by Faye, Amy
But more men didn't come, and Gunnar's vision dimmed. More and more, until he could only see for flashes. Thunder rumbled as Thor tore through the battlefield, and finally he could hear the cries of victory from a thousand miles away.
He had to find Deirdre, had to make sure that she was okay. Had to make sure she wasn't hurt. He had to have her, had to keep her safe. Thor had spoken, had told him that she was necessary. And she was important to him.
She was the key to his plans to retake the band from Valdemar. And, as the delirium took her, he added to himself—the most important woman in the world and the only thing that mattered.
Then the world was black and he cursed himself because he couldn't protect her. How could he protect someone when he couldn't even move?
The question echoed in his mind, and then exhaustion and pain wrapped him up and sent him spiraling into the land of sleep.
Twelve
The noise of battle faded long before Deirdre's heart stopped racing. She'd been in the battle before, but only far away. She'd left before she had really felt the effects of the last ambush, and every raid she had known to be happening, she had been far away from—tied to a pole, or stuck sitting in the wagon.
This was the first time that she'd really had to confront it, and seeing the violence only reminded her what she had already learned about Gunnar watching him fight Valdemar.
He wasn't anything like her, not the least bit. He lived somewhere she would never be able to go. Yet, how different were they? She'd hit that man over the head, and he'd crumpled just the same.
The scene in front of her looked all quiet and peaceful, but she knew that it was misleading. The English soldier at her feet could start to wake at any moment. Gunnar lay, delirious, on the floor. If he were to wake up, she wouldn't be able to rely on him.
The knife she had kept hidden kept drawing her attention, kept reminding her that it was ready to go, any time she needed it. But that would mean going against who she was, who she'd always been. She wasn't a killer, didn't want to hurt people. She would like to help people, if possible.
But that didn't mean that she was willing to do anything to save lives. It didn't mean she was willing to die for those ideals. When a Northman's face appeared at the rear of the wagon, making sure that neither of them had escaped, and the wounded were still alive, she was surprised how happy she was to see him.
After all, these were her captors, they were the reason she had suffered so much. But it freed her from the need to choose between death and murder. And the shaved-headed man seemed to put her more at ease than the others, seemed to understand what she was going through. It gave her a certain measure of peace, thinking about it.
He reached in and pulled the English bodies out, to the floor. The one she had clobbered groaned loudly at the treatment, but Deirdre was surprised to find that she couldn't have cared less. He deserved what he'd gotten.
Then the shaved man looked at her. "You are unhurt?"
"Yes," she answered, still breathless. "Gunnar… protected me."
"Is he hurt?"
"I don't—" she struggled to get the words out. "He was hurt, but he…" she looked at him, distracted, afraid, and more than a little bit out of her mind. "Right?"
"He's tougher than most," the Northman agreed.
"I'll take a look at him, though. That's what Valdemar told me to do."
"We were able to see this group coming—no bad casualties. These three, didn't do what we expected."
The apology, if indeed that was what he had meant it to be, wasn't a particularly effective one, but she had to take it. She had other things to do.
Turning Gunnar over was hard, harder than she had expected, and when the Northman came into the wagon to help he noticed the broken bench support, where Gunnar had been tied. He must have realized the implication immediately, that he could have run if he wanted. But he said nothing and between the two of them it was an easy task to lift and turn him.
Deirdre had seen the sword stick straight through him. It was as bad a wound as she'd seen him take, but she knew that it wasn't likely that it would last more than an hour. The way that she'd seen him heal before… She started preparing her poultices again.
The motion was easy and practiced and repetitive. She'd done all the hard work already, gathering and separating the herbs out, made all the decisions. Now she just had to do what she had to do. It was almost meditative.
But the time that she had now, to think and to relax, proved to be anything but thoughtful and relaxing.
He hadn't barely been able to move, and yet he'd killed two men. Two soldiers, battle-hard, one of them ready for him with a sword in hand. Gunnar had done it with a knife, and with his hands bound and lashed to a pole.
The fury in his eyes was hard to miss. It had been terrifying, and yet at the same time, the knowledge that it had been something he did for her, it was strangely… exhilarating.
The man's body moved completely with control. He knew what he wanted, and what he had to do to get it. He was in complete control, and moved with speed that belied his size. Yet she'd seen him hurt, saw him now, delirious and unconscious. A child could overpower him, the way he was now.
She looked down at him, sleeping. He was handsome, for a Northman. Very handsome, she added, then immediately tried to take it back. There were things that Deirdre would allow herself to think and to act on.
The looks of the Northerner were not one of them. Handsome or not, protective or not, he was responsible for her situation more than anyone else. Damn his apology, damn his sympathy, damn his promises of protection.
She took a healthy amount of the crushed herb mixture and pressed it into his wound, harder than she might have liked, and he gave a loud groan of discomfort before going silent and still once more.
The groan immediately triggered a bad feeling in her. She shouldn't have let her frustration take over what she was doing. She was supposed to heal people, supposed to help them.
She had done this to herself, as much as anyone else had done it to her. She knew better than to go into town. Knew better than to trust the people that she had followed there. But they had asked her to help them.
She couldn't refuse that.
And now, just because he had taken her away from her life, destroyed so much… did that give her the right to hurt a defenseless man? No, it didn't.
She looked at him for a long moment, pressing her hand down on the wound in his side.
In a few minutes she would have to pull some out—he would heal too quickly, and what sort of effect would it have if she just left all those herbs in as the wound closed up around them?
She started pulling them free a moment later, trying to ignore Gunnar's still-unconscious protests. It needed to be done. Yet…
To her very great surprise, he bled still. She pressed down hard on the wound, trying to staunch the bleeding. Perhaps it had been her own doing. Perhaps if she hadn't done any of this, then he would have been completely fine. But it was more than a little bit concerning.
He wasn't healing nearly as fast as she expected, after all.
The pain was beginning to become familiar, like a new friend. Gunnar's eyes flicked open, the sky still dark from the clouds, though from what he could see outside the rain had subsided.
Deirdre wasn't looking at him, but she noticed him stirring and leaned forward as much as the rope would let her, pressing in. Ready to mother him to her heart's content.
"How are you feeling?"
He grunted, then thought better of it. "Hurts. But I'll live."
She sat back and he watched her do it. The thoughts that entered his head, looking at the curves of her body shifting and moving as he watched, they were harder to push away. He had other things on his mind, but he couldn't do anything about them. Not without putting her at risk.
He couldn't afford that, not right now. In time, maybe something would change. He'd get his chance to take back the raid when he could, but until then
, he had all the time in the world. The arousal he felt, it had been easy to ignore when he had important responsibilities, people to keep safe.
Now, he had nothing more than hours to fill and plans to make and a beautiful woman to lay near. He closed his eyes, hoping to drift back into sleep, to try to escape the pain. The ropes digging into his arms, though, reminded him of the screaming pain in his shoulders, and that in turn reminded him of the dull ache of the pernicious wound in his side and the pain from where he'd been stuck through.
He looked over at her, and watched her watching the road behind them. She looked tired, but something else was in her face, something he hadn't seen before. He couldn't begin to say for certain, but it almost looked as if she weren't so upset any more. What it is that she'd decided she wasn't mad about, he wasn't ready to say.
It was a welcome change from the attitude she'd had before, constantly putting him under scrutiny and criticizing his every move. Gunnar knew exactly why she was angry, understood it completely, but that didn't mean he wanted to hear it either.
It would hurt, he knew instinctively, even as he decided to sit up and get onto the bench seat beside him. There was no good reason to get up in it, nothing to be gained from it, but that didn't mean he wasn't going to do it anyway. Nothing to be gained from laying there on the wooden floor, either.
And besides, he wanted to be up. Wanted to be able to see what Deirdre was seeing, wanted to feel right again. Even if it hurt, it didn't matter. He turned over, then used his hands to push himself up to his knees. The pain was there, but since he expected it, the sting hurt a little less.
Looking out back he could almost imagine what she was seeing. A few hundred yards back, he could almost make out the bodies of two-score Englishmen who had stopped them when the hills pressed together. The hills were too steep, and fell off too much. Like small cliffs. There would've been no other way through the countryside.
It was as good an ambush location as he could have asked for, but someone must have realized what was happening because as far as he could see no other wounded had joined them in the cart, and they were moving again within the day.
Gunnar let his eyes wander again, to Deirdre's hair, to her face. To the smooth ivory skin visible above the neckline of her dress, and the valley in between her breasts. He forced himself to look up. She could have caught him looking at any time. But as he did, something caught his eye. A shock of red, brighter than her hair.
"You're hurt," he said softly. She turned slowly, giving him a curious look.
"No, I'm fine," she answered, an eyebrow still raised.
"There," he said, leaning across the cart. He touched a spot on her chest, trying to ignore how aware of her body he was feeling. She recoiled slightly at the touch.
"Ah! Oh, that? That's nothing. Little scratch, it'll be gone in a couple of days." She shrugged.
"I should have protected you," he said softly. He set his jaw and looked out the back of the wagon. "I'll make sure it doesn't happen again."
For a long time neither of them spoke, just watching the road pulling away behind them slowly.
"Gunnar, it's only a scratch," she finally said, catching him looking again.
"All my life, I've been a quick healer. Didn't realize how quick until I was eighteen years old. You can't hurt me, nobody can, not unless I'm chewing that stuff you gave me."
She looked at him a moment, then looked out the back, not sure how to respond. So he continued.
"If I could trade being stabbed through the gut to save it for someone else, sure it'll hurt, but…"
He trailed off.
The silence seemed to stretch out again, filling the air, neither of them really sure what to say. Both of them trapped in their own heads.
He finished his thought minutes later, long enough that Deirdre had to take a moment to realize what he was saying.
"But for you, I'd say it's a little different."
"Why is that," she asked, already knowing the answer. "Because I can cure you?"
"No," he said, surprised to hear the words coming out of his own mouth. "Not because of that."
"Or is it because I'm a woman?"
He smiled faintly. "If you knew some of the women from the places that I'm from, you might not think that way."
She frowned, clearly annoyed at the answer, but Gunnar wasn't about to let that stop him.
"So what, then?"
"Because you're important. The most important woman in the country."
"Because I'm a witch, then. There are plenty of us, from what I've heard. Loners, but there are plenty who are better than I am, smarter and better trained. More experienced."
"Because you're you," he answered. The words hung heavy in the air, and it shut Deirdre right up. No response to that.
The thought brought a smile to his face, and he turned back to the road, watching the weather change. It might be that the clouds would be cleared by the time they stopped to make camp for the night.
Deirdre said something softly, and Gunnar didn't catch it. She repeated herself, louder. "What's that supposed to mean?"
He thought about it for a moment before answering. "I care about what happens to you. More than others."
"Do you mean 'I love you?' " He wasn't sure what he heard in her voice, but Gunnar had already started to say it. There was no excuse for backing out now.
He kept looking out the back of the wagon. Did everything have to be spelled out? He took a deep breath. No, he couldn't keep lying, and he couldn't keep making excuses for himself.
"What if I did?"
Thirteen
The question caught her off guard, and Deirdre immediately knew that she shouldn't have asked it. She knew he could have said yes. But she'd gambled that he wouldn't. It had seemed like a sure thing, at the time.
The thought that he could have said 'yes' was completely foreign, and yet once the initial shock had passed, Deirdre realized how obvious it had been.
He couldn't keep his eyes off her, but it had been easy to write that off as just being impatient to get what he wanted. To get his "curse" removed. The fact that she was surprised also forced her to confront her own thoughts.
Sure, he was handsome. Sure, he made her think about men, made her think about being a woman. But that was just because she couldn't help feeling bound up by the situation that she was in.
Right?
The feeling of his eyes on her burned as she hesitated, unable to take her eyes off him. It was just because she had her freedom taken from her, that made her want to experience all the things she was missing out on. The words made sense. It fit neatly into her mind.
Something told her that wasn't all there was to it, and as if to prove her wrong her body started moving almost entirely without her consent. She watched as if she were a passenger as she moved across the wagon, leaning in, and then felt the press of her lips into his.
His whiskers tickled, but the feeling of her lips on his was electric, setting her on edge. What was she doing? She should stop. She had to stop, and she shouldn't have done it in the first place.
Finally under control again, Deirdre sat back, her own eyes wide. He looked surprised, unsure how he was supposed to respond. She wanted to say that wasn't how he was supposed to respond, that it wasn't how she imagined it.
She wanted to say that she hadn't meant to do it, too, and the two thoughts battled in her mind. How could she have wanted a reaction to something that she didn't want to do? He should have kissed her back, fiercely putting his hands behind her head and kissing. Passionate, fiery.
Gunnar's entire personality was dark and controlled passion. She could see it, all the time, boiling just under the surface, and it wasn't hard to figure out why she was so fascinated by it.
It was the essential expression of mannishness, she thought, and created a mystique around him. The fact that he'd come from some far away land, a place she had only heard vague stories about as a little child seemed like it should matter. That t
hey used to tell stories about wicked vikings who would come and take naughty children away.
Here the boogeyman was, right in front of her. What on earth was she thinking about? If Gunnar's reaction wasn't what she'd wanted, it was at least what Deirdre had expected. But now here she was going on and on in her head about stories she hadn't thought about in years, not even after she had been taken away by the same men that her mother had tried to scare her with as a little girl.
She blinked and tried to refocus, and she didn't see Gunnar moving until she felt his whiskers brush her lips again, felt his arms wrap around her, pulling her up nearly standing. She could feel the hardness of his muscles, the strength pulled tight through his whole body as he pulled her in.
Her thoughts vanished, replaced with memories of the visions she had seen when she had sat in that tent, trying to figure out what to do about Gunnar's immortality. What it would feel like to be under these muscles, to be moving with him as he plowed her.
She tried to push the thought away, but it came back again, forcefully, and she had to put her hand on Gunnar's chest to separate them.
"Are you okay?" His voice was deep and gruff, and she could hear the arousal in it, could feel it in the tenseness of his body even as he tried to give her the space that she so desperately needed.
"I don't know if this is—"
"I'm not asking you to give more than you're prepared."
She slipped out of his arms and sat down, trying desperately to calm herself, to pull herself out of the moment. The road continued pulling away from them, the wagon gently rocking with the soft rolling of the packed dirt beneath them.
Gunnar sat back down. She couldn't help paying attention to him, making sure that he wasn't hurting himself.
She wanted to kiss him again. The thought hit her out of nowhere. She wasn't surprised at it. She knew herself, knew her own mind, but it came at the same time as noticing something else, something she couldn't quite put her finger on. She only knew that the taste of his lips, the feeling of his body—she couldn't get enough of it.
