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Ragnar sat up and hooked two fingers into his torq. “In case you’ve forgotten, I couldn’t disobey you if I wanted to – which I don’t want to,” he added. Then his look shifted, that I’m-so-clever smugness that Leif wanted to wipe off his face with physical force. “Or, here’s an idea: I won’t stray out of your sight. We can have her together.”

Leif choked on his ale.

Ragnar pounded him helpfully on the back. “Come now. You’ve never had to share? Ah, well, I guess a prince doesn’t have to–”

“Keep your voice down,” Leif growled, once he could take a breath. It was bad enough the people here thought him a lord; the last thing they needed was his real identity getting out.

“No,” Ragnar continued, waxing fondly reminiscent, “you would never have been stranded in an ice storm, only two women for fifteen of you, or no women at all. You know, your uncle’s not far off the mark, if the lad’s young and pretty enough–”

“Stop. Talking.” But there was no real command in his voice, and they both knew it.

“You’ll have to do something about that.” Ragnar nodded down at Leif’s lap, where his stand had tented his trousers obscenely. “If you want to handle it – heh – yourself, I can take care of it for you. Lend a helping hand so to speak.” He laid said hand boldly on Leif’s thigh, and Leif swatted him away.

Not before the heat and heft of it bled right through his trousers and sent a spasm up through his hip, groin, and spine, however. His toes curled inside his boots, and it was either shove Ragnar away, which he did, or shove his hand where Leif really wanted it, the temptation of which left his teeth bared, growl rumbling in his throat.

“Fine, fine.” Ragnar withdrew, and picked up his tankard. “You’ll not be able to walk out of here in that state, but that’s fine. That’s for you to worry over, alpha.”

Another growl shut him up, finally.

They sat, and they drank, but not in any sort of silence. The madam had pushed through the curtain into the kitchen, leaving them alone, save the sounds that filtered down through the ceiling from upstairs. The thump of bed frames against walls, crackle of stiff straw mattresses. Grunts, and groans, and moans, and curses. High, feminine cries and encouragements, and the more damning sounds of wolves loosed from men’s throats: growls, snarls, whimpers. If any of the women noticed the not-human noises, they either approved, or were too awash in pleasure to care.

Leif was so hard he had a stomachache, and his vision had gone fuzzy at the edges.

A particularly loud bang sounded overhead, and Ragnar breathed a rough laugh, shifting in his chair. A darted glance – stupid, stupid, he shouldn’t look, shouldn’t care – proved that Ragnar was in much the same shape, cockstand hard and very visible behind the flies of his trousers. But, unlike Leif, he wasn’t grinding his jaw and sweating resolutely through it. Seemed to be enjoying himself, in fact.

He lifted his ale to his lips with one hand, and reached with the other to adjust himself, humming a little, squeezing a little more than necessary.

“Stop that,” Leif choked out. Once again, he failed to push an order into the words when he should have.

Ragnar scoffed and sat back, hands braced on the table edge, arching and stretching his back, and then reaching down to rearrange his cock again. “It’s bad enough you won’t let me up there, or even split a nice juicy morsel, but now I can’t even givemyselfa hand?”

It shouldn’t have, but the mental image of that, Ragnar with his hand around his own cock, head tipped back, eyes low-lidded and wolf bright, muscles of his arm and chest working, sent a spike of arousal through Leif’s gut so acute he had to rest his hands on the table for support. It was only that he was so tightly wound, he reasoned. Anything would have set him off; he would have found anything exciting in his current state.

Also exciting, and curious, was the thought that followed on the heels of his little fantasy, a question he couldn’t keep from voicing. “Let you?”

Ragnar’s brows lifted in silent question, even as his head tilted, presumably to better catch the high, breathy squeals that started upstairs.

“What do you mean I don’t ‘let you’? Do you not…pleasure yourself?”

Ragnar hadn’t expected the question, he saw; the way his expression, always so mercurial and mobile, froze, gaze going flat and tight. He didn’t want to answer.

Leif’s wolf sat up at sharp attention, just beneath his skin. “If I ordered you not to, would you have to obey?”

Ragnar held very still a moment, save the pulse that throbbed in the hollow of his throat. Then he turned his head away, grumbling unhappily, a purely wolfen noise of distress.

“You would, wouldn’t you?” Leif asked, incredulous. “If I ordered you not to–”

He was cut off by a whine, one that Ragnar quickly swallowed. “You order me to do and not do everything else. Why would that be different?” he growled, and leaned down to rest his chin on his folded arms on top of the table, sulking.

That was true…and so this new facet shouldn’t have been a revelation…nor should it have been so exhilarating…

Before he could investigate further – a dangerous thing, awful, despicable, even – a new scent snared his attention. Ragnar’s, too, if the way his head shot up was any indication.

Leif faced forward, and saw that they were no longer alone in the dim tap room.

A young woman stood at the base of the stairs, one hand on the post, the other propped on her hip. Her hair was a thick, lustrous brown, unbraided, tumbling over her shoulders and down her chest. She wore a thick, woolen dressing gown belted at her waist in a way that highlighted its narrowness, and the fullness of her hips and breasts. She was pretty in a buxom, familiar, Northern way, and the smell of her – ripe and interested, warm and viable – hit him right in the cock.

He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from gasping or growling; he wasn’t sure what sort of sound would come out if he opened his mouth.