Lord of Fire and Ice (11 page)

The song went on and on, plucking at Katla’s soul, piercing her weakest point.

A tear trembled on her lashes. She tried to blink it back, but it escaped and raced down her cheek. She swiped it away angrily before anyone could see.

The sweet, sad melody sang the hidden desires of Katla’s heart as surely as if it were being pulled from her chest instead of coaxed from Inga’s flute.

At this point in her life, she expected she’d have so much more. Someone to love her despite her faults, someone whose soul fitted neatly with the bends and crooks in hers.

How could the unknown creator of Inga’s tune possibly know the despair she felt?

By the time the song reached its end, Katla had to cover her mouth to keep from sobbing. There was suddenly not enough air in the great hall, and she struggled for her next breath. While the rest of the company pounded their approval, Katla rose and fled to her chamber.

Not bothering to light her lamp, she threw herself on the bed and buried her face in the linens, where it was safe to give vent to her grief. She wept into the feather tick as she hadn’t wept at Osvald’s graveside.

She’d never know the mighty passion, never hear her beloved’s voice in her head, whispering a secret language only the two of them shared. No one would ever love her merely for herself.

The death of a dream was even harder to bear than the loss of a husband. She drenched the Frankish linens with her tears.

Every person in the longhouse needed her. Her days blurred with one task after another.

What did any of it matter?

She was always surrounded by a crowd of people, but Katla was so alone it made her chest ache.

She heard the click of the latch but didn’t look up. She knew who it was. No one else would be so bold as to enter her chamber without permission.

Lamplight flickered to life, sending his long shadow wavering against the back wall.

“What do you want, son of Ulf?”

“You.”

Katla swiped her eyes with her forearm and sat up. She blew her nose loudly into a small square of cloth and crumpled it in her hand. She turned to face him. He looked at her with an intensity that should have scared her. Instead, it made her breath catch and her nipples perk to aching hardness.

“I won’t free you simply because you bed me,” she warned.

“I’m not asking to be freed,” he said, his voice husky with desire. “But I do intend to bed you.”

Her nose was red from weeping. Her eyes glittered with tears that still threatened to spill over her lower lids. Her lips were puffy.

She wasn’t even pretty at the moment.

But she was the real Katla. Not the smiling, laughing Katla he’d warmed to that morning, but real nonetheless. Her carefully crafted mask of dutiful leadership had been stripped away and replaced by a vulnerable honesty.

Her deep unhappiness tugged at his heart, though he had no idea why it should claw at him so. She was his owner, the one who kept the iron collar on his throat, but despite everything, Brandr ached to make things right for her.

If he didn’t know better, he’d suspect she’d witched him. Whatever the reason, his soul was drawn to hers, and he’d never wanted a woman more than he wanted the one before him now.

He approached the bed but made no move to touch her.

“I saw your shoulders tremble in the great hall, and I knew you wept,” he said softly, finally lifting a hand to graze a knuckle over her still-damp cheek. “And…I couldn’t help but come to you.”

Her moss-green eyes fluttered closed for a moment, and she worried her lower lip, clearly unsure what to do.

“You’ll have to call for help if you try to send me away. I won’t leave willingly,” he finished, hoping the threat of a brawl would make her decide in his favor.

She opened her eyes and met his steady gaze. Her chest heaved twice, and her lips parted softly. Her chin began to quiver again.

“I won’t send you away.”

She extended a hand to him. He bent over it and brushed his lips across her knuckles as he’d seen the courtiers in Byzantium do to their empress. Then he turned her hand palm up and pressed a kiss on the soft center.

He heard her shuddering breath, but he was in no hurry. She wasn’t going to send him away. He had all the time in the world. He was determined to love this woman with toe-curling slowness.

“Will you tell me why you were crying?”

She shook her head.

“Later, mayhap,” he suggested.

“No.”

“We’ll see.” He cupped her cheeks and kissed her forehead. Then he raised her to her feet. “Let’s get you ready for bed, then.”

She blinked at him in surprise. After their desperate, hurried joining on the cliff top, she obviously wasn’t expecting restraint from him.

That was all right. He was wise in the way of women. At least, when it came to bed play. There were a hundred ways he could surprise her.

He unfastened her shoulder brooches and laid the silver ornaments on the trunk nearest her bed. Then he unclasped the chain around her neck that bore all the keys to every lock in her household.

He knew the load those keys represented, the responsibility for the lives of so many, was far heavier on her than their actual weight.

“Raise your arms,” he ordered.

She lifted them in surrender, and he pulled her tunic over her head. Her underdress clung to every curve. It would have peeled off the same way as her tunic, but he wasn’t ready for that yet.

He wanted to savor her. To put his stamp on every finger-width of her skin.

“Sit.”

“Don’t get used to giving me orders, Ulfson,” she said, some of the usual vinegar creeping into her tone, but she plopped her bottom on the bed’s foot all the same.

He knelt before her and pulled off her leather shoes. Then his hands slipped beneath her hem to untie the bindings that wound around her calves and held up her stockings.

She really did have lovely feet. They were delicate and well formed, with high arches. Her small toes were topped with neat, square nails, smoothly filed.

He raised first her right foot, then the left, to his lips for a kiss on the joint between her big toe and its nearest neighbor. Each time, he was treated to a glimpse up her leg to the shadowy realm beneath her linen underdress.

His cock urged him to more than a stolen glance. If he’d listened to his member, he’d have plunged a hand under her skirt and claimed her sex, then and there. He knew how to drive her to helpless need that way. To tease her with glancing touches and circle her sensitive spot till she writhed and wept, but he held back.

He wanted to hear her beg for his touch. So he consoled his cock with another peek at her soft curls as he kissed her right foot once more, this time slipping her big toe into his mouth and giving it a hard suck.

She all but purred.

“Took you long enough to get around to obeying my first command,” she said, her lips twitching in a suppressed feline smile.

“Figure I’ve owed you those. And I always pay my debts.” He shot her an answering grin and flipped her hem up to bare her knees. “Besides, the view’s well worth the trouble.”

Her eyes flared with feigned indignation, but her lips fought a smile. “Swine.”

“I haven’t done anything to deserve that.” He lifted a brow at her. “Yet.”

She fell back on the bed and loosed a deep, fruity laugh. “Then by all means, get to work.”

“You peeked into my mind, princess,” he said as he eased his shoulders between her knees to spread her wide. He delivered a string of kisses up the inside of her leg. “Now keep still. I dare you.”

The skin of her inner thigh was soft and sweet, and he hitched the linen to bare more of her legs as he moved up them. She smelled wonderful, her warm, musky scent blooming afresh each time his lips drew nearer to her sex. He pressed open-mouthed kisses on her, running his tongue into her intimate cleft.

She made a helpless little sound of need.

He drew back to look at her. Katla’s dark hair was spread out over the bed in a fan. She’d draped a forearm over her eyes, trying to shield herself from him, he supposed. Before this night was through, he promised himself he’d break through every barrier she erected between them.

Her breaths came short and quick. Her hem was rucked up around her waist in front, exposing her flat belly. Her legs were splayed in abandon.

He parted the soft lips of her sex. When his warm breath passed over her, she quivered.

He ached in response.

He tongued her once, and she raised herself into his mouth. He suckled the little nub, swirling his tongue over the spot.

The sounds of longing she made went straight to his cock, and he felt the pressure of his seed rising in the shaft. If he kept at this, he’d end up spilling in his trousers.

He pushed the underdress up more, baring just the undersides of her breasts, leaving the pert tips still covered. He moved up her body, ignoring her sigh of frustration, leaving a trail of nibbling kisses along her ribs.

He ran his tongue along the crease beneath each breast. She rocked her pelvis against him, and his cock throbbed almost painfully.

He laid his head between her breasts and drew a deep breath. The goal was to make
her
beg for him, not for him to succumb to the need to rut her blind in greedy, uncontrollable lust.

Once he reduced her to helpless pleading, then he could rut her blind in greedy, uncontrollable lust.

For now, he forced himself to run through the ingredients for Greek fire in his head—anything to delay his body’s inexorable reactions to Katla.

Quicklime, sulphur, bitumen…
He felt steady enough to lift her dress the rest of the way to completely bare her breasts. He nuzzled them, running his open mouth around her areola, teasing her with his nearness.
Pitch, resin, nipples—damn, I mean naptha.

“Brandr, please,” she moaned, arching her back and thrusting her breasts upward.

He forgot all about Greek fire and closed his lips over one while he massaged the other with his thumb and forefinger.

Her hands ran over his shorn head and down his back. She rocked her hips against him.

He rose up to look at her. “I thought you were supposed to lie still.”

She shrugged. “I thought you dared me to try. Besides, that tunic of yours is rough. We need to get you out of it.”

His face stretched in a wide smile. “You only had to ask.”

***

She sat up so she could remove his tunic over his head. It was so tight across his shoulders, there was a moment or two when she thought the seams might rip. Finally, she worked it free.

“That’s far too small for you.”

“I’ll have to take the matter up with my mistress,” he said with a lopsided grin as she smoothed her palms over his chest. Muscles tensed and flexed under his warm skin. “Or mayhap her brothers. I don’t know what they did with my clothes, but I wasn’t bare arsed when they first drugged me at the mead house, you know.”

He bent his head and claimed her mouth in a deep kiss.

He’d certainly been naked when Finn and the others dropped him on her floor. She already knew he was magnificent, from that time when he lay bound and helpless before her and then later in the bath house. Perfectly proportioned, endowed by nature with every masculine beauty. She could hardly wait to see him that way again.

“What were you wearing the night you were taken?” she asked when he stopped kissing her long enough to peel off her underdress. The linen slid over her skin with a soft rustle, and she was suddenly naked before him.

His eyes glowed with appreciation as he moved closer. The tips of her breasts grazed his hard chest.

“I asked you a question,” she reminded him.

“Oh!” he said, not stopping his leisurely perusal of her. “I was dressed for travel. Leather breaches, woolen cloak, a tunic with tablet-woven trim, and—as a matter of fact, now that I think on it, seems to me Finn was wearing that tunic at table this night.”

“Don’t count on him returning it.”

“Right now, princess,” he said as he gathered her hair in his fist and tipped her face up to his, “my old tunic is the last thing on my mind.”

As he bent to her, everything else fled from Katla’s mind as well. The world seared away in his fiery kiss, and her whole life sizzled down to the wonder of his mouth on hers and his skin gliding smoothly against her skin.

Her hands found the drawstring at his waist and plunged in to stroke his hard shaft and fondle his balls. He growled with pleasure, and a thrill of power surged over her. There might be a way to reduce him to pleading as easily as he seemed to bring her to her knees.

But the need between her legs was back and throbbing with a vengeance. Mayhap she’d play at tormenting the man after her own desires were satisfied.

They tumbled together into the bed, a tangle of arms and legs. Once they finished rolling, Katla found herself on top of Brandr’s long, strong body.

“Now, princess,” he said, folding his hands beneath his head. “Mount your stallion at your pleasure and ride him as you will.”

She sat up abruptly, surprised. Osvald had never allowed her to straddle atop him like this. It wasn’t fitting for a woman to so dominate a man.

“Besides, woman, if it’s a child you want,” her husband had always said, “why force a man’s seed to swim upstream?”

She blinked back the tears Osvald’s remembered words called forth. If she was barren, it wasn’t his fault. Hadn’t he done his duty by her, giving her a quick swive almost every night? If no child quickened in her body, Osvald was not to blame.

“What’s wrong?” Brandr sat up and wrapped his arms around her.

She was ashamed to realize she was shaking.

“Nothing,” she said quickly.

He kissed her temples, her closed eyelids, the tip of her nose. “You’re sure?”

She nodded. This wasn’t about getting with child, even if such a thing were possible. This was merely about scratching an itch. About making the empty ache go away, if for only a little while.

“Lie down, Ulfson,” she said fiercely as she forced her hands between them to push against his chest. “I’m going for a ride.”