliding into a boneless heap on the floorboards.

But the truth was, it was Zavier.

He was still so huge and lodged deep inside of her. His strong arm still held her fast against his chest, and she didn’t care that her corset was cutting off her ability to breathe deeply. She didn’t care that she should have been uncomfortable, splayed out on the lap of a man she hardly knew—her husband, of all things, which still seemed as impossible as it had earlier—trying to gather her wits about her again.

Because all she could really seem to care about was the way his head was bent to the crook of her neck. His lips rested there against her tender, oversensitive skin, making occasional goose bumps shiver to life every time he exhaled.

For a moment she felt caught somewhere between his mouth on her skin, the thick length of him still so deep inside of her, and the shocking blue sky before her, interrupted only by the rearing, snowcapped mountains. Caught and held.

Changed, something inside of her whispered.

Zavier shifted beneath her. He moved his mouth from the crook of her neck, and she had to bite back the involuntary sound of loss that welled up in her throat. He lifted her off of him in the same easy way he’d pulled her into this position in the first place, in case she might have forgotten all that superior strength he wore coiled up in that big, hard body of his.

She hadn’t.

And the slide of him out of her body, it turned out, made her feel as shivery as the other direction. And filled with an even sharper sense of loss.

Then she was on her side of the truck again with nothing to do but straighten her skirt and try to ignore the part of her that wanted to beg him to do that again. All of that and anything else, again. And again.

Because there was another part of her—the larger part—that felt something else entirely. Fragile, somehow, in a way she never had before. Not even way back when she’d gone to offer her initial tithe after she’d started bleeding and had felt so overwhelmed, at first. Unsure and hesitant in that beach shack where the sound of the waves drowned out the sound of her breath and made her feel safe, somehow. This was different.

This felt like shaken. Inside and out. And a little bit winded besides.

She folded her hands in her lap and crossed her ankles, the way her mother had told her the great and fancy ladies did, and tried not to stare while Zavier tucked his huge cock away, back into his trousers where she was a bit surprised it fit, and buttoned himself up.

On some level she supposed she should have been embarrassed that she was still breathing unevenly, because he wasn’t. Of course he wasn’t. He claimed he did exactly what he’d just done at least three times a day and worked his land in his downtime. She doubted he would breathe heavily if he ran up the steepest of the towering peaks looming there before her.

He shot her a glittering look from his side of the truck, with a hint of that smile that was no longer on his mouth. The mouth she could still feel against her neck, as if he’d left a red, hot mark there. The look he slid at her, too bright and much too blue, made that little spot on her neck throb and that ache between her legs grow, but Matylda had to sit there and pretend she didn’t feel either of them.

Because she had the odd, strong notion that if she didn’t figure out a way to protect herself, she’d be lost in this man. Lost and never, ever found, no matter what happened over these next few months.

“That’s a good start, Matylda,” Zavirt told her, his voice a low, approving rumble that worked in her like a new kind of heat. “That’s a very good start.”

She wanted to bask in that, but she couldn’t let herself. She had work to do here. She couldn’t rest on her laurels, such as they were. He fired up the ignition, threw the truck into gear, and drove them out of the tiny little mountain village—straight toward the towering mountains ahead of them.

“Tell me about your other wives,” she said, trying for a casual sort of tone even though she was still a little bit lightheaded and there was nothing in his closed-off expression that invited conversation of any kind.

Zavier made a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Why the fuck would I do that?”

“I want to know their strengths and failures,” Matylda told him. She clenched her hands tighter together and made her voice even lighter. “I want to make sure I’m being the best wife to you I can possibly be.”

“That almost sounds like you mean it.”

“Of course I mean it.”

“No,” Zavier said flatly. “You don’t. You don’t know me. You have no idea what I need, or what a ‘best wife’ to me would look like, and you’re not going to know until it’s too late because you town girls never do. This isn’t one of those sleepy little walled cities down there, protected from the elements all winter, where the worst thing that might happen is a few extra puddles and a foot or two of snow. This is the frontier. It’s harsh and unforgiving and fucking lethal, and believe me when I tell you this, sweetheart—I’m worse.”

She believed him. Matylda hadn’t thought much of the little road that wound through the village, but she missed it now that Zavier had taken to the rutted track that wound up the side of the closest mountain, bouncing all the way. And she didn’t need him to tell her how harsh he was. She could still feel him deep inside her, as if he’d changed her forever just by taking her like that, so bold and sure.

“You must have a rating system of some kind,” Matylda said with a great calm she didn’t feel at all, keeping her eyes trained on the mountain in front of them. “You must have a way to determine if a wife is meeting your standards. Points for this, deductions for that. Or do you set us all up to fail before we start?”

Zavier let out another one of those humorless little laughs. “All you need to worry about is how you take me, Matylda. Deep and hard. Keep that little cunt juicy and sweet and we’ll get along fine.”

Which, it turned out, strained even Matylda’s ability to spin out light conversation.

They drove for hours, up one mountain and down the next. Through long, narrow, alpine valleys studded with the ruins of lost worlds. The remains of old houses and lodges, left in pieces after the Storms. Downed wires and grounded lifts that must once have gone straight to the tops of the mountains. Cold, clear lakes that gleamed against the backdrop of snow, green trees dusted in white, and the provocation of the blue sky above.

Zavier didn’t stop until twilight cast dark blue shadows all over the rough terrain, long and deep. He pulled up near yet another gleaming alpine lake that still sported swathes of ice here and there, next to a grove of some large, old trees still stark and bare for winter.

He didn’t give her any directions, but Matylda followed him when he climbed out of the truck. It was cold, but not unbearably so, though she could feel the sharp sweetness in the breeze that promised much lower temperatures once the sun went down. She was glad she’d worn her heaviest winter skirt, the one that was thick all the way to ground and kept the cold out. She pulled her coat tighter around her as Zavier set about building a fire, then propped a kind of metal cage around it. It took her a moment to realize it wasn’t a cage, it was a makeshift grill. Making the fire more than simply a source of warmth. When he started to unload things from the back of his truck, she tried to help him, only to receive a level stare in return.

“Time to prove you can cook,” he told her. “Not haul shit.”

And then he left her next to the fire he’d made with a box of supplies and a single pot, as he set up a tent on the cold earth between the brace of trees and his truck.

Matylda hadn’t cooked since she’d lived on the coast. Life in the elevated cities of the Apennines didn’t allow for any cooking. She’d spent almost the whole of a decade eating her two meals a day that were prepared without any input from her whatsoever, and going without a midday meal altogether unless she had some extra scraps of fabric to barter for a rice ball or some salted fish.

Zavier was testing her. She knew that. But she didn’t mind. She fetched water from the lake and set it to boil on the little wire grill. Then she looked through the box of supplies he’d set out for her, pulling out things she thought might make a good, hearty dinner out here in all this cool, mountainous quiet. She found a sharp blade and a small, flat stone and began cutting things into smaller pieces. Cubes of dried meats. Root vegetables. Dried herbs and spices. She slid them all into the boiling pot and stirred, aware that there was a warmth inside her that had nothing to do with the heat of the fire.

Cooking reminded her of her childhood, she realized as the breeze kicked up and the sun dipped out of sight behind the western mountains. It made her feel the way she had when she was a little girl and both her parents were alive. When her father fished with the rest of the men in their seaside village and her mother sang as she cleaned, then let Matylda “help” with the evening meal. She half-expected to look up from stirring her pot to find Mama there with a smile, standing in the corner of the little kitchen in that windswept cottage they’d called home for so long.

But when she looked up, her mother was nothing but a memory. A happy sort of ghost. And Matylda was outside, kneeling before a campfire while dark crept into this isolated valley between solemn mountain ranges standing guard on all sides.

And Zavier was standing there in front of a tent that even she could tell, with her untutored eye, was well-constructed. He was watching her, but not the way her indulgent mother had. He wasn’t smiling, for one thing.

There was no reason at all the impact of his gaze should have made her shiver.

“What you making?” he asked.

And there was something in his tone that pricked at her. Something in that still way he held himself, his arms crossed over his broad chest.

“Soup,” Matylda said brightly, as if she hadn’t noticed a thing. “Unless it boils down a bit more than I intend it to, in which case, a hearty stew.”

Zavier’s blue eyes gleamed, and Matylda felt that like the praise he hadn’t offered. Or thanks, maybe. It made a different sort of heat move through her.

He moved closer to the fire, then sat down on the nearby rocks. He studied her for a moment, making that same prickling sort of sensation wash over her again.

“Why don’t girls from the Apennines wear panties?” he asked quietly, his gaze intent. “I assumed it was for easy access, but you strip down and shower for your rote fuckings, don’t you?”

Matylda blinked at the cascade of images that sent spinning around in her, but he was watching her so closely. She couldn’t let herself get lost in the outrageous things he said. She didn’t know why she had the strangest notion that he expected her to do exactly that.

“My mother always said it was a show of respect,” she said calmly instead.

“A bare cunt is a sign of respect? Really?”

This time she ignored his incredulous tone along with his crude words. Deliberately crude, if she had to guess.

“I don’t know what the great ladies do, off in their lavish estates. But my mother said all the rest of us live on the lands as the lords allow. And the law states that a lord can request his tithes directly whenever he pleases. So it’s custom to keep ourselves ready.”

“Ready?”

Matylda smiled and gave her pot another stir.

“Keeping myself ready is a sign of respect not only to a lord I’ll likely never meet, but to me. No one has any idea whether I wear panties or not, but I always know. And I know that when I’m ready to do what I could be called to do, without shame or hesitation, I’m the woman my mother raised me to be. That would make her proud. Since she’s no longer alive to know it one way or the other, it makes me proud.”

For a moment it was so quiet that Matylda thought she could hear the stars coming out, one by one, then in astonishingly bright clusters all at once, overhead.

“And it’s important to you to make your mother proud, dead or alive?” he asked.

“Of course.” She studied him, for a change. “Isn’t it important to you?”

His cruel mouth shifted into a kind of curve, but she wouldn’t call it a smile.

“I never knew my mother. My father, on the other hand, was a tyrant hated by anyone unfortunate enough to know him. The only way to make him proud would have been to be just like him. I declined.”

Matylda held his gaze. “I’m sorry. That can’t have been easy.”

Zavier shook his head slightly, as if to clear it. Then he crooked his finger, beckoning her to him.

It didn’t occur to her to do anything but obey him immediately. She didn’t even have to order herself to do it, and she thought maybe that should have worried her a little—she was here for a reason, after all, and surely that required constant vigilance on her part—but then she forgot to entertain her various anxieties.

Because when she stood before him, Zavier opened his rock hard thighs and indicated she should step between them.

Her heart careened off course, pounding so hard against her rib cage she was certain she might actually hurt herself. And she didn’t think she’d care, because he was touching her again. He traced the line of her corset down to where it covered the top of her skirt, and then rested his fingers on her hips.

“Up here, there’s nothing but weather and wolves,” Zavier told her, in a voice that seemed to ricochet off the wintry night around them, then back into Matylda, where it burrowed deep. “And me. You can consider me your lord, little girl.”

She opened her mouth to say something—to respond to that—but nothing came out.

Zavier’s mouth crooked a little bit, but his gaze was hard. Demanding. It sent that prickle winding down her spine again, almost like a warning.

He exerted a little pressure on her hips, just enough to tell her what he wanted. Matylda didn’t question it. She eased herself down to her knees, there between his outstretched legs, and looked up at him expectantly.

And she couldn’t have said why her breath kept catching in her throat.

She watched, fascinated, as he unbuttoned his trousers and pulled that massive cock of his out again, hard and huge. This time, she could see it. This time, she could appreciate the smooth head, the strong shaft.

Her throat went dry. She could feel her own eyes go a little wide, as if she’d never seen a cock before. She felt as if she hadn’t, not really.

Zavier reached over and traced her mouth the way he had back in the village. The shape of her upper lip, then the shape of her lower in turn. Then a faint pressure along the seam between, back and forth.

He took his hand away, but she understood. He wanted her to kneel forward and take his cock the way she’d taken his thumb earlier. Something she’d heard whispers of, particularly from men in the bell towers who were something less than wholly sober, but had certainly never tried.

It would never have occurred to her to try.

“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered.

“Don’t worry.” His gaze had gone a bit hooded, but no less intent on hers. “I’ll show you what I want.”

And suddenly she was as slippery and as shivery as if he had his hand between her legs again, rubbing at that secret place that he’d found so easily. Her mouth watered, and she leaned forward, bracing herself on his spread thighs. Her breath left her in a rush, she felt almost dizzy, and then she opened her mouth and took as much of his beautiful, gleaming white cock into her mouth as she could fit.

And then Zavier taught her a very hot, very thorough lesson.

He taught her about depth and rhythm. He taught her about teeth. He taught her to taste him, to run her tongue around the tip of him and over that part of him that felt like a ridge but was much softer. He let her try to take the length of him and what to do with her tongue while she did. He let her cup the heavy balls between his legs in her hands, and taste them, too.

He tasted of salt and a deeper, richer maleness.

He was intoxicating.

And while he taught her how to please him, her own greediness felt like a fire between her legs, igniting every time she sank down to take more of him. Sometimes she looked up, feeling that considering blue gaze of his on hers, and she understood, then.

He was testing her.

And Matylda didn’t care what he threw at her. She was going to pass his test.

Especially if it involved something like this, sucking him and licking him, worshiping him until she could feel her own dampness between her thighs and her breasts felt swollen where they pressed out above her corset.

Matylda thought she could do this forever.

Zavier sank his hands in her hair, pulling it out of the knot she’d tied it in sometime this morning on the bus. And then he thrilled her by holding her head still that way, moving himself in and out of her mouth, making her feel indescribably beautiful with every thrust. Mighty, somehow. Outside herself, even as she was centered completely on his cock surging between her lips and the corresponding red-hot blaze between her legs.

And when he was finished, he let out a shout as he flooded her mouth and watched her swallow him down. Matylda felt as if he’d given her a gift. Something precious.

Zavier looked down at her as he tucked himself away. Matylda knelt where he’d told her to kneel, only distantly aware that her knees were complaining about the hard ground, the cold, a stone or two. But she couldn’t bring herself to care. Then he reached over and wiped away the moisture that had accumulated beneath her eyes, making her heart kick and her breath catch all over again.

“The food you made should be ready,” he said gruffly.

And there was no reason at all that Matylda should feel that like a glowing endorsement, but she did. She moved back to the fire, stirring her soup that had long since tipped over into a thick stew, and then ladling it out into the two tin cups she’d found in her box of supplies that could serve as bowls.

And then had to talk herself into eating it. Because she was hungry—but she also didn’t want to lose that remarkable taste of him in her mouth.

Hunger won out.

They sat there in a companionable enough silence, eating into the dark. Zavier didn’t shower her in compliments for the meal, but he emptied his cupful and took the rest of what she’d left in the pot, which Matylda figured was the same thing.

When they were done, they sat for a bit. She stared into the fire as he sharpened one of his blades, and she thought, this is marriage. This is what it feels like. As if that would settle her on the strangeness of it all. Eventually, she gathered up the cooking things and fashioned a kind of torch from the fire to light her way, and then went down to the lake to do the washing up.

The water was bitterly cold, but it got the job done, and she used an extra length of cloth to wash herself, as well. The frigid water made her feel clean and more than that, a bit less fuzzy than she had before.

Back at their little camp, Zavier was banking the fire. He took the box of cooking things from her and nodded toward the tent, then went to lock the box in his truck.

Matylda didn’t know why the tent loomed there like a step too far, after everything that had happened today already. But she hadn’t balked yet, and no matter that she thought he expected her to at any moment. She hadn’t. She wouldn’t.

There were worse things in the world than one gruff, overbearing, not particularly friendly mountain man. Who she happened to have married. Like Nicoline’s potential execution if Matylda didn’t make it past June as the one wife Zavier couldn’t bring himself to trade in.

She shook her strange reluctance off and forced herself to head for the tent as he’d told her she should, unfastening the opening and crawling inside before she could change her mind or talk herself out of it. He’d hung a lantern from the tent’s roof, illuminating the inside—which felt close and cozy already, and that was just with her inside. Matylda thought of Zavier’s big body crammed into this flimsy little space, right there on top of her, and had to swallow, hard.

There was a rustling behind her, and then it was happening. Zavier pushed the opening wide and then crawled inside himself. He threw himself down on the bedding that he’d laid out on the floor of the tent, a sturdy pallet strewn with thick furs that took up almost all of the floor space, then propped himself up on his side. And watched her as if he could read every panic-edged thought that flitted across her mind.

“We’re going to sleep naked,” he told her, matter-of-factly, proving that if he really could read her, he didn’t really care if she was panicked. “I don’t want to hear about some fucking nightgown. I don’t give a shit about modesty. When you’re in my bed, wherever the hell my bed might be, you’re naked. Understand?”

Matylda moistened her lips, delicately. “That sounds very chilly, especially in the dark of winter.”

Zavier’s blue eyes gleamed. “I’ll keep you warm. I promise.”

She was certain he knew that that sounded a great deal more like a threat than a promise. She also knew that this was part of the test. Maybe it was all a test. Maybe all he knew how to do was test the wives who came here and tried to hold on to some part of themselves against him.

Matylda didn’t have that luxury. She could sit here and think herself into hysterics—though that wouldn’t help her sister—or she could listen to that greedy ache between her legs. The twin, sharp pinches of sensation that she knew on some vague level were her nipples reacting to his talk of nakedness. The heaviness in her breasts and the silken, knotted thing low in her belly.

She decided to listen.

Her hair was tumbling all around her, and she liked that. It let her imagine that she had some sort of curtain between her and this man—her husband, for her sins—who lounged there beside her, taking up all the air inside the little tent and all the space while he was at it, without doing anything else but lying there. He wasn’t threatening her. He wasn’t even ordering her around.

She couldn’t decide if that made it better or worse.

Matylda unbuttoned her outer, short coat that kept her arms and her neck warm but was cropped at the tightest part of her corset. She opened one hook and eye closure after the next. She eased off the first boot and began to work on the second when she heard a faint noise, and looked up again.

Zavier’s eyes looked even more blue than usual, like some kind of flame, so intent that it made her stomach flip over. And then a thick sort of sensation roll straight through her, like honey.

She worked on her boot, and she set both of them aside in the corner of the tent, as neatly as possible. She rolled off the long wool socks she wore, one and then the next, and only then did she turn to the matter of her corset. It was a worn leather, less restricting it had been when she’d bought it years ago, but it did its job. It had leather cinches that kept her contained, and she loosened those while Zavier watched. Only when they were loose enough to allow movement did she twist around to work on the laced opening.

When she finally pulled the corset off and breathed deep for the first time today, she understood why the tent was so different from what had gone before. In a great rush of air and comprehension. She’d felt naked and exposed in the truck. And again on her knees.

But there was nothing metaphoric about stripping down to her skin in front of Zavier in this tiny little tent where there were no distractions and nothing to look at but him. It was fact.

There was no seneschal and his staff she could call out to if things got weird or too much. There was no recourse out here. There was only Zavier.

This was her marriage.

She set the corset aside, aware that there was a lump in her throat, and that while she should have been able to breathe easier now that she’d lost all that restriction, it was very much the opposite.

Zavier was tighter around her than a corset and he wasn’t even touching her.

“You seem scared all of a sudden.” His voice was a low lick, as dangerous as the fire or the dark outside. “Wife.”

“Not at all,” Matylda lied. Although in truth, scared was not the right word. She was a little too shivery and damp for that. She ached in too many places—for him, not because of him—to believe it was anything as simple as fear. “Corsets are very restraining, that’s all. Sometimes you breathe a bit heavily afterward, just to remind yourself that you can.”

“I don’t like them,” he said. Sounding almost lazy, if such a word could possibly be applied to a man as alert and watchful as this one.

“Corsets?” She was so surprised that she forgot to keep herself from looking directly at him, which she’d been doing to make it seem as if he wasn’t so close. Or so . . . him. And that was a mistake. Because then she really couldn’t breathe. The lantern light did wondrous things to his face and that rock solid body, so long and rangy, filling up the whole of the tent, and she didn’t know if she ached or had become the ache herself. “You don’t like corsets?”

Corsets weren’t something anyone liked or disliked. Matylda had never heard anyone register an opinion either way. They were simply what was worn.

“No,” Zavier replied as if that was a silly question. “Corsets are for delicate little ladies who wouldn’t know hard work if it bit them. It’s different up here. You need to be able to work hard and run if you have to, and that corset won’t let you do it. You’d pass out and then I’d have to stop what I was doing to save you.”

“A fate worse than death,” Matylda said before she thought better of it.

His mouth flirted with a curve, but that flat line won. “Don’t wear it again.”

Matylda looked at her corset, rolled up in the corner next to her boots, and then back at him.

“You realize that’s shocking.” She met his gaze again because why not? Everything was already insane and so far outside her realm of understanding she couldn’t possibly make sense of it. Why not make it worse? “Scandalous, in fact.”

“Sweetheart,” he drawled, as if this was all amusing to him, “if that’s what shocks you, you’re going to have a hard few months.” He nodded at the rest of her clothes. “And you’re not done yet.”

But he was, Matylda thought. Done with this conversation anyway, which made a different kind of heat slap at her. This one not centered between her legs. This one was a little more temper and a whole lot less need. She thought of Nicoline. Of all the things that were at stake here. Her ruffled sense of propriety—triggered, ridiculously enough, by a corset she’d never enjoyed all that much in the first place, now that she thought about it as a choice instead of a necessity—wasn’t something she could soothe. Not here. Not with a man like Zavier who clearly enjoyed being as improper as possible.

What did you expect? she asked herself. Men who want to be proper don’t try to carve a living out of these mountains.

Proper was life in the cities. Not up here, with nothing between her and the wolves but a thin tent wall. And him.

Matylda slid her fingers to the shirt she wore, pulling it from the waistband of her skirt and then unbuttoning the top few buttons. That allowed her to pull it up over her head, and so she did, the way she always did at home. When she worked last of her hair through the opening, and then looked up again, the air in the tent had changed. Matylda didn’t look down at herself the way Zavier was doing. She knew that her breasts were on display now, round and full, with no corset to hold them up or shirt to conceal them. She shifted forward onto her knees and tugged at her waistband, pulling her heavy winter skirt down and over her legs.

And then she was naked. Just as he’d demanded.

She thought he would touch her there and then. Grab her, perhaps throw her down on the furs and claim her fully, now that there were no clothes between them—and she couldn’t deny the way her blood quickened at the thought. But Zavier only watched her for what seemed like a lifetime or two, except far more breathless.

Matylda knelt there, naked and aching with things she hardly understood, as he toed off his own boots. He’d lost his heavy coat somewhere, so there was only that harness of blades to remove and hang from a corner of the tent that she imagined had been put there for precisely that purpose. He peeled off his shirt, then his trousers, and then he was as naked as she was.

Except not, because he was built hard and tough, with all those astonishing muscles. More than that, he was covered in tattoos.

They were glorious. They were a kind of rough magic, etched into his skin, dark black words she couldn’t read, in a language that made no sense to her. There were winding shapes down his arms and lifted brands. And over his heart, on that hard, flat plane, a huge circle etched with more of the same fascinating letters.

“What is that?” she asked softly. “What do they mean?”

Zavier slid his hand over that compelling circle, and the expression on his face shifted. Matylda had no idea why it made her feel . . . sad. For him.

“It means that once upon a time, in a land far, far away, I was a very different man.” Zavier jerked his chin towards the furs. “Lie down, sweetheart. This is no time to talk. It’s time to fuck.”

“Oh,” Matylda said breathlessly. “I thought we already did.”

“That was just playing around. When we’re naked, it gets serious.”

“More serious than the truck?”

“Were you dressed?” He shook his head. “That’s not serious, Matylda. I didn’t even touch your tits, much less get them between my teeth.”

“Oh,” she said again, with very little sound.

Zavier was tired of waiting. Matylda knew that because he simply reached over and hauled her towards him then, laying her down on the furs himself.

He was right, she wasn’t cold at all, trapped between the furs and the magnificent heat of his harsh gaze on her.

And that was before he crawled over her, pressed her deeper into the pallet with that beautiful body of his that burned hot like the fire inside of her, and took his sweet time blowing her mind.