Harlequin Historical May 2021--Box Set 2 of 2

by Elizabeth Rolls

  He did so with a passion he told himself was only because he had been forced to wait. Only because he had built up a hunger so powerful it required regular feeding to feel himself again. To even attempt to sate himself.

  Thorbrand did not feel anything but Aelfwynn, day after day. And he could not have said he was any nearer to sating himself. No matter how he applied himself to the task.

  They did not speak of what she was to him, or what might happen when they left this cottage. Wise woman that she was, she never asked.

  And accordingly, he did not ask himself what it was he did here. Or what it meant to lose himself like this, like a man possessed instead of a man fulfilling his duties and his vows.

  When he knew better than to imagine what he could never, ever have. A warm woman, a quiet home.

  He told himself that he was not betraying the vows he’d taken. That he was only setting their future in stone.

  And so it was, stone by stone, that they learned each other.

  Thorbrand had never spent enough time with a woman to learn her thus. One night, perhaps two, had he entertained the same woman in his furs, but was always in between battles. On the road, forever moving, fighting, focusing on what lay ahead.

  He could not recall a time in his life when he had not been, if not actively fighting a war, preparing for the next. For there was always a next, new war to fight. These were ages drenched in blood, as was known far and wide. Doomed seasons and petty kings led only to more blood spilled, but such was not Thorbrand’s concern. His sword had been pledged to Ragnall long ago.

  When he was not out on a battlefield, Thorbrand trained in battle tactics. Sometimes he was focused on recovering from what wounds he might have sustained. Always did he offer his support and counsel to his king when called upon to do so. His head was always in the next fight, the next disputed territory, the next stretch of cold land they would take, then claim, then defend.

  Thorbrand spent very little time worrying about how to take his pleasure. There were always women. There was always another mead hall. There were songs enough to sing, ancient heroes to admire and gods to praise. There was no shortage of pretty things to fill his cup and warm his furs.

  But here in this cottage there was only Aelfwynn and this greedy want in him that grew ever bigger, ever sharper.

  And more time than he could remember ever spending on his own, away from the king who had made the boy he’d been first into a man, then into a warrior. Much less the men he fought with and considered his brothers, whether they were closely related or not. No wars to plan. No land to defend.

  Just Thorbrand and his woman and a valley filled with snow and silence.

  One day bled into the next. When the snow eased, Thorbrand hunted what paltry game remained this time of year and foraged what little he could from the bleak forest and the valley below. He cared for his horse, bathed daily in the hot springs and encouraged his skeptical Saxon to do the same, and was no warrior, here. Here he was a simple man who lived off the land and took care of what was his.

  Very like the dreams he’d had, little as he might wish to think about such things in the light of day. Or at all.

  But what he did most was learn her.

  He was obsessed with that golden hair of hers and how it caught the firelight. Some nights they never made it from the furs spread before the hearth to the pallet in the corner. She slept as hard as she ever had, but sometimes he woke her in the dark, lifting her leg high as she sprawled over his chest and finding his way inside her. She would come sleepily half-awake, her face in the crook of his neck and her mouth against his skin, while he gripped her tight and thundered them both to bliss.

  Some mornings he insisted she never dress at all and go about her chores bared to his view, forever sneaking glances at him, so that by the time he caught her up and thrust himself into her, they were both at fever pitch.

  She was his. In every possible way.

  He taught her how to kneel before him and take him deep into her mouth. And he knew he had trained her well when, after he poured himself down her throat, she was trembling and greedy and desperate for him to put his hands between her legs and bring her to her own release in turn.

  They spent time in the pool doing more than simply bathing, where he taught her any number of things in the embrace of the hot water. The pleasures of cold snow against warm flesh. How to climb him, how to grip him, and how different those things were when the water lifted her than when he held her aloft in the cottage.

  The snow kept coming. As soon as one storm eased, it might seem clear for the stretch of a day only for another storm to move in.

  The days passed even so. The light began to change, lasting longer before it gave way to night. It was a small thing, but still, within it was the hope of spring. With the coming of spring, Thorbrand knew, came too the promise of the sea. And the lands that waited for him in the west.

  Lands he would settle with Aelfwynn at his side, a far brighter prospect now than he had initially anticipated.

  But a duty made palatable was a duty all the same, surely. He told himself duty was all it was.

  Today Thorbrand found himself out on a gloomy afternoon, checking the traps he’d laid in the hope that there might be meat for his dinner tonight. Though if there was nothing he would eat the bread Aelfwynn baked each day using the stores he’d brought before and call it a feast.

  No meat awaited him out in all that sullen gray, but he thought of the magic Aelfwynn could work with very little and was as pleased as if a hart had stumbled into one of his crude traps. Down at the bottom of the valley, he left the woods and walked up its center, his gaze on the cottage in the distance. He could see the smoke from the hearth stain the low sky above the thatched roof. And now and again, a flash of light from the fire when Aelfwynn opened the door as she went about her tasks.

  They had not discussed tasks, either. She had woken their first morning, surveyed his stores with a practiced eye, then set to work.

  Proving herself, he had thought then. He had expected her to fail. For what could a pampered Saxon princess know of real work? The mother had fought and toppled kings, so surely the daughter would consider herself above the menial labor of life. But she had proved him wrong. Day after day, she cooked their food and frowned severely at him should he make any attempt to do more than eat it.

  She kept surprising him. It was starting to make his chest feel tight. Or maybe it was simply being here in this remote, craggy place. Away from all he knew. Tucked up with Aelfwynn in a cottage with winter still thick all around them and no entertainment but themselves.

  Or it is ghosts, something in him suggested.

  Thorbrand was afraid of neither man nor ghost, but he was properly respectful of the things he could not see. Well did he know that the hands that had built the cottage he stayed in were like as not bones beneath the earth he strode upon. For who abandoned a well-constructed cottage placed between two water sources? The pools to the back and the river below. Who walked off, leaving tools behind? No matter what theories were on offer in the nearest village.

  The people who had lived here had either starved in a winter like this one, left for fear of that starving, or had died in one of the wars that always ravaged these lands. However they had left, some nights Thorbrand was certain he could see their handprints in the ash of the hearth. Reminding him that all men met their ends, like it or not, and not all ends were drenched in glory.

  Perhaps not even his.

  As he headed back across the still, cold valley today, he thought again about that island to the west. Black sand beaches and waterfalls cascading wherever he had looked. The wild sea like a wall of stone, rising again and again. But most of all, that land. New land.

  Not soaked with blood and littered with bones. No ghosts, no ashy prints, no messes stretching back through time.

  Land lik
e this, Thorbrand could not help but think. A sturdy cottage, his woman, and at long last, quiet.

  The quiet was his greatest indulgence. He was used to crowded halls and ships packed tight. Not a cottage to himself and his woman while outside, what looked like the whole world slumbered there before him without another living creature in sight. He knew not when he had last slept so deep, for he was not on his guard here, ready to leap into battle at a moment’s notice. For no one was mounting a siege on this cottage. Only a few villagers in a different valley knew it stood here at all. Thorbrand and Ulfric had stumbled upon it entirely by accident the previous winter when Ragnall had been making his move on Jorvik and the brothers had been forced, for reasons too tedious to recount, to make their own, far stealthier approach. Then, as now, there was naught in this valley but quiet days interrupted only by the wind and the odd bird.

  Nor had he ever slaked his lust so long and so intensely, day after day, that he no longer felt certain that lust was the word to describe it. Lust was for some women, perhaps, but not Aelfwynn. Not his woman made of gold, who smiled at him when he was inside her and moaned out his name like one of her pretty Roman prayers.

  Thorbrand had always intended to die in battle as his father had done. To carry on the family name, drenched in glory, a hero to his sons and their sons in turn. Making certain, blow by blow and battle after battle, that his failures did not pollute the family name. He had never understood a man who preferred plows to plunder.

  But his time in this quiet valley had changed him.

  Aelfwynn had changed him.

  She was a prize. And she was his. And he found the conquering of her body, day and night, far sweeter a gift than any lands he might have taken in service to Ragnall. He knew it was true no matter how disloyal that might make him.

  For he had come to know this valley, even covered in snow, in the same way he had learned Aelfwynn’s curves and secrets. There was a poetry in walking the same land each day. In pitting his wits against what creatures lurked in so dark a season. The skalds might never sing these songs, but he could feel them in his heart. Changing him with their simple beauty.

  He had always longed for the battlefields, but here, in the stillness that was only ever shattered by his woman’s sweet cries, he found himself dreaming instead of the quiet verses a man could only hear when the land was not trod deep with the marching feet of too many armies.

  But he knew too that he was a ruined man, doomed and grim. He was stained straight through with blood. He had watched his own parents die, had done naught to save them, and he had carried that curse through these brutal years. He carried it still.

  The truth was, he did not deserve her.

  Not her, not this quiet, and certainly not this peace.

  It is as well, then, that this cannot last, he told himself gruffly.

  For none of it would last. Not this. Not whatever life he built across the cold sea. That was his true duty, lest he forget. Nothing was his. He was Ragnall’s.

  He had always considered it a good bargain, before.

  Thorbrand tried to shake his strange mood off as he made the final climb toward the cottage. Because however loath he might be to end this unexpected gift of time here, a surprise to himself each day, that did in no way alter Ragnall’s plans for Aelfwynn.

  Ragnall had made his wishes known, Thorbrand was sworn to uphold them, and that was the only story that would ever be told.

  He would do the telling of it himself.

  And there was no reason that should cut at him, the sharp edge of a knife he’d be far better off ignoring.

  “I’m just as pleased you have no meat,” Aelfwynn said brightly when he shouldered his way into the cottage, hands empty. The room was warm and smelled pleasingly of fresh bread. She had washed and hung some of their garments. And she was standing over her cauldron next to the fire, stirring something that smelled enticingly of fish and spice. “I have been in the dried fish and we will feast tonight.”

  But Thorbrand had a far different feast in mind.

  He had taken her in a fury too many times to count. This afternoon, he shook off the snow and the cold, hanging what he could by the door. He watched her as he took off his boots, biting back a smile as she snuck glances at him while she applied herself to her stirring.

  That he went over, held out his hand, and waited.

  It was different, though he did not wish to ask himself why. It felt different, there in the places his chest squeezed tight when he gazed upon her. And he knew she felt it too when her golden eyes widened. She wiped her hands on the apron she’d made from what had once been her headdress. Then she put her hand in his.

  Did he flatter himself that there was no longer anything but greed and longing in her gaze?

  He led her to the pallet on the far wall and stood there with her for a moment, both her hands in his as he gazed down at her. He had tasted every part of her. He had learned her generous mouth with his own. He had brushed tears of pleasure from her cheeks. He knew her scent and her sounds.

  You do not wish to share her with your king, a voice in him decreed, and he knew it for a truth. Little as he liked it.

  For all that was his was Ragnall’s. And Ragnall could do as he wished with it.

  Even with Aelfwynn.

  For the first time since he had been a lad of fifteen, battered and bruised, Thorbrand did not find that a comfort. He wanted her too much to know he must use her at another’s command.

  But then, he wanted everything too much. The quiet life, not merely a taste of it. All the things he knew he could never deserve. For too well did he know his worth—and it was the power in the swing of his sword. The vows he would not break. The trust his king had in him.

  Sweet lives were for other men. Better men.

  Men who were not drenched in blood, even when they were clean.

  And well did Thorbrand know that the longer they tarried here, the sooner it was that Ragnall would call them to him and this would end. How was it possible he did not wish it to end? But he knew it was more than possible. He knew it, too, was a truth he would rather not face.

  He who had faced all manner of unpleasant truths the way he did all things, with steel in his hand and the gods at his back.

  “What troubles you, Thorbrand?” Aelfwynn whispered, those fire-bright eyes moving over his face.

  “I need you,” was all he could manage to say.

  She sank down before him, his flaxen-haired princess, and settled herself prettily before him. Then, kneeling up, she put her hands on his thighs and waited for his nod. Thorbrand did not hesitate in giving it.

  He pulled off his overtunic as she freed him from his trousers. She tugged them down his hips while he stripped off the linen tunic close to his skin. Then she leaned forward to lick him, delicately, around the thick head of his shaft.

  First she teased him, running her tongue down his length, and pressing sweet kisses to the heavy pouch beneath. Then she repeated herself, light and maddening, until she found the head again, wrapped both hands around his length, and sucked him into her hot, wet mouth.

  Thorbrand groaned and found her hair, sinking his fingers deep into the warm silk. He looked down the length of his body, for the sight never failed to stir him. Aelfwynn’s blond hair flowing down her back, her face tipped up, and his thick length moving in and out of her pretty mouth.

  He had taught her this and yet she still surprised him. She still shook him.

  Soon she took him yet deeper, gripping his thighs when he took control. He thrust himself into her sweet, hot mouth again and again until he burst in a rush, roaring with pleasure as he emptied himself in her.

  And then he felt the fire again, almost at once, when she sat back on her heels and smiled at him as she swallowed him down.

  Everything was wild in him tonight. Thorbrand both did not know himself
and knew himself too well. It was the only war he had to contend with of late. He could not swing his sword to cut down his dreams of quiet when he felt he should want glory for his family instead. And he could not vanquish glory when he had long since sworn that whatever glory might come to him, it would come in a lifetime’s service to his king.

  But Aelfwynn was here, not his king. And she was one of his vows.

  He lifted Aelfwynn to her feet, then pulled off her overdress and her undershift. He bent to tug off her hose. Then he laid her out on his furs, a vision of breasts tipped in rose, golden eyes and pale gold hair, and the darker, richer gold between her thighs.

  Thorbrand settled there, kneeling between her legs and drawing them over his shoulders as he set his mouth to her slick heat and drank his fill.

  She yet tasted as he’d known she would, honey and heat, and all of it his. He knew how to make her arch up against him, how to grind her tender flesh against his mouth, his beard. He knew she liked the rough of his beard against her thighs, and the graze of his teeth while she bucked and sobbed.

  And today he did not pull her astride him, or take her from behind. Or lie, side by side, where he could draw her leg over his hip.

  Today, he crawled his way up the length of her body, licking her here, biting her gently there, and then, finally, gathered her beneath him. For the first time.

  Aelfwynn’s breath caught. Her eyes flew wide. “But...”

  He had told her she need not lie upon her back to take him the first night he had worked the ache out of her limbs. And he had kept to that promise, but tonight... Tonight he wanted this.

  Tonight he wanted her where he could see her, as if that might make the way she had bewitched him settle in him better.

  “Do you trust me?” Thorbrand asked.

  Slowly, even though she shook, Aelfwynn swallowed. Then nodded.

  For the first time, Thorbrand stretched out on top of her and gazed down into her face. He gave her some of his weight and saw the way her eyes darkened with a deep, woman’s pleasure. He gave her more and felt the tips of her breasts stiffen.