“Once I know, I can prepare.”
“Will you indeed. What sort of preparation do you think will save you, Aelfwynn?”
“Perhaps I seek a direction for my prayers.”
“Your fate is written,” Thorbrand told her, his voice low enough she felt it in her bones. “Do you know it or do not, it cannot be changed.”
She found herself sitting a bit straighter. “I don’t believe that.”
He shrugged. “What you believe or do not believe changes your fate not at all.”
“I doubt you believe it either,” she said, recklessly. And perhaps more loudly. “Else why would you and your people spend lifetimes battling to take what was never yours? Surely, if you were resigned to your fate, you would have stayed where you were on faraway shores and let your gods do what they will.”
“That the path has already been laid out is not leave to live as a coward,” Ulfric said disapprovingly.
“You need not fear,” Leif added. “It has all been decided.”
She knew many thought thus, her own people included. But Aelfwynn had been raised by a woman who had never accepted fate. Aethelflaed had always fought.
Fate will do what it must, she had said. But then, so shall I.
“Is it fate if it is naught but sadness?” Aelfwynn asked softly.
She heard the others laugh, but all she could see was Thorbrand. His dark beard, his marvel of a mouth, his intent gaze. “Because you think you can decide your own fate, Aelfwynn? Is that it?”
Surely she should have laughed at that, yet could not.
“I decide nothing and control nothing,” she replied quietly. “Save myself. And so I wonder how it is a mighty warrior believes himself without choices when he possesses more than I will ever have.”
Something passed between them then, though she could not have named it. Everything within her seemed to narrow down to the beat of her heart, and the lick of flame that seemed to her both of it and because of it.
For a moment she forgot where they were. The long ride, the ache where she sat. Her unknown future, from where he might be taking her to what awaited her in his furs this night.
For a moment, she forgot her own name.
And then it returned, in a rush, in the form of Ulfric thrusting one of the roasted birds in their direction. Thorbrand took it, looking away from her as he did, and she felt as if he’d released her from the grip of his hands. She had to fight to breathe properly.
The meal itself was a quiet affair. Thorbrand cut off pieces of the roasted bird with his knife, then offered them to her. She took them gratefully, finding the meat succulent and somehow better for being both cooked hot in this cold night, and eaten outside.
But too soon, the meal was done and Thorbrand was ushering her into his tent.
Aelfwynn both wanted to obey him and wanted to fight. Instead, she only trembled. And crawled within as bidden.
He followed, quietly removing his boots at the entrance and then hanging his great cloak to seal them more fully within. It seemed smaller in the tent tonight. Aelfwynn was certain it was smaller. Closer. Thorbrand merely looked at her, and she hurried to remove her own cloak and shoes, then began unwinding the bindings on her hose. And her headdress, even though her heart fluttered.
“Lie down, Aelfwynn,” he ordered her when she had finished. When she only stayed where she was, kneeling there and shaking slightly, he moved closer. And that did not make anything better. “On your back, with your legs wide.”
Every tale she had ever heard of what men might do to women came back to her then, as surely as if she heard it sung before her in a hall thick with mead, fire, and song.
“But...” Her mouth was too dry. “Thorbrand...”
“Lie down,” he said again, his voice a dark command.
And was not this what she had expected all along? Was it not what she had prepared for, most of her life? What all women understood was their lot, be it sooner or later?
Mildrithe’s voice sounded deep within her. It is within your power whether the sword cuts you in half or holds you aloft.
Aelfwynn took the deepest breath she could. She gathered herself until she knew she looked nothing but calm and obliging, there in the face of Thorbrand’s dark, relentless gaze.
He did not waver.
And thus she obeyed her Northman captor and lay herself out before him, like the sacrifice she had been from the start.
Chapter Six
Sjaldan er ein báran stök.
There seldom is a single wave.
—Old Norse proverb
Thorbrand did not laugh, though he was sorely pressed.
Were he another man, he might have taken poorly the sight his Mercian princess presented him. For she had laid herself down before him as asked, flat on her back with her legs wide. Her arms she kept at her sides, her soft hands clenched into fists. Her eyes were not merely shut, but wrinkled with the effort of keeping them so—her whole face crumpled in on itself as if she were but braced for a blow.
Rarely had the obedience Thorbrand expected as his due entertained him so greatly.
He could have moved closer then, but he stayed where he was to well and truly draw out the moment. He watched her chest move as her breathing quickened. He saw the color that stained her face, no doubt as her imagination ran away with her.
Thorbrand let her run and run.
“I admire your obedience, Aelfwynn,” he said, eventually. Then had to bite back a smile when she flinched, turned even redder, and breathed all the more heavily.
But she stopped wrinkling up her face and her eyes fluttered open, pinning him with a gleam of pure gold in the dark of the tent. “You did not present me with any other option.”
“Indeed, I did not. I find your notions of captivity extraordinary. In your uncle’s court, or your mother’s, what generosity was accorded captives and slaves?”
Aelfwynn studied him. This time, her frown seemed genuine and not the braced anticipation of potential harm. Thorbrand found he preferred it. If she must frown.
“I think you know already,” she said.
“I do.” And it was only then did she appear to note that he had moved closer to her, and she startled, her gaze shooting to the hand he’d placed at her knee. “Very few choices are on offer. And yet you have already enjoyed many. I will accept your grateful protestations whenever they grace your tongue. For I am benevolent, is this not so?”
He slid his hand higher, then waited.
Aelfwynn’s response was deeply satisfying. She stiffened. Her eyes flew wide. Her lips, ripe like berries, parted. She lifted up her hands as if she meant to slap at him, then wisely dropped them.
“Well done, sweeting,” he murmured. And beneath his hand, beneath the gown and the hose she wore, he felt her heat rise. “Now be still.”
She made a soft, half-muffled sound at that order, and he could feel her quiver beneath him. But she did not lift her hands again. She did not rock from side to side. Slowly, he reached down and pulled the gown higher, baring her legs to his view. Unwrapping her like the gift she was.
And because he could, and wished it so, he took his time.
He could hear his brother and cousin outside, talking in Irish as they sat by the fire. It was a still night, so no wind howled through the trees, disguising any possible enemy approaches. Still, he knew that they did not allow their talk to keep them from their watch.
Thorbrand had the better bargain. He was stretched out on his furs with this lovely, distressed morsel before him, far prettier than any bird on a spit.
And the more prettily she worried that lower lip of hers, the harder he got.
Yet he still took his time.
And soon enough her gown was at her middle, exposing her lower half to his gaze, covered though she still was in the hose she wore next to her
skin. He laughed at the sight of the dagger she wore strapped there.
“Do you plan to do me harm?” he asked.
She looked confused until he tugged at the fabric that held the dagger fast. Then paled. “I carried that for protection on the journey. I...”
“Be still,” he said again, more gruffly this time.
But he threw the dagger in its sheath toward his boots and had no intention of returning it to her.
Then he began to rub her. He ran his palms down the outside of her legs until he found her small, pale feet, and liked it when she curled her toes at his touch. He shifted around, going to kneel at her feet and then pressing his thumbs deep into the fleshy pad of each foot. And he grinned when she let out a long, low sigh.
Against her will, if he was not mistaken.
Thorbrand did not speak. He worked on both of her feet at once. Then took his time learning the shape of her calves, her knees. He took care to knead her flesh well as he worked his way higher and higher.
It would be better if she were naked, but he found he did not trust himself to take this lesson only as far as he wished to go this night if faced with the temptation of her bare flesh. Not when he had decided, after last night and the memories she’d stirred in him, that it would be better all round if he took his mother’s advice—and took his time. If she was naked, he might well be lost.
For he had never felt a thirst this powerful or a need so great. And slake himself though he would, and soon, tonight was for seduction.
The plans he had for Aelfwynn would work far better were she not merely willing, but begging for his touch.
No matter who she made him remember or how stained his battle-weary hands were.
He found that the more he smoothed his palms over her legs, the more he found the places where she stiffened or moaned, the more dedicated he became to his task.
And, sorely tempted though he was, he did not slide either hand between her legs to cup the true heat of her and test her softness. Or how she might yield.
Though the need for her pulsed in him, deep and hot.
She was flushed, her eyes but half-open, and looked at him as if already thoroughly debauched.
Truly, she was a ripe bit of fruit, his Aelfwynn. Ripe and sweet.
Thorbrand stopped, his hands lightly gripping her hips. And for a long moment, he only gazed down at her, this Saxon princess who had chosen him over the uncertainty of the road. Blond hair spilling out from her braided coronet, sending silk cascading this way and that. The lovely oval of her face, flushed with a need he doubted she recognized. Better still, no more did she lie like a virgin on a slab for the local dragon, ready to feel its flames. She was pliable in his hands. Needy.
“Thorbrand...” she whispered.
“Turn over,” he growled.
She blinked, then shuddered. And he was pleased indeed that his own garments were still firmly in place. For it would be far too easy to cast aside these notions of a slow seduction, plunge within her, taking her virgin’s blood as his due, and then teach her how to scream his name in pleasure.
Soon enough, he cautioned himself.
A bad rower always blamed the oar. Thorbrand preferred to row well at the first and leave no room for blame. Thus did he wait, keeping his hands on her as she huffed out a breath, then set about turning over as commanded to lie there on her belly.
“Legs apart, sweeting,” he said, but did not wait for her to obey. He separated her thighs himself, and then looked at the picture he’d made of lovely Aelfwynn, stretched out before him. Her elegant neck bared to his view and beyond, the graceful line of her willowy back. And best yet, the plump fruit of her bottom, presented so sweetly to his view.
Thorbrand started there, too aware of the faint keening sounds she made as he rubbed stern fingers into her protesting flesh. To say nothing of his own pounding, driving hunger. He kept at it until she sighed, a soft sound of release. Only then did he move lower down her legs. Once again he skirted her woman’s heat, filled with a dark anticipation when she squirmed, unknowingly moving as if trying to press herself into his hands.
There will be time enough for that, he promised himself as he rubbed her down. There would be time to explore her slick folds with his hands, his tongue, his teeth. To drink deep of the sweetest mead, honeyed and rich.
He had to wrestle himself to keep from doing so now, sure he could taste her already. He had to keep his mind on the simple task of easing the aches and pains her journey thus far had caused her. Because Thorbrand was going to take her innocence and bind her to him, as surely as if it were chains of iron he used instead of this. Heat. Greed. Longing so intense it would render her nothing at all but his.
Far better that he enslave her with her own flesh. That was what he had decided on the long, hard ride today. Something in him had leaped at the notion that he could take this woman who should have had nothing in common with his mother and make of her the kind of wife his mother had been to his father. Capable of raising strong sons, defending their home, and in her own, feminine way, formidable.
His long watch last night in the cold had cleared his head, thank the gods.
If he was going to remind himself of the past, better to remember the parts that mattered most. He had not protected his mother when the battle for Dublin raged. His father had lived long enough that wretched day to blame Thorbrand for her loss before going down himself.
Thorbrand had spent the years since determined to win as much glory as he could—not for himself, but to honor them both. To prove to the gods who had abandoned them that day that he was not the failure he had been at fifteen, grown into enough of a man then to know and do better than he had.
His failure would haunt him, always.
Aelfwynn was a means to an end. A demonstration of the vows he had sworn to keep, nothing more. Thorbrand would protect her and keep her, because that was what Ragnall required.
It was tempting to want more, for he could remember well the way his mother and father had laughed together, particularly in the middle of the night when they were deep in their bed on the far side of the cottage’s hearth. He remembered waking to the sound and falling asleep again in the next moment, secure in the knowledge that all was as it should be.
But Thorbrand had not been that boy in a long while.
He knew too well that this doomed world did not allow for anything like security. It chewed up such things and spit them out. Security was not what he would offer his little Saxon. Thorbrand knew, as she should too, that there was nothing safe beneath the sun. There was only a brief respite now and again, if a man was lucky, between wars.
Still, he would bind her to him all the same. Fate was fickle and the gods took sides as they pleased, but he knew longing. He knew greed. And he knew the task of protecting her, according to Ragnall’s wishes, would be far easier if she had no wish to stray from his side.
It started here. Now. Like this.
He did not ask her to turn over again, taking care of that task himself. Then he came down beside her, stretching his body out next to hers. He took a deep pleasure in the tangle of necklaces that fell to one side. In the gown, spun of a fine wool, rucked up and her hose still visible. Thorbrand moved one palm over her thigh again, then let it wander slowly up along her side, bringing it to rest just south of her bodice.
And felt a deep male satisfaction soar in him when she let out a sigh again. Her eyes were a darker gold than he had seen them thus far, heavy lidded and not quite managing to hold fast to his.
“Tell me what you know of the pleasure a man takes in a woman,” he bade her.
He watched as the heat in her eyes faded. Even beneath his hand she suddenly held herself more stiffly.
“It is a woman’s duty to submit to her husband.”
“Yet this prospect, I see, does not delight you.”
“I on
ly hope that my surrender pleases you,” she said quietly, her lashes lowering so he could not see what truths her gaze might tell. “So you do not hurt me.”
Thorbrand did not know why her words seemed to move in him so strangely. As if they left wounds, deep and perilously close to ugly.
“And if I cannot promise you that?” he asked, though his fingers were restless, drawing runes upon her belly.
What he wished was to hurt those who might think to bruise her. Not to do the bruising himself. But he did not say such a thing, not to a woman who was his captive.
Her lashes lifted to show her gaze was steady. “Then I shall take courage in my prayers, take heed from the martyrs, and endure.”
“Those are pretty words, Aelfwynn. What do you know, I wonder, of true endurance?” He could have told her of sea crossings that had taken more lives than a battlefield. He could have talked to her of long marches and brutal waits, and the reward for such forbearance being naught but more fighting. “What have you endured?”
“Thus far I would venture to say my endurance spans two days held tight in a Northman’s hands, no small thing.”
He waited, lifting only a brow, as she flushed a deeper shade of red. And again he was struck by the contrasts in this woman. The sweet, submissive innocent he had expected after her confession the night before, and yet she was still the bolder Mercian princess who could not seem to keep herself fully concealed. Her own words betrayed her.
Thorbrand could see when she recollected that his hand was even now nearly spanning her soft belly. He propped himself up on his elbow as he lay there beside her, looking down into her face as she sorted out the particular cage she found herself in.
She made a soft sound in the back of her throat. “And thankful am I indeed, Thorbrand, that you have thus far seen fit to keep those hands gentle.”
And he might have decided this was a fine moment for a lesson, had he not seen shadows in all that gold he found had already made him a jealous man. He wanted more of it. He wanted her shine, not her shadows.
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