Read Online Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance) by Megan Crane - Free Book Online

figured Wulf, like the rest of them, would want to channel the night’s disappointment and near-death experience into a restorative fuck or two before they regrouped to talk about what the hell they were going to do now. That meant he had time to clear his damned head.
    Another brother was stepping up to Lyla as he started walking, offering her a hard dick for her bright smile. Riordan headed down to the water, feeling the sea clutch at him as he made it to the hard sand at the waterline. It took him a minute to recognize that the figure he saw out in the swell was Tyr, holding his woman in his arms. Tyr sounded as if he was being a hard-ass, but he couldn’t have been, because Helena was laughing at him.
At him.
As if the war chief was just another man.
    “You don’t actually
have to
throw me into the ocean every time,” Helena was saying, her voice perfectly clear for a moment when the breeze changed. “You want to.”
    “Same difference, sweetheart,” Tyr replied.
    In a voice that sounded nothing like the war chief at all.
    Riordan waded out, let a wave break over him, and then dove forward through the next one. It was dark and the weird-ass moon was bright, and he cut through the cold, crisp water easily, concentrating on the reach of his arms and the soft rush of the water over his naked body.
    He didn’t want to think. Whether or not the war chief got soft for his mate wasn’t Riordan’s concern and there was certainly no reason it should
clutch
at him, as if there was a message there he should be heeding. Warriors weren’t soft, no matter what things they murmured in the dark when there was pussy involved.
    And he was even less soft than that, because he didn’t deserve anything else. He hadn’t been raised in any kind of hardship like Gunnar and Wulf had been under Amos’s iron fist. His parents had been good, solid people and a credit to the clan. That was what made what he’d done to them so hideous. They’d never beaten him or tossed him out into the cold winter to fend for himself. They might not have been the most demonstrative people in the world, but besides the camp girls, who were exactly that by choice and profession, who in the raider clan—or any other clan on what was left of the Earth’s surface, come to that—was? It wasn’t smart to be soft in a world that worked so hard to kill you. Still, Riordan had been in no doubt that they’d loved him in their way, his stoic parents. He’d been their oldest son and their hope for the future.
    That, too, made it worse.
    He swam out to ships, circled each one of them, then headed back to shore with the same long, hard strokes. It felt good to move through the water, quick and smooth. He liked the silk of the sea against his bare skin. And out here, finally, he could lose himself the way he wanted to do.
    No Eiryn. No dark midnight eyes across a fire and the straining body of another fuck. No regret, no ghosts.
    He needed to let this shit go before it ate him alive. He needed to stop telling himself that and actually do it.
    You need to do
something,
he growled at himself.
Anything.
    Riordan had made it back to the beach and was toweling himself off in front of his rock when Wulf walked into the circle of firelight again, wearing nothing but a length of wool wrapped around his hips. He patted the camp girl with him on her naked, jiggling ass, and she melted away from him. Then he nodded at Gunnar’s nun near the fire, where she and a couple of camp girls were dividing up the cooked rabbits into enough portions to go around.
    “Eat,” Wulf said, his voice pitched to carry. “And then tell me what the fuck we’re going to do now.”
    Riordan took his meat when it came around, settling back to eat it with the nuts and jerky he always carried with him. The debate was already raging, and he listened. He calculated. He tried to hear the agenda behind the proposition instead of just the words, if there was one. He snuck a glance over at Wulf,