“There is fear in your eyes.” And she pleased him when she did not cringe away from him. When she held his gaze. “I would know your fears.”
“So that you may become them?”
He increased, very slightly, the pressure of his hand against her belly. “If you do not already fear me, sweeting, then the rumors I have heard about you must be true. You must be dim indeed, ill-suited and ill-prepared not only for the challenges you faced as your mother’s daughter, but for any life at all not simple and disciplined, like your abbey.”
Her chin lifted at that, but his words chased away the shadows in her gaze. And if they stung her, he thought it still the better bargain.
And then thought to question why he cared. Why did it matter to him that this woman, his already, should...? What? Think well of him?
That might have concerned him had he gone and gotten himself a wife in the usual order of things, but his had never been a quiet life, made of ordinary things. Not since he had failed his mother. Then buried her with his father when he had been but a boy.
You are a man this day, Ragnall himself had told him, with a heavy hand on his shoulder. And so must you sing songs of your father, and add your verses to his, so that all may know the glory that is his even now in Valhalla.
Thorbrand had looked up to Ragnall, his father’s condemnation a heavy stain on him. He had wondered why no one could see it save him.
May it be so, he had replied, fervently.
It will be so, said Ulfric, only a winter younger, even more fiercely from beside him.
Thorbrand knew he would make it so or die in the attempt.
He had been fighting ever since. No seasons off for farming, or wedding, or communal squabbles like some. Only battle. Only blood. And he still thought it a betrayal of his parents’ memory that privately, and only sometimes, he dreamed of a quiet place far from the din of another battlefield where he might use the power in his shoulders to push a plow rather than swing a blade. To build, not destroy. When he knew well what he owed them.
What he could never repay.
He would have denied this dream if asked. Indeed, he had been outraged when his king had told him what Thorbrand was to do with this Mercian captive.
You are the only one I trust to do this, Ragnall had said. The man who was, in many ways, Thorbrand’s second father, so little did he recall the man whose blood he shared aside from those final moments when he had seen naught but accusation in his dying father’s gaze. He remembered that in excruciating detail. For I know that you will not only keep her safe from harm, not only will you bind her to you, but you will make certain she thrives until I have use of her.
It will be my honor, Thorbrand had said at once, though the words scraped at his mouth.
And he deeply disliked the fact that here, in this tent of linen and furs still dangerously deep in Mercian land, he kept catching himself thinking less and less of the vows he’d made and the duty he was called to execute, and far more of the sweetness of exactly this kind of quiet.
Did he not know that these Christians frowned on such things, he would think her a witch.
Beneath his hand, Aelfwynn trembled, though her gaze stayed on his.
“Do you make me wait to hear your answer?” he asked her. “Is that wise? I told you I would know your fears.”
“I am told it is painful,” she said at last.
He returned his attention to her belly and the runes he painted there with his fingertip. One. Another. Drawing protection upon her—and he told himself he did so only because her protection better served his king. And not because he could feel her fear. No matter that he could scent her arousal beneath it. “There are many things in life which can be painful. That does not mean they are always so.”
Her breath was not quite even, and not entirely fearful. “What makes it one or the other?”
He met her gaze then and did not smile, somehow. “The skill of the practitioner.”
Thorbrand doubted she fully grasped his meaning, but something must have impressed itself upon her, for her eyes grew wider, then darker in precisely the way he liked.
“I have seen men and women and their couplings,” she said, as if she confessed a great sin. “The frenzy of it. The agony.”
“Agony is one way to describe it, that is true.”
She was beginning to frown, no doubt because he could not seem to keep his amusement out of his voice. “Do you deny this?”
“Not at all. For what is life without a touch of agony?”
“Of all the stories I was told, it was my mother who was the most dead set against the practice.”
“An unusual woman, your mother.” It was not a compliment.
Aelfwynn considered him for a moment. “Had she been my uncle’s brother, I think perhaps less would be said of the ways she was unusual and more of the ways she was powerful.”
“Was she your uncle’s brother, I doubt she would have spent her time filling a daughter’s head with fears that could only distress her come the marriage bed.” He traced another rune, inguz, for new beginnings and the fertile hopes of a man and wife. Not safety. He knew better than that. “Only women tell these tales of agony to untried maidens. To what end?”
She shifted beneath him, though not, he thought, in any great effort to dislodge his hand.
“I think you underestimate how prepared a woman must be,” Aelfwynn said. Her gaze touched his, then dropped. “For how could a woman dedicate herself to all that is expected of her if she were not prepared? It is no easy task to weave a peace with broken thread.”
“We are all of us called to do what we must,” he said softly, and wondered then if he was drawing runes upon her or if he was drawing her heat into him. It was a strange sensation. “You may not believe in fate, sweeting. But it guides us all the same. Your mother might well have taught you thus and spared you.”
“My mother never found herself a prisoner,” Aelfwynn retorted, with a flash of that spirit he craved. “She would have thought her name alone would spare me such a fate.”
“Nothing can spare you your fate, Aelfwynn.” He moved his hand, spreading more symbols across the gentle slope of her belly. “You will surrender your innocence to me. The only question is when.”
She shuddered slightly, though Thorbrand could see the glaze of heat in her gaze. He could feel it beneath his palm, her body readying itself for him.
“Are these your fears, then?” he asked.
Aelfwynn was already flushed, yet turned redder with every breath. “I will confess I do not understand how the act of rutting can be so painful and yet also so laughable that some women claimed they slumber through it.”
Thorbrand did not do well at biting back his laughter then. “Again, there is the matter of skill.”
“I don’t understand.”
He felt a strange rush of something like tenderness as she lay there, quivering beneath his touch. Yet with her chin set mutinously, though they both knew that if he decided at any moment to take what he wished, there was little she could do. He did not intend to put that to the test. For he was hungry for her, hungrier than he could ever recall being for any woman’s flesh before, but it was more than that. He also wanted deeply to soothe her.
Because it was the wiser course, he assured himself.
“It is like a sword,” he told her.
She let out a sharp sound of impatience. “It is always swords. Too many swords.”
He laughed again. “Indeed. But surely you know that while any man can lift a sword and swing it, this does not make him a warrior. That, I am afraid, takes practice. Skill. And no little art.”
“Why is it when I wish to speak about the fearful things that men do, I must always find myself instead speaking of swordplay?” she asked, sounding genuinely indignant and baffled at once.
Gods protect him, but Thorbrand.
..liked her.
An ill portent when the woman was Ragnall’s to use, but he could not think of that now. Here.
“If you insist,” he said, “I will show you.”
“You don’t mean...?” He could see the wariness in her gaze then. She swallowed, hard. “Is this when you shall crawl on top of me and heave at me until I weep and you are satisfied?”
Thorbrand could not say he had ever given much thought to the behavior of men. And yet if that was not a harsh condemnation of the lot of them, he knew not what could be.
“I promise you that there will be no heaving,” he said dryly. “And more, you need not fear that I might spring the act upon you. Do not worry over the act at all. If you do not wish it, you need not even be upon your back.”
And when her eyes lit up at that, Thorbrand could not decide if he felt filled with pride that he had made her look so delighted so easily. Or rather thick with shame that she had no idea what he meant, and, it was clear, no earthly notion that there was more to the pleasures men and women found between them than lying flat on her back and enduring it.
“Do you mean it?” she asked, her voice hushed, as if he had offered her pouches stuffed with gold.
“I rarely say things I do not mean.” He tugged her with him as he rolled then, so that once more she fell across his chest. “Now you have crawled atop me, Aelfwynn. What danger is there now?”
Her gaze then was so bright with hope and relief, Thorbrand was shocked he didn’t spread her legs wide and settle himself deep inside her, no matter that he had only just eased her saddle-sore muscles. And no matter that he had promised.
But he was a man who kept his vows, always. What use was honor if a man only worried over it when other men could see it?
He toyed with some of the blond strands that had fallen from her braid and acknowledged that he had never imagined himself the saint and martyr he clearly was this eve. Who knew that deep within him lurked a latent Christian after all? He would have to make certain to blood the appropriate sacrifices to the real gods, and soon. But for now, there was only this. There was only her.
And what he had promised Ragnall he would do.
A task that could only be the more pleasant if he awakened her slowly to all the ways she could crave him.
So he smiled, dark and needy, and liked too well the echo of his own hunger he could see in her face.
“And now, Aelfwynn,” he said, and her name, too, was honey on his tongue. She was that sweet. “I think it is time at last for that favor. I will claim a kiss.”
Chapter Seven
Nē sceal man tō ǣr forht nē tō ǣr fægen.
One should be neither too soon fearful nor too soon glad.
—The Durham Proverbs,
translated by Eleanor Parker
Aelfwynn felt as if she no longer fit in her own skin.
She could hardly comprehend what had already happened in this tent. That he had tugged her underdress up to her waist, exposing her. That he’d found her dagger and taken it and she had offered not the faintest protest in return. Had forgotten he’d done it, in fact, because Thorbrand’s huge, hard hands were pressing and rolling all over her skin until her legs no longer felt like her own.
Until she no longer felt like her own.
And Aelfwynn had never understood what cleaving was, though the priests thundered on about when it was permitted and when it was not. She’d never understood their dire warnings about impure thoughts and the sinful touching that must follow. But then, what she had considered touching before now was not in any way what the priests warned against.
She understood a great many new and troubling things this night.
For she had never felt so sinful as she did now. Fair to bursting with sin, suffused in too many flames to count, wrecked by one wildfire after the next. Both where his hands had touched her through her hose, over and over again, and in many places he did not.
And now this overwhelming mountain of a Northman stared up at her gravely, his dark eyes a steady provocation on hers, and wanted a kiss.
When surely he could take what he wanted whenever he pleased. She knew not why he insisted on drawing it out. Was he making it better or worse?
But she could not think of that now. Not with the prospect of kissing him lighting her up from the inside out.
A soul does not truly know how to fight until she also knows how to surrender, she thought to herself now. With great piety.
For surely it was that, and not her sinfulness, that made her want nothing more than to creep up the vast expanse of his chest. To let her bosom drag against him as she did it, because there was something in the ache of it, looming like a new glory, as she moved.
He’d been toying with her hair, but as she slithered over his chest, that hand moved to hold fast one cheek. And his other hand smoothed over her bottom in a way she felt she ought to have found deeply objectionable. Yet did not.
And besides, surely it was that same magic he had already worked. It was medicinal, she was sure. He was a healer, she told herself solemnly. And she was no heretic that she wished—fervently—to believe it.
“I have never kissed a man before,” she confessed, though she had moved enough that she had almost made it to that distractingly stern mouth of his.
This close to him, she could no longer pretend that she did not notice that for all he was huge and hard and terrifying, he was moreover beautiful. His dark hair and dark beard made her blood a shuddering thing inside her.
And his eyes, so dark and so intent upon her, made her want to cry.
A different kind of tears, she acknowledged.
“Permit me,” Thorbrand murmured.
Aelfwynn was astounded. She could feel his very breath on her lips. She felt torn, deliciously, between the hard heat of his palm at her cheek, the great stone of his chest, and the swooning, spinning, glorious heat that seemed to be coming from inside her...
As slowly, almost carefully, he fit his mouth to hers.
She thought she laughed, or gasped, for it was so foreign.
Aelfwynn had never given much thought to her own lips, but well did she know their shape, their plump softness. His suited him, merciless and grave, and yet as he pressed them to hers, there was...something else. A hint of give that made that wildfire low in her belly ignite.
And there was his beard, besides, and the prickle of those hairs against her face should have been horrible. Instead of setting her to squirming against him, as if she had been dunked in a cauldron and set to boil, something that was not, she discovered, horrible at all.
He made a low noise, a growling, humming sort of thing, and the wonder of it was that she could feel it in his mouth and hear it with her ears. And more, feel the shivering heat of it in every part of her he had touched.
Deep inside her, the fires she could not seem to keep from burning blazed high.
And then he licked her.
She pulled back in surprise and he laughed, his mouth chasing hers.
“You licked me,” she accused him.
“Lick me back, woman,” he rumbled, and then claimed her mouth again.
Her mind reeled. In all the sinful things Aelfwynn had witnessed out of the corner of her eye in too many halls to count, or with the whole of her eyes if no one was watching her too closely, she had never thought what she was witnessing was...tongues. Licking.
But Thorbrand knew what he was about. He did not wait for her to catch up to him, he merely licked his way into her mouth, and somehow, she felt the strength to meet this bizarre incursion with her own.
And she felt herself...boil over.
It was a pure shock, new sensations exploding inside of her. Every time their tongues touched it was as if she were a glowing hot iron in a smith’s forge, and while surely that should have terrified her, it did not.
F
or, though this might shame her later, it felt too good.
Thorbrand did something with his hand, moving her head so that she was lost in a dark, twisting heat. And everything was the slide of his lips, the touch of his tongue, the way he captured her and claimed her and took her again and again.
And yet still, she knew enough to know that this was not the act itself. This would not rid her of her maidenhead. She was not in the proper position, for one thing, as she had been before—waiting for him to mount her. That was the thing her mother had warned her against, for far different reasons than her priests had. And for another, while Aelfwynn wore far fewer garments than she should have, than was at all right or proper, she wore them.
She understood something new and shocking about herself then.
If this was sin, then she was a sinner in truth, for she would have done anything to keep kissing Thorbrand forever.
Instead, his hand moved. He pulled back. Then held her apart from him when she would have tried to kiss him all the more.
“It was only a small favor, Aelfwynn,” he said, mildly enough.
And she could not tell if she was distressed or angered at the dark amusement she could hear laced into his voice and could see too well in the gleaming darkness of his gaze. And the longer she gazed at him, she became aware once more that his eyes were not the monstrous black of her imagination as befit a rampaging Northman, but a dark blue midnight.
For some reason, that made her shudder all the more.
“But I wish...” Aelfwynn began, because she yearned. She knew not what she yearned for, perhaps, but she was certain it began with his mouth on hers yet again.
“Aelfwynn. We have been over this.” He did not laugh, yet she could sense it, filling the tent all around them. “It is not what you wish. It is what I wish. And now I bid you rest. There are many days of travel ahead.”
Thorbrand wrapped his arms around her as he had the night before. He settled deeper into the furs and pulled one over her, too, covering them both. And then, as though he somehow did not see that she glared at him, he merely closed his eyes.
Moments later, he began to snore.
Kidnapped by the Viking Page 9
