Harlequin Historical May 2021--Box Set 2 of 2

by Elizabeth Rolls

  He found he did not like the way she said that, though he had said something similar to her. Much less the way she looked at him as she spoke.

  “Perhaps,” he gritted out, “you should stop these games altogether. There are good manners and then there is idiocy.”

  “Is there indeed?” she asked, her voice sweet. Though what lay beneath it was not. It was an edge far sharper than that of the dagger yet in her hand and he could feel it as if she’d cut him. “What a novel concept. I should simply stop accommodating the great many men who storm into my path and insist I bend to their superior will. What would have been my fate, I wonder, if after my mother died I had opted not to flatter anyone or behave in the least bit subservient or agreeable? If I had rashly picked a side. Chosen the path I wanted without concerning myself with anyone else’s wishes. Given myself to one of my suitors. Done as I pleased, for once.”

  He liked hearing about her suitors even less than hearing that edge in her voice. “Worry less about fate, for it will find you no matter what you do.”

  “I would be dead, Thorbrand,” she tossed back at him. “Killed as a traitor to my uncle or as a disappointment to Mercia. Killed because I could only ever be a symbol to any of them, of what had already been lost. Do you truly believe that it could be otherwise?”

  “And yet you were not concerned about accommodating me overly when your life was in my hands, were you?” Thorbrand had spent so long with this woman, yet constrained. Forced to hold himself back for one reason or another. But now they stood in yet another frozen wood and a man who had dared take what was his at their feet. She would be his wife before nightfall, no matter what she might have told herself to the contrary. He feared he had no restraint left within him. Or perhaps the truth was that he did not fear that at all when it felt far more like freedom. “Or was that what you wanted, Aelfwynn? Better for a Saxon symbol to die at the savage Northman’s hands. Think of what they would whisper about you if you were taken, yet lived to tell the tale.”

  And to his astonishment—and though he admitted it only to himself, his deep and dark delight—she actually brandished the dagger she held at him.

  At him.

  Like a woman of ferocity who could handle anything, even him.

  Especially him.

  There were bright northern summers in her gaze, reminding him of lands where the sun never set. There was a glorious fury on her face. And Thorbrand had never seen any so beautiful as this woman. He had never wanted any woman more, so much that he resented his own king for the interest he had in her.

  He wanted to rip these feelings out of himself and burn them on a fire.

  Failing that, he would settle for burning the two of them alive in a manner that brought him far more satisfaction, for all that it was never, ever enough.

  Nor will it ever be, something in him spoke. Like prophecy.

  But Aelfwynn thrust her dagger forward as if she meant to thrust it straight through his chest. More than once.

  And Thorbrand could have disarmed her easily, but did not. Because he liked this side of his woman. He had wanted to tear down the hills at the thought he’d lost her today. And tearing down hills was the least he would have done had he found her foully abused by the likes of Bjørn. There could have been no price paid that could have assuaged him.

  Yet he still wanted to see where she went with a dagger and that temper in her gaze.

  He craved it.

  “I have spent my entire life making certain that I’m nothing but agreeable and accommodating at all costs,” she threw at him. “By the time you condescended to stop me on that road, I had already exhausted myself making certain that any who ventured near me in the wake of my mother’s death thought only of my serene countenance. My endless prayers. And my blameless character, inoffensive to all.”

  “And thus you are known throughout the land. Do you wish me to congratulate you on this? Or do you not realize that being known as such is an insult?”

  “It were no accident, Thorbrand!” she threw at him. “How do you think I survived?”

  “Because of your blood,” he replied, frowning because the question was foolish. Did she truly require his answer? “What else?”

  She moved closer, still brandishing her little blade. Again, he could have taken it from her, but what would be the fun in that? Far better to see where she was headed, to his mind. What she was capable of when she wasn’t pretending to be one of her saints.

  “Let me tell you something about my blood,” she seethed at him, a ferocious expression on her face that made him as hard as it did happy, though he would not have admitted the latter. She need not know how he craved her. How he longed for a wildness to match his own, particularly as his future battles would like as not take place mostly in their bed. He wanted a worthy opponent and he had known that she had this in her. He had tasted it. “It is all well and good to claim a direct line from King Alfred, all praise his name, but what good does it do me? Were I my mother’s son, who can say what might have happened? My mother might never have ruled at all. But I was born a daughter. And thus all my royal blood has ever done for me is make me a target. A prize. A bit of tender to be bartered between men as they decide what sort of treaty I might become. All I ever wanted to do was fight, Thorbrand, and so I did—though you may disdain my weapons.”

  “I do not disdain your weapons,” he replied, impatiently. She waved that dagger at him again, and he could not tell if she wished to stick him with it or if she’d forgotten she even held it. “Though I tire, Aelfwynn, of that sharp little blade too close to my face.”

  She frowned at the knife as if she’d never seen it before, but once again lifted her gaze back to him. Her frown deepened. And he could see that a great emotion held her fast. Her bodice heaved with the force of it. Her cheeks blazed with heat.

  He found her almost too beautiful to bear, especially in high color and her version of fury crackling through her. He wanted her beneath him. He wanted her and she had walked off into the woods with a man who might have hurt her, or killed her, and he did not see himself forgetting that any time soon.

  “Every woman knows the fates that await her, no matter how blameless,” she told him. She made a faint sound, not quite a laugh. “The veil is a gift accorded the few.”

  Aelfwynn shook slightly as she said that and he did not know if it was because she still longed for her nunnery. Something he might have to take as a personal insult if she did not cease—not that it would change her destiny. Nothing could.

  And that was not because of the gods but because Thorbrand had no intention of letting her slip away from him again. Ever.

  “You may think it foolish to concern yourself with a destiny when it has already been decided, but women are different, are they not?” Her eyes were like flame, the dagger still aimed at his throat. “Men can rely on fate. Women must rely on men, and of the two, I warrant fate is the kinder.”

  “Then you know it little.”

  She ignored his words. “A woman may be a wife or concubine. Free or a slave. But no matter what she becomes, often through no fault or choice of her own, the work of it remains the same. Men are to be flattered. Supported. Obeyed and admired in all things. I was yet a girl when I learned that my mother was permitted to do things no other woman could. But why? Not because she wished it alone. But because it suited her husband to allow her to do those things. As it suited her brother, who let her do as she wished. My father died before he could marry me to a rival or an enemy, but my uncle did not waste his time putting me in my place. I am left to wonder if my mother never knew her power had been borrowed all the while.”

  “Life is hard and short, sweeting,” Thorbrand rumbled at her. “I have spent mine on one long, endless military campaign where who has power and who does not is always readily apparent in who lives and who dies. What else is there? Men must take or be taken, that is t
he way of the world. Better learn to swing a sword or you will find yourself flattened by another’s.” He shrugged. “I chose to swing mine, and well.”

  “I congratulate you on having a choice at all.”

  Thorbrand studied her, that frown on her face and the dagger yet extended. Her chest was still rising and falling rapidly, making him wonder why they were standing thus, when this was a conversation better had naked.

  As he thought all conversations with this woman should be had.

  “What is it that irks you?” he asked her. Her eyes flashed and she opened her mouth, but he shook his head. “I do not wish to hear another story about your family or the trials of your bloodline. It was only you and me in that hall yesterday. I told you I meant to marry you and you reacted poorly. Why?”

  Her hand trembled as she held on to her dagger. But for a moment, all was silent save the sound of her ragged breathing. The winter wind had picked up slightly, rattling through the branches up above them. Yet he could smell the earth beneath them, muddy and wet, and in the rich scent of it, the promise of green things. Months hence, but still. A promise all the same.

  “You should have told me you meant to marry me from the start,” she said quietly, and her eyes seemed big. Overbright. “I thought I was your slave.”

  “That you were wrong should fill you with joy, should it not?” His voice was dry. “It should not inspire you to swing a dagger in my direction, I would have thought.”

  “You should have told me,” she said again, more intensely. And that gleam in her gaze even brighter than before. “I do not think you would take it lightly if you thought your freedom have been taken from you, do you? Better to know.”

  “But what freedom of yours did I take?” he asked, and it was an effort to keep his voice calm when he would have preferred to roar. To thunder at her about that dagger and her foolishness and whatever else would end this standoff and get her in his arms, where she belonged. “Have you not been at pains to tell me what few choices women have? Whether you call yourself a wife or a thrall, you belong to another. To me, Aelfwynn. Why should it matter to you which, if you are already as constrained as you claim?”

  The dagger moved even closer. “There is a difference between a wife and a slave!”

  “Not for you,” Thorbrand said, dark and low. “We have already had a taste of it, have we not? If you believed yourself a slave, it is a certainty you were not ill-used. I dare you to claim otherwise.”

  “Do you think that makes it any better? For I may assure you it does not.”

  “I will tell you what I think,” Thorbrand told her, and he moved closer to her then, until, had he breathed in too deeply, he would scrape himself with the pointed end of her blade. He glared down at her, somehow keeping his hands at his sides when he wanted nothing more than to touch her. To haul her close. To show her how they fit, as she’d apparently forgotten. “You would rather be my thrall.”

  Aelfwynn gasped. “I would rather no such thing! No freeborn person would ever wish for such shame!”

  He pushed on, ignoring her outburst. “That way, you can carry on as you have, forever congratulating yourself on your martyrdom. Is that not what fuels your pious little Christian soul? Your great sacrifice. Your struggle.”

  There were too many emotions to name, then, crowding through her eyes like gold. He noted each and every one of them, though he could not have named them.

  Thorbrand leaned closer to her, flirting with the point of that knife. “But if you are my wife, Aelfwynn, what then? If you are not martyring yourself to the Northman beast, could it be that this is not the great sacrifice you would prefer it to be? That you are not suffering, after all? Because try though you might, you cannot escape what you feel, can you? And worse, what you want.”

  She had gone still. Pale. “You have no idea what I want.”

  “You want me,” he roared at her, and liked it too well when she jumped at that. And better still, flushed bright red, telling him the truths her skin knew, even if she denied it. “But the notion offends your Mercian sensibilities, so far better, in your mind, that you succumb to a terrible fate than that I marry you and protect you and live out a life with you. By the gods, you would rather come to me in chains.”

  “I have done no choosing and I want no chains,” Aelfwynn said, though she sounded very nearly stricken, the dagger dropping to her side. “Yet you would wed me just as you took me in the first place, whether I chose it or no.”

  Thorbrand eyed her. “Did I not give you a choice on the eve when first we met?”

  “Yes, and a fine choice it was. Wolves, bandits, men set to rip me to pieces around the next bend...or you.”

  He laughed. “There is always a choice. What you want are choices you find agreeable, sweeting, and those are not gifts the gods tend to bestow. Better learn that now, when, like it or do not, none of the choices you have made will kill you. Many are not so lucky.”

  “I should have risked the wolves,” she threw at him. “They could only have been easier to reason with than you.”

  Thorbrand leaned to put his face close to hers, and he was not laughing any longer. “You will never escape me, Aelfwynn. The wolves cannot have you. But mark this. You can decide, here and now, whether our marriage be a pleasure or a prison.”

  And he watched as she stood there before him in this cold clearing, shaking from the force of the emotions that swept over her, too many waves on an unquiet sea. He saw the fight in her and, at her side, the way her hand that still held that dagger trembled.

  But he knew her too well. His little martyr. His woebegone saint.

  “What galls you is not that I meant to marry you from the start,” he said, and did not hide the dark laughter that moved in him. “But that, were you my slave indeed, you would have loved the role all the same.”

  And maybe he should have expected that look of surprise on her face. Then the bright bloom of color that followed, something too complicated to be simply temper. Shame, perhaps. That fire that was theirs, that burned even now.

  But she stopped shaking.

  “You are a demon straight from hell,” she bit out.

  “And that is how you like me, Aelfwynn,” he replied, not in the least insulted. “Over and over again. Night and day.”

  Her eyes were too bright with all of those things he could see tracking over her lovely face. She was not the least bit serene. He had never seen her thus, a bright, burning flame of temper.

  She was a vision. Even when she swung that dagger, and cut him.

  It was a slice across his forearm, little more than a scratch—but she’d cut him. She’d blooded him.

  For a long, tense, exhilarating moment, they only stared at each other. Aelfwynn’s jaw dropped open with what looked like shock. While Thorbrand’s whole body tightened with an outrage mixed with need, a bright hot flame that he was not certain he would survive.

  He was not sure he wished to survive it.

  And when Aelfwynn turned and ran for the trees, he laughed loud and long.

  Then chased her.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Soþ hit sylf acyþeð.

  Truth will make itself known.

  —The Durham Proverbs

  Aelfwynn threw herself through the trees, desperate to get away.

  Desperate to escape.

  His terrible words, ripping her open wide. The horror of the things he’d said, like arrows striking her through the heart. She told herself he was wrong. She told herself he knew not the dark places inside her, the things she dared not speak aloud.

  He was wrong. Her mother had been Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians. She was granddaughter to King Alfred. She wanted to be no man’s thrall. Her very blood forbade it.

  She ran in a blind panic, wanting nothing but to put space between her and the Northman who had spoken her deepest, most aw
ful truths out loud. She cared not that branches caught at her, that roots seemed to rise up to trip her—

  But a strong arm caught her, hauling her back, before the latest roots laid her out on the forest floor.

  And Aelfwynn had the clear thought that there was no further need for her to be quite so obliging. Or accommodating. Or in any way agreeable, thank you. Not to this man who had flayed her open with such thunderous deliberation.

  So she fought.

  For the first time in her whole life, Aelfwynn fought not with her words and her silences, her prayers and her piety. She did not smile. She was not serene.

  Finally, she fought.

  Thorbrand held her against him, his arms around her like bands of steel. He laughed while her arms flailed and her legs followed suit, seeming not to feel it at all when her heels landed blows or her fists found purchase.

  He seemed not to feel it and so she struggled harder, screaming out her fury and her feelings to the sullen winter sky.

  “Go on then,” he urged her at her ear. “Exhaust yourself.”

  Aelfwynn hated that he knew. That he knew far too much. That he knew the darkness in her heart and the longing in her body. That he knew, even before she did, what she longed for. What she truly longed for.

  She had always imagined it was this battle.

  Bravely did she fight on, but she already knew she was lost. She already knew that writhing about in his arms was nothing but a frustration. For she knew too well a different struggle. The two of them wrapped up tight in his furs, fighting to get closer, to get deeper, to lose themselves forever in the slick, sweet heat that had become as dear to Aelfwynn as breathing.

  But she had always told herself that if given the chance, she would fight the way men did, all fists and blades and savage cries of dominance. So she kept going, even though the more she fought, the more a new, more unpalatable truth wormed its way into her.