George relaxed for the first time since he’d arrived on Fair Isle, and decided, after all, that this marriage was no great burden. ’Twas harmless, really. A pagan rite, nothing more. Had he agreed to it immediately, he might have been home by now.
His obligations to king and clan, and to the families of his men who’d perished at sea, weighed heavy on his mind. Surely they’d sail on the morrow. His bride was as anxious to secure her dowry as he was to return home.
As for tonight…he’d make the best of it.
Rika sat not inches from him, but had barely glanced in his direction all evening. He leaned over and whispered in her ear, “This was no my idea, ye know.”
His closeness startled her, and she drew back. “I know. It will all be over soon.” Her expression was cool, but her eyes were troubled.
“No soon enough,” he said, and wondered why this much celebrating was really necessary.
She whispered something in Lawmaker’s ear, and the elder rose. “It’s time!” he shouted over the din. “The night is on us.”
“Time for what?” George asked to no one in particular.
Rika’s grim, pale expression gave him his answer.
“Oh, the—”
“Ja,” Rika said, cutting him off. “We will retire now to our…” She drew a breath, and if George didn’t know her for the icy thing she was, he’d think it was for courage. “To the cottage,” she finished weakly.
Without preamble, he and Rika were whisked from the bench and carried outside on the shoulders of a small throng of drunken islanders.
’Twas snowing. Billowy white flakes blustered down on him, clinging to his hair and garments. He sucked in a breath and realized, too late, that he’d had far too much mead. His head began to spin.
Moments later, the door to a small cottage at the other end of the courtyard was kicked open, and Rika was dropped unceremoniously onto the bed within. George was set on his feet in front of her.
Before he knew what was happening, three men relieved him of his weapons, his boots, and his tunic, leaving him next to naked in naught but his leggings. He snatched a fur from the bed and held it in front of him. He wasn’t usually this modest, but the strangeness of the situation unnerved him.
Two women hovered over Rika, and when they drew back he saw that she, too, had been stripped of her outer garments. Her undershift was thin, nearly transparent. In his mind’s eye he saw her as she’d been in the sauna last eve—her skin pearled with sweat, her hair damp and clinging to the curves of her body.
He drew a sobering breath.
One of the women, an elder, said, “Remember what I told you, girl.”
Rika did not respond, nor did she move a muscle. Hannes and Lawmaker and the few others packed into the tiny cottage fell silent. Finally she tipped her chin at George and said, “Do it then. Get it over with.”
He looked at her, uncertain of her meaning.
She set her jaw and eased back onto the bed. “I’m ready, Scotsman. Finish it.”
“What?” he croaked. Truth dawned, and his mouth gaped. “Ye mean…” He glanced at the others in the room, and shook his head. “She canna mean what I think she means?”
“Ah, what’s that?” Lawmaker said, his face as innocent as a babe’s.
Oh, nay. Surely they didn’t expect…
“It must be witnessed,” Hannes said. “It’s the law.”
George stood speechless, clutching the fur.
“Go on then,” the burly islander said, and slapped him on the back for what had to be the hundredth time that night.
“With all of ye here? Ye’re daft.” In truth, since the third or fourth flagon of mead he’d been thinking he wouldn’t mind it so very much. And why not? Any port in a storm, so the Inverness sailors were fond of saying.
But this, this was unthinkable.
Rika sat up in the bed. “You must, or it won’t be legal. Am I right?” She looked to Lawmaker for confirmation. “Unless of course, we don’t have to do it at all?” Her face lit with hope.
“We’ve been all through this,” Hannes said. “Have we not?”
“Ja, we have,” Lawmaker said. “But it need not be witnessed. That’s an ancient custom we rarely practice. I, myself, shall attest to the legality of the marriage when the time comes. Now, let us away.”
“But—” Rika flew from the bed as Lawmaker herded the onlookers from the room. “Nay, you must stay!” Her eyes widened in what George could swear was fear. “Sitryg, Lawmaker, do not leave me here alone with him.”
Lawmaker paused in the doorway and cast her a hard look. “He’s your husband now. You must trust him, as he has trusted you in agreeing to this bargain.”
She started toward the door, and on impulse George reached out and grabbed her braceleted wrist. Her whole body went rigid at his touch.
“Remember, too, what I have told you,” Lawmaker said to her. “Not all men are the same.”
George looked into the blanched face of his bride and, as Lawmaker closed the door on them, wondered what the devil the old man meant.
Chapter Five
All men were the same.
Rika backed onto the bed in the cottage, drawing her legs up under her, and waited. And waited.
Grant stood for what seemed a lifetime with his back to her, the fur wrapped around his waist, warming himself by the small peat fire blazing in the hearth.
The moment she had been dreading had come at last, and now that it was here she was anxious to have done with it.
“What are you doing?” she asked lamely, not knowing what else to say.
“Trying to clear my head.”
This surprised her. Brodir had never been concerned with such matters. In fact, he’d been deep in his cups most every time he’d taken her.
“Perhaps this would go…better for you, were it not entirely clear.”
He turned to look at her, and she could tell from his expression he thought it a strange thing for her to say. Their eyes locked, and he let the fur slip from his waist.
Thor’s blood!
Grant was nothing like Brodir.
Heat suffused her face as the Scot dispensed with his leggings and cast them aside. His eyes raked her up and down, and she braced herself for what would come next.
He moved toward her in the firelight, and for the second time in as many days she was acutely aware of his size and strength. He exuded a feral maleness that startled her.
Lawmaker was right. She had underestimated the Scot.
Rika drew herself up to meet him, fisting her hands at her sides. Fear was not an option. She would never give him that satisfaction. Never. Let him take her and be done with it.
Her pulse raced as he eased himself onto the bed beside her. “Do it,” she demanded. “Do it now.”
He cocked his head, studying her face. Why did he hesitate? Thor’s blood, just do it!
All at once his expression softened. “Never in my life have I taken a woman against her will, and I’m no about to do so now.”
Her heart stopped. Of all the words he might speak, those were the last she expected to hear. “But…you must.”
“Nay, lass.” He shook his head. “Ye dinna want me, and…well…” He shrugged.
The truth of it stung more than any blow Brodir had e’er dealt her. Grant didn’t want her. Her belly tightened. She knew all along he didn’t, so why did it hurt? She should be relieved, elated, even, but she wasn’t.
Something else occurred to her. “It doesn’t matter what you or I want. It’s the law. You heard the elders—without consummation the marriage is not legal and I cannot claim my dowry.”
He shook his head. “This coin is of great import to ye—to willingly give up your virginity to a man ye canna stand, and one you’ll ne’er see again.”
She closed her eyes against the rage of memories blasting across her consciousness. There was no reason to keep the truth from him, for he was about to learn it for himself. “I am no maid, and there
fore give up nothing.”
The silence that followed was unbearable. She felt her cheeks blaze hot. Finally he said, “We can say that we did it, and no one will be the wiser.”
Rika opened her eyes.
He really didn’t want her.
She almost laughed. That would never have stopped Brodir. His hate stoked his lust, and he wreaked it on her not as a lover, but an enemy.
Nay, she did not understand the Scot at all.
“Lawmaker sees all,” she said. “The old man will know we lie.”
Grant laughed, and warmth flooded his eyes. “Aye, methinks naught gets past him.”
Rika smiled, unable to help herself, and worked to instill a measure of gentleness in her words. Everything depended on the Scot’s cooperation. “Will you do it, then, as agreed?”
“Aye,” he said, and slid his hand across the furs to cover hers. “I will.”
The warmth of his touch startled her. She drew her hand away and, gathering her courage, stripped her shift off over her head.
Grant sucked in a breath.
“I will not struggle,” she said, and eased back onto the pillows. “Do as you will.”
For a long time he did nothing—he simply sat there looking at her body in the softness of the fire’s glow. She feared to look at him, but curiosity overcame her apprehension and she stole a glance.
His face was shadowed in the firelight, his hair awash in gold. Her gaze drifted lower, across the muscled expanse of his chest, which rose and fell with each measured breath he drew. His body was hard and lightly furred, all burnished gold as if the sun had kissed him.
Her own breathing grew quick and shallow under his scrutiny. And when their eyes finally met, what she read in his stirred her blood.
Desire.
Nay, it could not be.
Yet even as she formed the thought, his hands trailed lightly over her thighs. She gasped at his touch.
“I willna hurt you,” he breathed, and slid closer on the bed.
How could she believe that? She tensed as he leaned over her, and when she looked into his eyes she knew she’d believe anything he told her.
“Wha-what are you doing?”
“Just this,” he said, and his mouth covered hers in the gentlest of kisses.
The world slipped out beneath her, and she floated weightless in the tender wash of the kiss, his breath hot and sweet, his tongue smooth as glass as she opened to him.
What was happening?
“Rika,” he breathed against her mouth. “Put your arms around me.”
She obeyed without thinking, and he deepened the kiss. His body settled atop hers, the weight of him solid, comforting, nothing like Brodir’s oppressive bulk.
His mouth moved over her skin like a firebrand, and she gasped with a spiraling sensation she could not comprehend.
“Touch me,” he whispered in her ear. It was not a command, but a plea, invoked with such sweetness she could do naught but respond.
Her hands roved his back and buttocks with a will of their own. He moaned in pleasure, and his surprising response spurred her on. She kissed him with a ferocity that shocked her, clawed at his back as he thrust against her.
“Grant,” she breathed, lifting her hips to meet his.
“Will ye no call me George?”
Her eyes flew open.
Thor’s blood, what was she doing?
Her body stiffened beneath him. Ja, she would submit, but never would she succumb. Oh, she’d heard about men like this, though she’d not believed it. They wielded pretty words and tenderness like a double-headed ax. Their weapons were tenfold more deadly than the brutal domination at the core of Brodir’s armory.
She tried to push him off her, but when his mouth slipped to her breast and he began to suckle, all thoughts of stopping him vanished.
“George,” she breathed involuntarily, and fisted handfuls of his hair. Heat spread from her center like molten steel.
His thighs parted hers in one swift motion, and she knew the inevitable had come at last. He was ready, and so was she, yet it was not the velvety tip of his manhood that brushed against her—it was his hand, his fingers playing her like some rare instrument.
“Don’t.” She struggled against him.
“Aye,” he breathed against her lips before his tongue continued its silken exploration of her mouth.
Nothing in her experience with Brodir prepared her for Grant—for the unbearable urgency mounting within her, centered at the place where his fingers worked their magic.
Her heart thrummed in her chest, her limbs writhed beneath him, and when she felt certain she might die from the pleasure he wrought from her, he spread her thighs wide with his own and drove himself inside her.
She drew breath with the shock of it, and knew naught but him—his scent, his power, the slick heat of his skin as she bit into his shoulder. He cried out and thrust again.
A bright-edged wave of something that was, until this moment, unfathomable gripped her, jolting her near senseless. Somewhere at the edge of consciousness she felt not submission, but a visceral power that surged beyond all sensation as Grant found his own pleasure.
In her.
George pulled a fur over the sleeping woman beside him, and wondered what the hell had come over him. The hearth fire burned low, and in its waning light he looked at Rika, daughter of Fritha, with new understanding.
Her naiveté had stunned him, for true to her word, she was no maid. Her kisses were artless, her response to his own surprising passion uncontrived.
She was, in her lovemaking, as open and straightforward as she was in her other dealings with him. Nothing like the women he knew at home.
He shouldn’t want her, but he did.
Even now, his desire for her surged anew. This could not be. ’Twas the drink. That was it. What other reason could there be for this irrational hunger? He’d bedded dozens of women, but never had he felt the ache of wanting that consumed him now.
He knew if he touched her, chanced the simplest caress, she’d wake and look at him in wonder, as she had when first he’d touched her, as if he’d done something remarkable.
As if she’d never before been made love to.
The tall one belongs to Brodir.
He understood now what that meant. The jarl was her lover. What kind of a man was he to have never shown her pleasure? For clearly this had been her first experience of such things.
His gaze drifted to the scar on her throat, and he recalled the panic in her eyes when first he kissed her. What had this Brodir done to evoke such fear in a woman who styled herself fearless?
The bracelets.
He’d tried to remove them before she drifted off to sleep, but she’d grown panicky again and had refused. He hadn’t pressed the issue.
Now, one slender, bronzed arm splayed across the pillow over her head. He leaned over her and slowly, carefully, tripped the latch on the bracelet.
She sighed dreamily. He froze. The bracelet fell away onto the pillow when she turned and reached for him in her sleep.
“Sweet Jesus,” he breathed, catching her wrist in his hand.
She was horribly scarred. Aye, she’d been bound, and on more than one occasion. What kind of a monster could do such a thing?
Absently he drew her wrist to his lips and planted a gentle kiss on the purplish scar, then laid the bracelet to rest on the chest flanking the bed.
His anger surged.
Christian or pagan, a man who abused a woman so deserved a slow and painful death. George wished the whoreson were here now, so he could teach him a lesson in—
What the devil was wrong with him?
What did he care what went on between these heathen people? ’Twas none of his affair. He had his own bride waiting, in Scotland, and she, unlike Rika, was everything a woman should be—so the king had promised.
George shook off the momentary stupor. He must forget this Viking woman. What had happened between them tonight was broug
ht on by drink—nothing more. He hadn’t even wanted her, not at first. She’d insisted. What could he do? He was a man, after all, not a monk.
He edged away from her and squinted in the near dark, looking for his clothes. Ah, the bastards had taken them. Fine. He’d pass the night here, but would freeze to death before he touched her again.
A shiver shot up his spine. With the fire gone out, ’twas cold as a tomb in the cottage. He burrowed under the furs and turned his back on her, edging as far from her as he might without falling off the bed. Tomorrow they’d sail for her father’s island, and in no time he’d be home.
After a while he drifted into an uneasy sleep, and dreamed of serpents bathing in a bridal cup of mead.
Rika dressed at dawn in the everyday garments she’d stashed under the bed the afternoon before. Grant was gone, but his scent lingered on her skin.
She’d bathe quickly before breaking her fast. It was Saturday, and the bathhouse fire would be lit, the tubs filled with heated water, the moist air of the sauna redolent with herbs.
The sealskin drape on the window flapped in the rising wind. She drew it aside and was blasted with sleet. A shiver raced up her spine. Donning her cloak and boots, she took one long look around the room. The rumpled bed stared back at her accusingly.
“You enjoyed it,” she whispered to herself. Nay, she hadn’t. She couldn’t. It was horrible. It was…
Wonderful.
She’d wanted him, and he her.
Rika shook her head fervently and pulled her cloak tight about her. It would never happen again. Never. She tripped the door latch and walked into a blizzard.
Thor’s blood, where had the weather come from?
They couldn’t sail in this. The courtyard was deserted; everyone must be inside. Her bath would have to wait. Rika jogged to the main longhouse where she took her meals and burst inside.
“There you are.”
In the entry she stamped the snow from her boots, and turned toward Lawmaker’s familiar voice.
“Come and break your fast. Your husband waits.”
Husband.
She bristled at the old man’s words, but knew there was no escaping it. Grant sat beside him on the bench, and from the look of their full trencher, it appeared neither had yet eaten.
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