by Sandra Hill
“This one is a virgin,” Vadim said. “Pure as new snow. And a skilled weaver.”
Ivak arched a brow with skepticism as he circled the shivering female who had seen at least twenty winters. He doubted very much that a female slave could remain intact for that many years. Still, she would be a welcome diversion. New meat for jaded palates. Not to mention, he had lost a weaver this past summer to the childbirth fever. He nodded his acceptance to Vadim.
And then there was the fifth woman . . . a girl, really. No more than sixteen. Red hair, above and below. Ah, he did love a redheaded woman. Fiery, they were when their fires were ignited, as he knew well how to do. He could not wait to lay his head over her crimson fluff and . . .
He smiled at her.
She did not smile back. Instead, tears streamed down her face.
He ran his knuckles over one pink, cold-peaked nipple, then the other.
She actually sobbed now, and stepped back as if in revulsion.
The tears didn’t bother him all that much, but the resistance did. Thralldom was not easy for some to accept, but she would settle into her role soon. They usually did. They had no choice. Not that he would engage in rape. Persuasion was his forte.
But wait. She was staring with seeming horror at something over his shoulder.
Ivak heard the growl before he turned and saw the smithy tugging to be free from the restraints being held by both Vadim and his assistant. At the same time, the young man was protesting something vociferously in what sounded to Ivak like the Irish tongue.
“What is amiss?” Ivak demanded of Vadim.
“He’s her husband, but you are not to worry—”
Ivak put up a halting hand. “I do not want any more married servants. Too much trouble.” He started to walk away.
“You could take one of them,” Vadim offered.
Ivak paused. The woman’s skin was deliciously creamy and her nether fleece was tempting. “I’ll take her. You keep him.”
The husband didn’t understand Ivak’s words as he spoke, but Vadim must have explained once Ivak and Serk left the building and headed back to the keep because his roar of outrage would be understood in any language.
“Is that wise, Ivak?” Serk asked. “Separating a man and his mate?”
“It happens all the time, my friend, and do you doubt my wisdom in choosing good bedsport over good metalwork?”
Serk laughed, but at the same time shook his head at Ivak with dismay. In some ways Serk had gone soft of late, ever since he’d wed Asta, the daughter of a Danish jarl. Six months, and Serk was still besotted with the witch. Little did he know that Asta was spreading her thighs hither and yon. Ivak knew that for a fact because he’d been one of those to whom she’d offered her dubious charms. He would have told his friend, but he figured Serk would grow bored soon enough, and then it would not matter. As long as she did not try to pass off some other man’s baby as his own. When Ivak had mentioned that possibility to Asta, she’d informed him that she was joyfully barren. That was another thing of which Serk was uninformed.
And women claimed men were the ones lacking in morals!
That night he swived the Irish maid, and she was sweet, especially after having been bathed. It was not an entirely satisfying tup, though. The girl was too willing. He kept seeing her husband’s face as he was dragged away. No doubt his distaste would fade eventually, but tonight he had no patience for it, and he sent her away after just one bout of bedsport. In the end, she begged him to be permitted to stay, but he wanted no more of her for now.
He drank way too much mead then, which only increased his foul mood. That was the only excuse he could find for his seeing Asta slinking along one of the hallways and motioning him with a forefinger to come to her bedchamber. Another round-heeled woman with the morals of a feral cat. He knew for a fact that Serk was serving guard duty all night.
Mayhap he should tup Serk’s wife and then explain to him in the nicest possible way on the morrow what a poor choice he had made in picking this particular maid for his mate. Ivak would be doing his friend a favor, he rationalized with alehead madness.
Asta was riding him like a bloody stallion a short time later, and while his cock was interested, he found himself oddly regretting his impulsive invitation. Bored, he glanced toward the door that was opening, and there stood Serk, staring at them with horror. This was not the way he’d wanted his friend to discover his wife’s lack of faithfulness.
“Ivak? My friend?” Serk choked out.
“I can explain. It’s not what you think.” Well, it was, but there was a reason for his madness. Wasn’t there?
At the stricken expression on Serk’s face, Ivak shoved Asta off him, ignoring her squeal of ill humor, and jumped off the bed. By the time he was dressed, his good friend was gone. And Asta was more concerned about having her bed play interrupted than the fact that her husband had witnessed her adultery. To Ivak’s amazement, she actually thought they would resume the swiving.
Ivak searched for more than an hour, to no avail. It was already well after midnight and most folks, except for his housecarls, were abed. His apology and explanation to Serk would have to wait until morning. He had no doubt that Serk would forgive him, once he understood that Asta was just a woman, and a faithless one at that. Oh, Ivak did not doubt that Serk would be angry, and Ivak might even allow him a punch or two, but eventually their friendship would be intact.
Still, he could not sleep with all that had happened, and he decided to walk out to the stables to check on a prize mare that should foal any day now. What Ivak found, though, was so shocking he could scarce breathe. In fact, he fell to his knees and moaned. “Oh, nay! Please, gods, let it not be so!”
Hanging from one of the rafters was Serk.
His friend had hanged himself.
What have I done? What have I done? She was not worth it, my friend. Truly, she was not. Oh, what have I done?
Ivak lowered the body to the floor and did not need to put a fingertip to Serk’s neck to know that he had already passed to Valhalla. With tears burning his eyes, he stood, about to call for the stablemaster in an adjoining shed to help him release Serk’s noose, when he heard a noise behind him. Turning, he saw the young Irish blacksmith, husband of the red-haired maid he’d bedded, running toward him with a raised pitchfork. Vadim and his crew were supposed to depart at first light. The man must have escaped his restraints.
Before Ivak had a chance to raise an alarm or fight for himself, the man pierced his chest with the long tines of the pitchfork. Unfortunately, he used the special implement with metal tines that Ivak had purchased this past summer on a whim, not satisfied with the usual wooden pitchforks for his fine stable. So forceful had the man’s surge toward him been that he pinned Ivak into the wall.
“You devil!” the man yelled, tears streaming down his face. “You bloody damn devil! May you rot in hell!”
He was given a choice: Hell or something like Hell . . .
“Tsk, tsk, tsk!”
Ivak heard the voice through his pain-hazed brain. I thought I was dead. I must be dead. Opening his heavy lids, he glanced downward, beyond the sharp tines that still pinned him to the wall, to see his lifeblood pooling at his feet. Definitely dead. Raising his head, he saw that Serk still lay in the rushes where he’d lowered him. And the blacksmith was gone. Apparently, neither he nor Serk had been discovered yet. Well, it would be too late for either of them now.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk!” he heard again, and this time realized that the voice came from his right side. “It is never too late, Viking.”
If Ivak hadn’t been dead, and if he hadn’t been immobilized by a pitchfork through his heart, he would have fallen over with shock. Standing there, big as he pleased—and he was big, all right—was an angel. A big, black-haired man with widespread, snow-white wings and piercing blue eyes.
Ivak knew what angels were since he practiced both the ancient Norse religion and the Christian one, an expedience many Norsemen ado
pted. Apparently, he would not be off to Valhalla today with its myriad of golden shields and virgin Valkyries. “Am I going to Heaven?” he asked the frowning angel.
The angel made a snorting sound of disbelief at his question. “Hardly!”
“Hell, then?” he inquired tentatively.
“Nay, but thou may wish it so.”
Enough of this nonsense. Dead was dead. “Who are you?” Ivak demanded. “And how about pulling out this pitchfork?”
“Michael,” the angel said, then eyeing the pitchfork, added, “Thou art certain I should do that?”
Before Ivak had a chance to reconsider, the angel . . . Michael . . . yanked it out, causing excruciating pain to envelop him as he fell to the rush-covered floor, face first. If he were not in such screaming pain, he would have been impressed at the strength of the angel to have removed, all in one smooth pull, the tines that had not only skewered his body but had been imbedded in the wooden wall behind him, as well. Like one of his muscle-honed warriors who hefted heavy broadswords with ease, this angel was.
He realized in that instant whose presence he was in. Staggering to his feet, he panted out, “Would that be Michael the Archangel? The warrior angel?”
The angel nodded his head in acknowledgment.
“Am I dead?”
“As a door hinge.”
“Is this what happens when everyone dies? An angel shows up? You show up?”
“No.”
“I’m someone special? I get special attention?”
“Thee could say that.”
Ivak didn’t like the sound of that. “Stop speaking in riddles. And enough with the thees and thous!”
The angel shrugged. “You are in no position to issue orders, Viking.”
He sighed deeply and tried for patience, which had to be strange. A dead person trying to be patient. “What happens now?”
“That depends on you.”
More riddles!
“You are a grave sinner, Ivak Sigurdsson. Not just you. Your six brothers are equally guilty. Each of you has committed one of the Seven Deadly Sins in a most grievous fashion.”
“My brothers? Are they dead, too?”
“Some are. The others soon will be.”
Ivak was confused. “Which horrible sin is it that I have committed?”
“Lust.”
“Lust is a sin?” He laughed.
The angel continued to glare at him. No sense of humor at all.
Ivak laughed again.
But not for long.
The angel raised his hand and pointed a finger at him, causing him to be slammed against the wall and pinned there, but this time there was no pitchfork involved. Just some invisible bonds. “Sinner, repent,” Michael demanded in a steely voice, “lest I send you straight to Lucifer to become one of his minions. You will like his pitchfork even less than the mortal one that impaled you.”
“I repent, I repent,” Ivak said, though he still didn’t see how lust could be such a big sin.
“You do not see how lust can be sinful?” Michael could obviously read his mind. The angel gaped at him for a moment before exclaiming, “Vikings! Lackwits, one and all!” With those words, the angel waved a hand in front of Ivak’s face, creating a cloudy screen in which he began to see his life unfolding before him, rather the lust events in his life.
It didn’t take Ivak long to realize that not all the girls and women had been as eager to spread their thighs for him as he’d always thought, but most of them had. What surprised him was the number of husbands or betrothed who’d suffered at his hands—rather his cock—for his having defiled their loved ones. Serk hadn’t been the only one. And babes! Who knew he’d bred so many out-of-wedlock children . . . and how many of them lived in poverty! He would have cared for any of his whelps brought to his keep, but these were in far countries.
And then there was this past night’s events . . . the thrall he’d taken to his bed furs knowing she was wed. Worst of all, his betrayal of his best friend.
He shook his head with dismay as shame overcame him. Raising his eyes to the angel, he asked, “What can I do to make amends?”
Michael smiled, and it was not a nice smile. “I thought you would never ask, Viking. From this day forth, you will be a vangel. A Viking vampire angel. One of God’s warriors in the fight against Satan’s vampire demons, Lucipires by name.”
Ivak had no idea what Michael had just said. What was a vampire?
But then, it didn’t matter because his pain-ridden body became even more pain-ridden. Every bone in his body seemed to be breaking and reforming, even his jaw and teeth, after which he hurtled through the air, outside his keep, far up into the sky. Then he lost consciousness.
When he awakened, he found himself in another keep of sorts. But it was made of stone, not wood, as Thorstead was. And the weather here was almost unbearably warm, not the frigid cold of the Norselands.
The sign over the entryway read: “Angola Prison.”
About the Author
SANDRA HILL is a graduate of Penn State and worked for more than ten years as a features writer and education editor for publications in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Writing about serious issues taught her the merits of seeking the lighter side of even the darkest stories. She is the wife of a stockbroker and the mother of four sons.
Visit her website at www.sandrahill.net.
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Romances by Sandra Hill
Kiss of Surrender
Kiss of Pride
The Norse King’s Daughter
The Viking Takes a Knight
Viking in Love
Hot & Heavy
Wet & Wild
A Tale of Two Vikings
The Very Virile Viking
The Viking’s Captive (formerly My Fair Viking)
The Blue Viking
Truly, Madly Viking
The Love Potion
The Bewitched Viking
Love Me Tender
The Last Viking
Sweeter Savage Love
Desperado
Frankly, My Dear
The Tarnished Lady
The Outlaw Viking
The Reluctant Viking
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from Kiss of Temptation copyright © 2013 by Sandra Hill
KISS OF SURRENDER. Copyright © 2012 by Sandra Hill. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062063861
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062064622
FIRST EDITION
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