Edge of Ruin: The Edge Novella Boxed Set by Megan Crane

Author:Megan Crane [Crane, Megan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Swerve
Published: 2017-08-07T18:30:00+00:00

5.

Matylda wasn’t like the other wives.

Zavier was forced to admit that surprising truth—and the related, unpleasant fact that it unnerved him—pretty quickly into the trip home. Which could have taken a quick three days, had he wanted to get there as fast as possible. But instead, calling on the wily behavior of the raider king he’d refused to serve across the sea after his shithead of a father had been rightly cut down, he’d spent years leading hapless women around for a week to ten days in the extreme alpine wilderness, just to see what they were made of.

Not much, he usually found. A lot of tears and too much whining, more often than not.

Zavier’s problem was that he’d been raider bred. A son of Donovan, a true raider king, no less, and raised to take his place in his clan’s warrior brotherhood. And he might have left the eastern islands—and his clan and family and the brotherhood—a few years after Wulf had risen up and cut the old man down, but he kept looking around these soft mountains for a version of a raider woman. Someone he could trust to do what needed to be done without all the coddling the soft women here seemed to need. Coddling Zavier couldn’t—wouldn’t—provide. He kept waiting for a tough one, with her own backbone and no fear. The kind of woman who could handle the hard, lonely life out on the frontier.

Not to mention an ex-raider son of a bitch like him.

He’d given up. Raider women were exclusively raider-bred, he’d concluded, and he had to make do with whoever the douchebag lords sent him in their annual attempt to appease him. To solicit his cows and encourage him to keep his dangerous ass away from their cushy estates downhill. He didn’t expect any better from some pansy lord who hid from the weather and the reality of the world in the ancient castles that dotted this part of the battered, drowned earth. A woman with raider tendencies would kick a lord’s ass.

A real raider woman would take over the whole of the Apennines.

Most of his wives freaked out the first night, right about the time he told them to prepare him some food. That was usually after a long, tense ride in terrible silence, during which he knew they made themselves sick worrying about his sexual demands. Because none of them had ever done what Matylda had, and taken that edge off right there in town. The more stoic wives dramatically endured the first night, acted as if they were handing over a very sad tithe until he made them come all over him the way no tithe ever had before, clearly. Either way, there was always weeping for days. He was always left to cajole them and comfort them, except his versions of both were not exactly what the average lowland female was looking for. Apparently. After about a week, the women were either so submissive they melted into useless puddles

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