Harlequin Historical May 2021--Box Set 2 of 2

by Elizabeth Rolls

  I do not wish to fight him, she acknowledged, though it hurt. I would fight for him. I would fight with him.

  Yet the truth she least wanted to face was what he’d said before she’d wielded her dagger at last. She had thought herself his slave and had still loved her time in that cottage. She had found a deep joy in the quiet rhythm of a life finally shared. There had been no distance between them, for how could there have been? They might tend to different tasks, but both had been in service of the same ends. Food and shelter and a fire to keep them warm.

  For once, Aelfwynn had not been set apart. For once, she had known a real intimacy that she had only heard tell of, before. Not only the things he did to her that made her shudder so and call out his name. But the fabric of their days, stitched together unevenly for she was no deft hand with a needle, but only theirs.

  Like a secret, she thought now, but not because she would have tried to hide it had others been near. But because it belonged to them alone. The rhythm and the sweetness. All theirs.

  And because she loved him. Slave or wife. Lady or thrall. She loved him all the same.

  Had she fallen in love with him the very first moment she’d seen him standing in the road, covered in dark and snow?

  She sagged against him, undone. Her breath was coming in high-pitched now, almost wheezing, so fiercely had she fought him. Aelfwynn thought she could be proud of that, at least. That she had fought as hard as she could.

  Thorbrand turned her around in his arms, still holding her off the ground, and then flattened her back against the nearest tree.

  “You drew my blood,” he growled at her, and she had never seen him look so dark. So thoroughly stern.

  It should have terrified her, but it did not. Instead, it seemed to set her aflame. Until it was as if her heart became lodged between her legs, sending out waves of need until her whole body burned the same.

  Hot and bright and never-ending.

  “You seem no worse for wear,” she managed to say.

  “I will allow it,” he said with all his usual arrogance, as if she had not spoken. “We will consider it a wedding gift, you and I. But were I you, Aelfwynn, I would think carefully before you lift a blade to me again. Very, very carefully.”

  “Thorbrand—” she began.

  She was furious. She was desperate. She loved him.

  And she yearned for something she dared not name, for she had been taught better. There were no love matches for her. No love matches between a Northman and the woman he had abducted out of her uncle’s keeping, however indifferent that keeping might have been. She was foolish to imagine otherwise.

  Yet imagine otherwise she did.

  His mouth was on hers then, and that fire that ever roared between them swept over her. Like a glorious fever and she welcomed it. She longed for more even as it took her over.

  And Aelfwynn didn’t think. She did not worry over how best to handle him, or what she ought to do with her expression, her gaze, her.

  She simply met his kiss with all the fury she felt inside. All the shame. All the need and the fear and the panic he brought out in her, all that heavy and overwhelming love, because he saw her.

  He had seen her from the start.

  He had seen her plain when she had grown so accustomed to disappearing while others gazed upon her that it had never occurred to her that anyone could look at her and truly see her. Not her grandfather. Not her parents. Not her powerful uncle.

  They had seen a useful tool. A favored child who would nonetheless find her true calling only when she married for strategic purposes. Or in Edward’s case, a minor inconvenience to be removed from the inevitable sweep of his rule.

  Thorbrand might have wanted to use her name for his benefit, but that was a name. He yet saw her as a woman. He treated her first and foremost as a woman.

  As his woman.

  She had never been simply... Aelfwynn.

  Until now.

  And as if to prove it, Thorbrand ate her alive.

  He hauled her up high, shoving her dress and underdress out of his way. Then he tore her hose down to her ankles so he could raise her knees up on either side of his body. He freed himself in the same rush, and then he slammed himself home.

  Aelfwynn shattered at once, the pleasure so intense and the fit so thick and full, that it was all she could do to throw back her head and let out a long, keening cry. Of joy. Of surrender. Of love.

  Thorbrand gave her no quarter. He thrust into her again and again, that glorious pounding, as if he, too, had thought her lost to him. As if he regarded that loss in the same way she did.

  As if the very notion of any separation between them was unbearable.

  He put his mouth at her ear, working himself into the slick grasp of her body again and again.

  “If you wish to rant at me about the trials of this life of ours, you may do so only when we are joined thus,” he growled, fierce and hot. “If you wish to try to cut me, use your nails and no dagger. We will all play our parts in the future laid out for us, that is a certainty, but you and I? We will always meet here, Aelfwynn. We will always meet right here.”

  “Thorbrand...” she managed to say.

  But only that. Only his name.

  And then she was shattering all over again, sharper and wilder than before, and this time, he went with her.

  Until there was nothing but the joining.

  And the joy that was only theirs, and only this.

  Thorbrand held her there for some time, both of them lost the wildness of their breath and when he pulled out of her, she let out a soft sigh of disappointment. For then, again, they were two once more. She felt the cold of the day. The stretch in her thighs. The places she’d kicked against rocks and roots as she’d run, as she’d been shoved, making her feet feel tender. The way she melted still despite these things.

  He set her down gently and she busied herself pulling her hose back into place. Then smoothing down her dresses and trying her best to put her cloak to rights. Though she dared not run a hand over her hair, afraid of the damage she might find.

  Maybe part of her hoped she yet looked as wild as she felt.

  As wild as he’d made her.

  “You will marry me this day,” Thorbrand told her then as he fastened his trousers, his voice all command. “I will hear you say it.”

  “I will marry you,” she agreed. She did not have to consider it. “This day.”

  And it could have been an eternity that passed then, his midnight blue gaze hard on hers. The feeling of him still between her thighs. The longing that never left her. Always empty, then, yet always full.

  Joy, something in her whispered. Love.

  No one had told her she should anticipate either. They had told her to live up to their legends, and so she would, if not as they’d imagined. She would fight to love a wild and savage Northman and should they find themselves in Mercia again, she would not hide it.

  Aelfwynn did not intend to hide her true self again. Not ever.

  “I did not expect this,” Thorbrand said then, his voice quiet, but rough. He moved to wrap his hands around her shoulders, tilting her so that she had no choice but to meet his gaze. To lose herself in all that intent dark blue. Even if, given the choice, she would have done exactly this. “I did not expect you, Aelfwynn.”

  That hurt, as if he’d cut her in return, and she did not have it in her to hide it as she ought. To lower her gaze, to smile. To disappear again. “I apologize if I am a disappointment.”

  She ought to have been well used to the feeling, after her half year of pleasing no one as the potential new Lady of the Mercians. It was worse now. She had thought then only of surviving, yet with Thorbrand, she wanted so much more.

  So very much more, it made her breathless.

  But she had learned something very important in the
se woods today. She was not given to fighting with fists. She had other weapons, as she had always maintained. So too would she use them here, if she had to.

  That was a choice she could make, and happily.

  “You mistake me.” Thorbrand gripped her harder, though she thrilled to the touch. “I thought a Mercian princess nothing more than a task to complete. A vow made to my king, so there was a kind of honor in the task, though it came with no glory. But this I vowed to do for him, as I would do whatever he asked.”

  “You are loyal,” Aelfwynn said softly. “Most kings dream of your like, yet find instead men like those who abandoned me on that road.”

  He shook his head, his face grave. “I expected a shrew. A spoiled creature, no good for anything. I thought I would take this mewling chit to the cottage I had found and see how we would suit, only her and me. It would make no difference in the outcome, you understand. But before I set sail for the west, I needed to know if Aethelflaed’s daughter could tend a fire. Bake a simple loaf of bread. Produce ale to drink.”

  “And what if I had failed you?” She was not certain she wanted his answer.

  “If you could not do these simple tasks, I would still take you across the seas. But where we settled would be different. If you were useless, better I should take you to a village where our survival need not depend on what you could or could not do. But if you possessed even the most rudimentary skills, I would take you instead to the land I claimed as mine last summer.”

  She sniffed. “I hope I passed this...bride test.”

  “Aelfwynn.” Thorbrand made a sound that could have been a laugh, though his gaze was far too serious. “You do not heed me. It took me less than one day to forget entirely that there was any test at all.”

  She allowed herself a small sigh, and liked well how the heat of his hands made her feel warm when she knew she was not. “That is no small thing, I suppose.”

  “There is more,” he said in that same grave manner. “Living with you in that way, so far from the din of battle and the commands of kings... It reminded me that for all I dream of the glory that can be won with the swing of my sword, so too do I have other dreams.” He reached up and ran his hand over the wild hair she wore braided now, as if she was one of them. A Northman’s woman. This Northman’s woman. “A quiet life. The love of a good woman. Land that is ours to work as we will, and whatever sons you may give me.”

  “Thorbrand...” she whispered.

  “I have known nothing but shame for the want of such things,” he told her solemnly. “For I have fought in too many battles. They have marked me well. The Irish warrior who left me with scars all over my side took more from me that day.” He looked intense then. Tortured. She found her own fingers twitching as she thought of tracing over those scars like claws that raked down his side. His dark eyes blazed. “He killed my mother while I watched. I did nothing.”

  Aelfwynn made a low sound of sorrow, but he kept on.

  “And as I lay there, bloody and useless, he took down my father, too.” Thorbrand’s face looked harder, then. His gaze bleaker. “I saw the look in his eyes as he died and knew well his disappointment in me.”

  “I do not believe it.” Thorbrand’s eyes widened, no doubt at her temerity. But Aelfwynn shook her head then, as decisively as if she was a queen in truth though her voice was soft. “I do not. His wife was dead. His son injured, and badly. Maybe his true disappointment was in himself.”

  For a long while, Thorbrand stared at her as if she really had sunk her dagger in deep. He looked nothing short of thunderstruck.

  When he pulled in a breath, it sounded ragged to her ears. “I have carried this failure with me, Aelfwynn, always.”

  She slid her hands higher on his chest, and dared to place her palm over his heart. “Maybe it was never yours, Thorbrand.”

  He looked as if he were in pain. As if her hands on him were setting him alight. “I have given myself to these wars on behalf of our people, over and over, that I might right those wrongs in some way. It has shamed me deeply that I might want anything but the battles and the glory that might bring honor to my family as I could not do, then.” She shook her head again, but when she opened her mouth to speak, he stopped her. He gripped her that much tighter. He lowered that midnight gaze of his even closer. “Yet whether what you have suggested here is truth or a wish, I know well that I would walk away from all of it. I would do this happily for as long as we must stay away, and call it the better choice, because of you.”

  And Aelfwynn had spent long and lonely years learning how not to speak. How not to reveal herself. How to hide.

  But this was Thorbrand, who thought himself a failure when the scars she’d seen on him suggested he had nearly died himself. He had offered her choices in that road. Not good choices, as he had said, but choices all the same. He had treated her tenderly when he did not have to. He planned to marry her. He had held her after she’d cut him with her dagger, and he had let her flail and fight until she could do no more, never crushing her or hurting her.

  Just as he had taken her maidenhead in that pool, making her feel as if she had been the one to gift it to him. Not ruining her in the way she’d understood ruin, all sobs and repentance and horror, but leaving her wanting more.

  And unless she was mistaken, he had, just now, given her a piece of himself he had never given another. He had made himself vulnerable in the telling. Aelfwynn knew, with a deep rush of feminine understanding, that if she did not comprehend and accept the gift he offered her here, she might never see it again.

  That was more than she could bear.

  Aelfwynn melted against him, and ordered herself, once and for all, to show that she was as brave and courageous as her mother had been. As she too had been, in her own way. But this mattered more to her than kingdoms in play or the whims of her uncle. Or Ragnall.

  This meant everything.

  This was Thorbrand’s heart, and she intended to cherish it. And him.

  She slid her arms up and around his neck, stretching up on her toes and forgetting how they ached, and she held his gaze as if her very life depended on it.

  For she knew well that it did.

  More important, so too did her heart and any possibility of happiness.

  “I told you once that I dreamed of peace,” she told him softly. “Far away from disputed borders and fortified burhs. Out of reach of kings and would-be queens. Where the only blood that signifies is that we will share when we make our daughters.”

  He smiled at that. “Will we have daughters then? I can tell you, sweeting, if the daughters we raise are like their mother, I will know I have the favor of the gods after all.”

  She found that she was smiling too. “I never wished to be a queen, Thorbrand, or even a great lady as my mother was. I can think of nothing I should love more than to be your wife. To bear you sons and daughters in turn. And...” She paused, searching his face, but how could she keep back pieces of herself when he had shared his with her? What kind of marriage would that be? Maybe others resigned themselves to what was practical. But Aelfwynn was not others, and she wanted more. She wanted everything. “And I will love you, as best I can, for as long as we are given.”

  And everything stilled. Her heart and breath. Him. The wood around them, even the sun above.

  “I will hold you to that, Aelfwynn,” Thorbrand told her. His voice was rough, though his touch was gentle. And the look in his eyes made tears form in hers. “And when Ragnall calls for us, I will remind him that we are kin. And I will ask of him—”

  “No,” Aelfwynn said fiercely. “That is not who you are. When your king calls, we will do as he bids. That is the vow you made and so it is our honor that is at stake. Our honor. And I will not have you stain it, Thorbrand. Not for anything.”

  “You are fierce, little Saxon, are you not?” But his voice was filled with something like w
onder.

  “I was raised to believe that weaving peace is a woman’s sacred duty, not only to her family, new and old, but to God.” Aelfwynn thought of the women who had taught her, Mildrithe and Aethelflaed in their turn. Two such different women. Two markedly different places in the world, and each had known precisely where she belonged. Aelfwynn had always envied them that knowledge, but she felt it now. Here, in Thorbrand’s arms, at last. “How could I consider myself a good woman, much less a good wife, if I did not make certain to keep, woven tight and gleaming, my husband’s duty to his king?”

  “I do not deserve you,” he gritted out, and she heard a kind of pain in those words. She wanted to reel at that. At the notion this huge, hard man who she had once thought terrifying might truly believe the words he spoke.

  Then again, he truly believed he had failed his own parents.

  “But you do,” she replied swiftly, her voice still fierce and her gaze steady on his. “For so you claimed me in the middle of an old road and made me yours. Does a man deserve what he claims? Our kings would say they do, I think. And so must I.”

  “Sweeting,” Thorbrand said, his voice almost too rough then. Too deep. Yet it moved in her as if it was a part of her. As if he was. “Aelfwynn. I will make you a good husband, I promise you. Whether we till the land or sit high above your homeland, it will be the same. I promise you this. And more, I will love you. With my body, my sword, and my heart, and every blessing the gods have ever granted me. So do I swear here and now.”

  Aelfwynn reached over and pulled his dagger out, smiling when she saw his dark brows rise. But instead of swinging it in his direction, she shook back the sleeve of her cloak, and pricked herself on the inside of her wrist. Deep enough only to let a small droplet of blood rise against her pale skin.

  Then, holding his gaze, she fitted her wound to his.

  “Blood spells are a dangerous game,” Thorbrand warned her, though his gaze was warm. “What would your priests say?”