THE VIKING AND THE COURTESAN

by Shehanne Moore

  “Oh. Oh.”

  “And even if she is, all these years, it’s what I am too. A runaway one. My mother wouldn’t come here without me after I sold myself to pay their passage. You would be the one breaking the law.”

  “Ohhhh.”

  Water splashed onto Snotra’s gown, welding it to her legs, as her face contorted. There was no doubt the deluge spared Malice from seeing what would in all probability have happened next. Since this was certain to involve her eyes being clawed out though, what she’d have seen would probably have amounted to nothing.

  As it was, those standing around gathered closer. Their bodies drew a veil. It was nothing to what drew over Malice’s heart. The sudden surge of stupid misplaced, pity, for Snotra, for him, for herself, all caught in this sorry mess.

  Had she won? And was it worth the cost, when even now she didn’t know if she could stay here?

  Chapter 16

  The fire had died although golden flecks still spun through the air on the same faint breeze that lifted her hair. Snotra had gone. She had gone in a cart to Ari’s house with her father and as many curses as she could rain on all their heads—credit where it was due, Malice wouldn’t have called Ari the things Snotra had when all he was doing was trying to help ease the situation.

  Snotra hadn’t just gone, she’d gone with as many possessions as the cart could hold too. Soup ladles, tureens. Malice swore she even spied her own apple green dress on top of the pile. Interesting when the damned woman couldn’t have his heart, she’d taken everything else. Chairs, the sweeping brush, the chickens. And not at all keen to let any of it go either when challenged.

  It was just as well Malice had no shoes with her here. As things stood she’d very little doubt that if Snotra had been somehow able to zing through time she’d have lifted Malice’s fifty pairs.

  Sin Gudrunsson would need to raid from now until doomsday to replace it all.

  She studied the darkly frothing water. Was now the time to think like this though? Maybe, for that matter she wouldn’t be allowed to stay here either when the man was complicated in every respect—what was it about her men? When he’d done as good a disappearing act as Malice, since the cart trundled along the rough path?

  When she’d kissed Cyril, certainty had been deep in her bones as marrow. This . . . this . . . she suddenly had no honest idea about. Any of it.

  Yet it felt like home—something she’d have sooner swallowed a cupboard load of sweeping brushes than say so here . . . yes, but something she could no longer deny, because her home, her home was where he was. This was where he was. She just must pray he felt the same way. This really was the last time she could do this. She hugged her knees tighter, protection against the whipping wind and the shivers that crept up her spine. Of course she knew she had no real control over this. All she had was the small certainty about what controlled it. Thanks to Cyril telling her. As if she hadn’t already guessed.

  Hearing the quiet crunch of a footstep behind her, she froze, her breath hanging with her thoughts in the air. It was him, wasn’t it? She didn’t need to look to know. There it was, just how she had somehow come to know this man, not just his body, him. His scent, his breath, his sighs. Even his silence. If he ended this now, standing there, as she knew he did, tall, angular, moon and firelight bathing his face in its own icily rugged glow, she couldn’t bear going home again. She must believe that wasn’t going to happen. And yet, she was the first to acknowledge, what kind of life were they going to have exactly?

  True love, or be doomed.

  Difficult when sometimes hate was so close to love. Did this mean they couldn’t argue? He eased down onto the sand. Her heart didn’t just pound. It kicked against her ribs as if it was a caged thing. Never had she been more aware of the need to look not as she must have several times on the Raven. Never had she been more conscious of how much she stood to lose.

  Look around at him? She could, of course she could, but it was easier, when storms raged inside herself, storms she must batten, to keep her gaze fastened on the inky black water, the tide inside her in check.

  He casually spread his long legs. “So . . .”

  His voice was milk and honey on her spine. A rumble in places between her legs, she couldn’t allow. This wasn’t about lust. Lust wouldn’t make this stop. This was about eternity. That long dark thing that seemed to stretch in the water, while she sat staring and he picked at a tuft of beachgrass.

  “Would you like to tell me where it is you get to when you disappear? Because, Malice, it’s not here, is it?”

  This was the talk she longed to have and this was not the time for lies, or flippancy. But if she told him the truth, with that prickly pride of his, about being left, about being second best, would he listen? Would he believe? Would he also believe that although she kissed Cyril, he was nothing to her, that she had never slept with him and never would, because that was not an option, was it?

  Perhaps, after all, some things were just too hard to say? Especially for a woman like her who had never been anyone’s best. But if she didn’t step out onto this rickety bridge, she was always going to be that woman. After all, she was here, wasn’t she?

  “I see my husband.”

  “Your husband?”

  The sharp exhalation was not encouraging. In fact the tremor that coursed up her spine and across her scalp, the one she tried to smother, made it even more discouraging than she’d hoped. She imagined he tilted his jaw. She imagined he knitted his brow. Certainly in that instance he stopped fiddling with the beachgrass. Not to speak now would doom her as surely as opening her mouth. She might as well take the latter option.

  “Cyril.”

  The word came out as best really, as it was possible for it to come out in the circumstances. That was straight, ungarbled. Although how it did when her throat was drier than the sand beneath her fingertips and she remembered what he’d said about Saxon men, she hadn’t the least idea.

  “Since you must know, he is someone I am with sometimes. Then I’m with you. But if you’re going to be unreasonable about it . . .”

  This wasn’t a direct challenge. This was an aching hope.

  He flicked the beachgrass against the sand. “Well, I’d like to be, sweeting, but you’re looking at a man who has just given his life away, so why don’t you just tell me . . . do you love him?”

  “I—”

  She jerked her head around, sucking the first full breath of air since he’d eased down beside her. Then she jerked her head back. He felt huge to her, in every way, as if he’d grown as much as she had. Or maybe they always were that way and it was life itself which had shrunk them?

  “Once I thought I did. When I was first betrothed to him. But then he didn’t want me.” She pushed stray tendrils back off her forehead. “He let me down. In fact he did impossible things to me. Things that meant I was never with him. I tried to be. In the wrong way I suppose. And then . . . well . . .”

  She shrugged. She didn’t say he knew the rest. The rest was still to be written. What she had come to know about this situation was that she knew nothing at all. “You have no idea.”

  “But how can you be with him when—”

  She drew a breath. “Because I’m not from this moment here. From now. These stars are not mine.” She might as well say it and be damned. “I’m not from Saxon England as you know it. I’m from somewhere else.”

  He raised his head and she waited with an alarm coating her skin, for him to say, as everyone else had all her life, that this was another story, when she’d still to explain to him how she got back and forth. Her heart began to pound. She should never have started this. And yet she’d very little choice. She tried not to let her gaze flit over his powerful, yet leanly sculpted shoulders, the windswept hair, white-gold in the moonlight, but it did it anyway.

&
nbsp; “It is, on the whole, the only reason I kiss him. When I do, I return here, to you. But since Cyril doesn’t even like women, I wouldn’t worry too much about me ever being involved with him. I never have been.”

  The silence, broken by lapping waves, lapping waves and his faint exhalation of breath, extended. She drew her eyelashes down. Well, she had said it now. She could hardly take it back, so she might as well wait for his reaction. It might be it was better than she expected. That would not be saying much. What she expected was the worst. It was what made her palms go dry with waiting. With wanting too.

  “Where are your stars, Malice?”

  “I . . .”

  He was so close. And his voice was such a caressing rumble, dare she believe she had only to turn her head to kiss him? She did turn it. Then she turned it back. My God, he really could be teasing, couldn’t he? A rare smile curved her own lips. She shook her head, pushing her fingers further through her hair as she tried denying that fact.

  “Probably nine hundred years from now would you believe? It’s why I find you so hard to get along with. But, don’t tell me you don’t know this.”

  “That I’m hard to get along with? Or I know this? At least that I’m trying to.”

  It clung didn’t it? The idea he did know this. Still she said, because it was her chance, “Well if you do, you need to do more than what you did taking that collar off me.”

  The chin tilt, the blade of beachgrass flumping onto the sand, the things she saw as she stole her gaze sideways, crisped her throat. Now it wasn’t just dry as the sand, it was drier than that sand must have been after it was burnt away from whatever sea had boiled dry to create it.

  “Don’t you know how to make up a pile of Norse sagas?”

  Make things up? What she’d been accused to since the age of five. She suspected that for Norse he really meant something else. Something she sat upon right now, feeling the chill sweep up through into the base of her spine. The funny thing was how that chill felt so warm all of a sudden it spread like hot honey through her veins.

  Why was this? Because she also felt she’d vanished into oblivion on more than one occasion? Reappeared from that oblivion beneath his nose? That she didn’t behave like the other Saxon women? She ran Strictly for a start? Were these the reasons he understood this?

  And she’d thought he was some kind of barbarian? With regard to her making up stories though? She tossed her hair out of her eyes.

  “Maybe.”

  “No, really. Not want you? How could he not want you? A woman as beautiful as you?”

  Her? “Because I—”

  “A speciality is it? Like other things?”

  “What is?”

  “You disappearing?”

  “Oh that?” For a second she thought he meant the other things. “Well, whatever you believe, that is the truth. I don’t know how it happens. Only that it does. The first time was at that convent. I kissed Cyril. I landed there, I didn’t know where I was. And . . .”

  “I happened.”

  He had, hadn’t he?

  “Well, I did, didn’t I?”

  His eyes held things she’d never seen in them before. He peered out from under stones this man, who exuded confidence the way the sun did warmth. What freed her breath in that instant was that they also held things she could drown in. It made it easy to clasp the hand that cupped her face in that second.

  “So, what are you telling me, Malice? About this? That you can’t stay? That you’re going to disappear again? Hmm?”

  She lowered her eyelashes and he swept a strand of hair back from her cheek. “I don’t know. Unless you—you—”

  He brought her mouth to his. The kiss was so full of honeyed sweetness beneath its initial scorching heat, it was perhaps the most honest, the most tender kiss and because of it, the most passionate, he’d ever given her. Territory she hadn’t actually explored for all so much had been chartered. The pressure, controlled, yet demanding, stole her breath. The world spun, but not like it had before when spinning meant plunging to another place. She revelled in the touch of his fingers on her face, the warm taste of his mouth, this dizziness that swept over her.

  Even when he broke the kiss, it still was. As for the faint scrape of his breath against her lips, that was heaven.

  “You were saying? Hmm.”

  “You stop loving Snotra.”

  “I already have.”

  “Even then I have no guarantee of—”

  “I love you.”

  Loved her? She was glad she was sitting down. And yet, maybe, just maybe, it was time she let certain things go, especially now his fingers were in her hair.

  “Even if you are my thrall. Although me being one myself—sort of anyway—means . . . do you know, I’ve no idea, probably that we’re going to have to leave Juggesland and start again somewhere else. Even if that business was years ago I don’t trust Snotra. Is that what you need to hear?”

  Her own lips curved. How could they not when she thought of all he must have gone through when relief flooded that it had ended with him being the better man, the man he was inside. “That I’m your thrall?”

  “That I love you?”

  The ground moved in a different way. Then she realized that that was because she was on her back, staring into his eyes. The ends of his hair brushed her face. He edged his hand down over her waist. For the first time, despite what flared in her centre, the milky warmth seeping along her veins, the desire to feel his mouth on her body, to be possessed by him, fear flickered like a tiny crack of lightning. Was it any wonder?

  He raised his head. “Is there something wrong?”

  For him to notice was a first. “I’m just worried that you’ll always have to love me, that I’ll always have to love you . . . Never have a moment when we don’t love one another. I’m just . . . not sure such things are possible.”

  He narrowed his sky blue eyes. Then he shook his head. It wasn’t that she hadn’t come back in time for this, it was that she had. Irrational? Stupid—when she wanted him so much, her blood thrummed.

  “That first time, I ended back in my own time . . .”

  “Because I didn’t love you, Malice. But if you’re telling me I can’t have you, then . . .” He blew out a breath. “I think I can just about show restraint. I mean, I have shown restraint.”

  She smothered the desire to grin inanely. It wasn’t what she’d have called his behaviour that first night on the island but who was she to contradict when soft sand tickled her back and his mouth was inches away?

  “I thought that was finesse.”

  His lips were gentle on her face. “No, listen, if that’s what you’re asking me. I just don’t think I can do it twice. But if that is what you’re telling me it takes for us to be together . . .”

  God no. It was a way but she couldn’t bear it. Already the closeness of his body, feel of his breath, his hand on her waist was torture enough.

  “I’ll do it, Malice. I’ll do it rather than see you go through any more. I didn’t love you enough before. That day on the island I thought Snotra because I have always known her—almost always anyway. She walked into my thoughts and I think I mostly felt . . . well, it was like coming back to earth. We were saved. And it was time to go home. But I saw it tonight. I was born to be with you. I just couldn’t admit it. The way you kept disappearing, and reappearing. And disappearing made my head spin. As for that business you said you ran. Do you blame me having doubts?” He grinned wickedly. He was called Sin after all. “Not that it didn’t interest me. You’re a very sensuous woman.”

  “What?” She lowered her eyelashes. Her? Who had strictly pretended to an experience she didn’t have to keep face with the women she employed?

  “Hmmm.”

  Longing tingled thr
ough her. “Well, maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime if that’s the case. Mostly I did it to buy shoes.”

  “Shoes? Are you serious?”

  “Shoes.”

  “Here was me thinking you were happy without them and Snotra was safer to me.”

  “I am happy without them. I just . . . want you to be happy without certain things too.”

  She couldn’t help teasing him. But in her heart, in the places he’d touched, she did mean what she said. She only wanted the best for this man. It wasn’t him wound tighter than a clock, dealing in human misery.

  “Then I better get up.” His gaze sent another bolt of longing through her. “Otherwise I’ll be having these things. And then.” His mouth brushed her fingertips. He sighed deeply. “You could be in trouble.”

  “Not that.” She landed a playful smack. Imagine. It would have been unthinkable for her a few weeks ago. Surely he understood she meant the raiding. “I don’t want you to do that.”

  “What?”

  “Not, not make love to me.”

  If it was a time for confessions then this was hers. She edged onto her elbow, propping herself there so he was forced sideways onto the sand. “My only fear is one of these times I end up in my time, I can’t find Cyril, that he’s dead, gone, whatever. But, maybe I didn’t love you enough either. That first time . . . maybe I only wanted you.”

  “So women from where you come from do that, do they?”

  That little smile playing about his lips, the way, his gaze licked her, how could she do otherwise than nod when her insides melted like this? Although she’d no intentions of giving him ideas that were even higher above his station.

  She slipped her arm around his neck. “Oh they do a lot of things.”