by Betina Krahn
“Does this frighten you, Serricksdotter?” he said with a ragged edge.
“No.” She whispered the half lie with her eyes half closed. On one level it was entrancing, on another it truly was terrifying. Control of the situation was clearly in those big, firm hands that were making butter of her muscles and mush of her will.
“And what of this?” he murmured, moving his hands down her back, so that she was forced slightly forward, against his body. With his arms fully around her, but not quite embracing her, he traced her spine and caressed every muscle in her back. “Does this make you want to run from me?”
“No,” she breathed, lifting her eyes to his. Those great, shaded pools of sky, filled with equal measures of pleasure and hunger. It was a mild surprise for her to realize that what he was doing to her seemed to give him pleasure, as well.
“Or this?” He raised his hands to her shoulders, then slid them down her naked sides, where they clasped her waist tightly and pulled her forcefully against him.
She could scarcely shake her head. The size of him, the sudden impact of their bodies, and the feel of his lean musculature against her own tautly molded frame overwhelmed her senses. She felt the ridge of his hardened flesh against her belly and was mildly shocked to realize that it was meant for her . . . that she had caused it and that her body responded to it.
Thigh to thigh they stood, hardness to hardness. And there was suddenly a new ache deep inside her, one that could not be assuaged by a simple massage.
“You spoke truthfully, Long-legs. I believe you do not fear my touch.”
She watched his generous lips as he spoke and longing surged so powerfully in her that it took her breath. It was a magic peculiar to him, his own unique enchantment, that allowed him to draw the life-breath from another mortal being without even touching her.
“Breath-stealer,” she said in a whisper. “When you steal a woman’s breath, what do you do with it?”
“I’m no thief. I always give it back,” he vowed, his voice thick and sultry, enveloping her like the steam. He lowered his head and ran his hands up her sides, to the sides of her breasts, driving all the air from her lungs in a soft rush.
“Have I stolen your breath, Fearless Maiden?”
She could only answer with her eyes. “Then I will be pleased to give it back to you.” He lowered his mouth to hers by agonizing increments, then paused a hairswidth away and blew ever so gently on her lips. That hot, moist stream of breath drowned her mouth in swirling, liquid sensation. Pleasure surged and eddied through her lips, engorging and weighting them so that they parted.
But his restitution was a sham, for instead of giving back her breath, he dangled it between them, allowing her use of it only in short, shuddery gasps. Then he covered her mouth with his, flexing his lips softly over hers, moving in slow, lazy circles that coaxed her to return that shockingly intimate contact.
Mouth-to-mouth, they stood, softness to softness. Her arms went slack and her knees buckled. As she clung to the remnants of her sanity, the thought surfaced in her head: This was what he did with his mouth that pleasured the women so! It shocked her enough that she pulled back, breaking that hypnotic contact.
“You don’t bite,” she murmured wonderingly.
“Not unless I’m bitten first,” he whispered over a soft chuckle, pulling her back to him.
The force of his mouth on hers deepened and his tongue traced the edges of her lips and the lush crevice between them. She had never imagined two people doing such a thing: pressing their mouths together, opening to each other, feeling the soft, liquid slide of tongues over lips and of teeth gently raking. It was like being devoured . . . but oh, so pleasurably.
His arms tightened around her, leaving no room between them for the defensiveness that held a scrap of linen in place. She withdrew her arms and wrapped them around him, where they began to trace the bold contours of his back. He was a marvelous broad plain beneath his soft woolens. How enthralling it was to be joined to a man in this way . . . to fill her arms with his strength and warmth, to have her senses drenched with his musky male scent and the subtle motions of his male body against hers.
A muffled gasp burst on the quiet around them. But it was the sound of Aaren’s name that penetrated the pleasure-fog in her senses. The sound of feet thudding on a packed floor and more gasps and murmurs sent her shoving back blindly in Jorund’s arms. But his embrace tightened around her and held her to him as he swung them around to face the intruder.
Miri and Marta stood just inside the door, panting, and behind them, eyes wide and jaws slack, stood Helga, Sith, and wraithlike Inga. They had come at a run, expecting to find bloody mayhem committed in their women’s sanctuary . . . and found the battle-maiden and their Breath-stealer locked in heated embrace instead of heated combat!
“Aaren?” Miri squeaked out, her face crimson. “Aaren?” Marta echoed, blushing.
Aaren was struck speechless as she glimpsed their shocked faces. She was caught in her enemy’s arms . . . weaponless . . . half naked . . . and worst of all, half surrendered! What in the twisted roots of the great tree Yggdrasil had come over her, to let herself be drawn into such a disgrace? She shoved furiously against his ribs and freed herself, only to face further humiliation when her linen cover stuck to his shirt and her breasts came away bare. She snatched the cloth back and covered herself.
“I-I was afraid of what would h-happen when I left you,” Miri stammered in explanation, her innocent gaze riveted to the sight of Aaren’s flushed skin, passion-darkened eyes, and swollen lips. “I told Marta and then Helga . . . and w-we were afraid you’d be . . . you would be . . .”
“Cuttin’ each other up,” Sith finished for her, eyeing the pair of them as if committing every detail to memory. “Well, they ain’t doin’ no cuttin’,” she declared to the others, “and we ain’t gettin’ th’ churnin’ done by standin’ here. Come on.” She gave Inga and Helga a shove and snagged Miri’s and Marta’s arms to drag them out the door. But the look the old dairywoman cast over her shoulder as she departed said that the only thing getting churned that morning would be her tongue. Her story of finding the battle-maiden half naked in Jorund Borgerson’s arms would soon be all over the village!
The instant they cleared the doorway, he reached for her with a grin, apparently intending to take up where they had left off.
“Don’t you dare touch me, Borgerson,” she said as she struggled to hold her cover in place and fumble with the ties of her breeches. “Not if you wish to keep your wretched hands.”
Jorund blinked and jerked his chin back, then retreated a step. She’d gone from flaming ember to frozen clinker in the bat of an eye! Watching her quaking hands grapple with simple ties, he realized she was embarrassed at being caught half naked in his arms, and guessed that she resisted and protested now to salve her pride. Well, he was not about to let her pride interfere with the sweet savor of the prize he sensed within reach.
“You wouldn’t hurt my hands, Long-legs,” he said, coming closer, wearing his most cocksure and irresistible grin. “You like how they feel on your skin too much.”
She backed away. “Don’t wager your blood on it, Borgerson.”
“You like the way I touch you, Serricksdotter. The way I caress and stroke you . . . the way I soothe your skin. No one has ever touched you like that before, have they? No one has ever stolen your breath as I did. Well, there’s more, Long-legs. Much more. We’ve just started to make pleasure.”
“We’ve just ended it.” The low, sultry rumble of his voice crowded her senses and sent her wits hurtling into action. This time she knew what to expect, and she wouldn’t let herself be trapped by his big, insolent frame, his tantalizing word-webs, or her own wretched curiosity. “If you touch me again”—she leveled a scathing look at him—“you’ll pay for it.”
She crossed the chamber to the bench by the opening to her sleeping quarters and snatched up her tunic. To don the garment, she had to drop her cover
and bare herself, but to turn away would display timidity in her enemy’s presence. . . . Tossing her cover aside with a defiant flourish, she lifted the tunic over her head.
When she looked up, he was standing half a pace away, his eyes fastened hotly on the bumps visible on the front of her garment.
“You have lovely breasts, Serricksdotter. Ummm . . . as soft as the rest of you is hard.”
Before she could protest, he ran his forefinger up the underside of one breast and dragged his knuckle over one tightly budded nipple. Sparks shot along her nerves and she gave him a fierce shove that caught him off guard and knocked him back a full pace.
“That is the end of my mercy, Borgerson. Touch me again and you’ll pay.” She truly meant it as a warning, but the instant she uttered it she realized he would only take it as a challenge.
His surprise at the strength of her rebuff quickly melted into a wickedly sensual, self-possessed grin. Never in his life had he been physically opposed by a woman. But under his surprise rode a white-hot current of excitement that he’d never experienced with a woman before. Her tall, broad-shouldered body was as strong as it was beautiful. Persuading her, he realized, could get intensely physical. The idea galvanized him.
“If I have to pay, Serricksdotter,” he said in husky tones, “be sure I’ll make it worth the cost.” He made a smooth grab for her shoulders. She stepped into his grasp with her knee swinging, and he just managed to twist his pelvis aside so that she struck his groin instead.
“Whoa!” He reacted instinctively, using his grip on her shoulders to spin her forcibly, then lashing an arm about her bucking waist to pull her against him sideways. But no sooner had he trapped her against him than she stomped on his foot.
“Aghh! Dammit!” The second he opened his mouth to groan, her thrashing head smacked him in the mouth and he got a mouthful of hair. He grappled with her thrashing form and managed to seize one of her flailing hands. But she turned even that against him, raising her wrist and sinking her teeth into his hand.
“Owww!” He released her with a shove and lurched backward, staring at the red teeth marks on his hand in complete astonishment. “Odin’s Bones—you bit me!” he exclaimed. When he snapped his head up, she was crouched nearby, feet spread and arms and hands braced, looking feral and untamed . . . as dangerous as a cornered she-wolf.
“I warned you, Borgerson,” she ground out between gasps.
He glanced down at the red oozing up into his pores, then fingered his throbbing lip and fell back a step, looking at her in disbelief. She acted as if he were trying to beat her instead of pleasure her! That a woman he wanted would resist his much-practiced wooing was absurd enough, but that one would actually hurt him—him—was unthinkable!
“I meant to enjoy you, wench—to make pleasure with you!” he bellowed. “And you—you bit me!”
“I’m a warrior, not a wench. And I’ll not be cozened or bullied by anyone . . . especially not a woman-heart,” she snapped, watching anger inflate his massive shoulders and carve his features into a formidable mask. She’d wounded his vanity as much as his hand, and she knew that such a pride-blow hurt far more than a few teeth marks.
But as she watched the turbulence welling in his usually genial countenance, she felt in her chest an aching swell of confusing regret that tainted the anticipation she felt for their coming fight. For surely now he was angry enough to take a blade to her troublesome hide. . . .
“A warrior?” He stalked closer and halted abruptly, as if observing some invisible line of contention between them. “You’re no warrior, wench. You play at being one, but have you ever wielded a blade in full blood-battle? Ever felt your iron bite so deep into flesh that it splinters bone? Ever heard the cries of your own fallen kin and comrades, or watched—” He clamped his jaw shut and the heat of the words he did not speak leaped into his pale eyes, setting them ablaze. “You’re no warrior, Serricksdotter, until you have done all that and more.” He paced two angry steps aside, then back.
“But you’re no woman, either”—he jabbed a finger at her—“for there is no womanly softness in you at all.”
“No weakness, you mean,” she countered fiercely.
“Softness and weakness are not the same thing, wench. And you’re surely no woman, Serricksdotter, if you don’t know that.” He pinned her with a stare that seemed to pierce her to her very marrow.
“But if you’re no warrior and no woman . . . then what are you?” he sneered, making her darkening amber eyes his targets. “You’re all hair and fangs and claws . . .” The impression he’d had of her earlier flooded into his mind again: coiled and sinewy, tawny-eyed and dangerous.
“You’re a she-wolf,” he declared. “Odin’s She-wolf.”
The taunt lay burning on the air between them. Then before she could respond, he strode to the door and ducked outside, leaving her red-faced and quivering, and feeling strangely wounded by his verbal slash.
A she-wolf, he had called her. All hair and fangs and claws.
She stumbled to the bench and sat down hard, her limbs aching with the unspent energy of confrontation. Beneath that miserable slow burn of thwarted battle-need, a yawning emptiness opened in the middle of her, a feeling of loss . . . very like that which she felt on the night Serrick left her. As she examined it, she realized that only part of it was the disappointment of her failure to make him take up a blade and fight her. The other part had to do with the way Jorund Borgerson had looked at her . . . as if she were a loathsome thing . . . as if he didn’t want to touch her, to hold her against his body, or to press her mouth with his, ever again.
She sprang to her feet and furiously began to shove the hem of her tunic into her breeches. Her hands couldn’t work the lacings of her breastplate and buskins fast enough. She growled from between clenched teeth but, startled by the wolfish sound of it, choked off that noise a moment later. In the blink of an eye, she was out the door and striding for the foot-worn path down to the lake shore.
But no matter how hard she ran or how far she walked that morning, it was always there the moment she stopped: the awful realization that she wanted Jorund Borgerson to want her almost as much as she wanted him to fight her.
She had just lost a precious, heart-felt connection with Father Serrick, and with each day that passed she could feel Miri and Marta slipping further away from her as they made their own lives and did new, womanly things that she could not share. Jorund Borgerson had begun to invade the void created by those losses, filling her senses with undreamed-of pleasures, and her mind and heart with untold confusion.
When he stroked her skin, she found herself growing gentle to match his touch. When he looked at her with eyes filled with wanting, she felt a helpless flush of pleasure that he found her soft breasts and long legs eye-pleasing. And when his body had settled against hers and his lips poured over her mouth, she went all weak-kneed and breathless . . . and she yielded, molding herself to the power of his larger, stronger frame.
Finding herself near the fishing boats along the sandy part of the shore, she climbed up on the grassy bank above them and propped her chin on her fists. Would he ever try to touch her again? Would he ever want that delicious mouth-meeting with her again? Would he ever look at her again with that breath-stealing blend of sky-blue teasing and molten-silver need?
She felt an odd sense of connection to him that went beyond the closeness of bodies and the meeting of mouths. Her intuition said it was a womanly feeling . . . and that it came straight from the soft, inner part of her that she had thought was sealed safely away.
The moment she thought it, her stomach contracted and her throat began to constrict around a hard lump of anxiety. Softness. There was no room for softness—not in the fierce, uncompromising world she was fated to inhabit and not within her! A trickle of panic ran down her spine as she realized that the wall she had constructed to separate the woman from the warrior in her had weaknesses . . . and that Jorund had managed to locate and penetrate those w
eak spots with his special woman-skill.
She began stuffing those treacherous womanly impulses back behind her wall, then fortified it with dire images of the other warriors’ fierce faces and of the women’s scornful appraisal of her. She had to be strong . . . had to uphold her honor and that of her sisters, or all was lost!
What did it matter if Jorund Borgerson looked at her as if she were honey to be tasted? she admonished herself. It changed nothing. He was still her adversary. And she was still bound by the enchantment, her honor, and the jarl’s decree to take a blade to his insufferably conceited and despicably craven hide!
She shoved to her feet to start back, but after only a few strides she halted in her tracks, feeling unsettled, feeling that something was wrong. Her senses sprang to life and she scoured the area around her, ready for action. But there was only sand and swaying boats and lapping water and . . . a wind. A full wind, heavy with moisture. She looked up and found the sky half filled with flat, dark clouds. Alarm bolted down her spine and through her legs. Storm clouds. And on the heels of that thought came another . . .
Harvest!
WHEN JORUND LEFT the women’s house, he ran along the path that led through the forest, desperate to put that humiliating confrontation with Aaren Serricksdotter behind him. He had failed to seduce her, failed to convince her to abandon her absurd notions of blade-fighting him . . . and even failed to keep his own cursed temper in check. After all his determination to turn the other cheek and turn her bluster into whimpers of pleasure . . . he’d hurled insult after insult at her!
He lurched to a halt on the narrow trail and bent over with his arms braced on his legs, panting. He could have sworn he’d almost had her . . . holding her against him, running his hands unhindered over her body, toying with her mouth in that delectable ravishment of a kiss. He groaned and straightened, running his fingers through his wind-whipped hair. What in Godfrey’s Heaven had possessed him to call her a she-wolf?
