Her features hardened, and the ice returned to her eyes. “My brother’s grasp is not an easy one to slip. Especially since I am female.” A side-eyed look toward the tent’s exit tightened her mouth, pulling it into a frown. “Even now, I promise you, he plans to recover me. Not because I am his sister, but his chattel. And the healer you called forth will ensure my return is less than pleasant.”
“Why?”
“Because she worships Alrek as a god.” She reclined across the furs and curled over onto her side. With her head pillowed on her arm, she stared straight ahead at nothing at all. “She feeds the sickness of his mind.” With a twitch of a shoulder, she added, “I would lay odds she reported I prevented her from crippling the skilled warrior who cost him so many of his best archers.” Another deep breath left her in a dismal sigh. “Although, their deaths lay at my door as well. I set our defenses poorly.” After rubbing her eyes again, she shooed him away with a flip of her hand. “Go. Sleep. The rattle of my chains will trouble you no more, great bear.”
Great bear?From her, he rather liked that. “If you had escaped, where would you have gone?” It didn’t sound as though she planned on returning to her clan or the village.
She rolled to her other side, giving him her back. “I did not seek escape,” she replied through a hitching yawn. “I sought to join you in your bed.”
“Why?”
“Are yousakteas well assølibat?”
“Am I what?” The one word resembled celibate, but the other?
She twisted to face him and pinned him with a damning glare. “Forgive me. Weariness returns me to my native tongue. I asked you if you wereslowas well ascelibate.” Without waiting for his reaction, she flopped away again and settled deeper into the furs.
“I am neither slow nor celibate,” he defended to her back. “But I still dinna allow the wants of my cock to risk me or my men.”
Silence fell between them. Her slow breathing made him think she had found their conversation so dull that she had fallen asleep in the middle of it. Just when he thought to return to his bed, she rolled to her back and looked at him.
“I am no longer a threat to you or your men.” Her confession came out as an irritated hiss, causing him to seat himself beside her pallet. Her tensed smile was as bitter as her tone. “I meant to seduce you, oh mighty Thorburn. Use you. Gain your trust so you might protect me with your warriors and take me back to the mainland when you left Mull.ThenI planned to escape and disappear deep into Scotland. Perhaps, even farther.”
“Why did ye not tell me that back in the woods?” She had not held back in her fight, and he knew, if he had faltered, she would have killed him.
“Because those who fought against you would have just as easily turned their arrows on me.” Her tone held no fear or rancor. She talked of her own forces killing her as if it was something as ordinary as the weather.
Behind all her hardness, all her ferocity, and every bit of her seductive posturing hid a forlorn soul seeking sanctuary. He reached out and touched the cool silk of her cheek.
She stared up at him. Watchful. Waiting. Silent.
Such full lips, he thought as he ran the tip of his thumb across them. When she didn’t move, he withdrew and stared down at her. He had never met such a woman.
“You would have enjoyed my interruption of your celibacy,” she informed him with a dip of her chin.
“Of that, I have no doubt.” He could no longer resist all that was her. Not just her body. But her indomitable and yet somehow fragile spirit as well. Gingerly straightening his sore knee, he stretched out beside her.
She shifted to her side. Facing him, the waning candlelight danced in her eyes. Her sweat, her intoxicating musk, even the hint of ale on her breath fanned the fires in his blood. The glimmer of a smile danced across the mouth that would soon be his.
“I have never had a Scottish bear before,” she observed.
“Dare I risk ye, my lovely Adellis?” He treated himself to the inviting curve of her graceful throat. Salty. Smooth as velvet. The quickening of her lifeblood tapped against his lips as he grazed them across her flesh—such an addictive beginning.
“Dare you not?” she breathed into his ear, her tone as teasing as her touch. She tickled her fingers across the part of him where her gaze had lingered once he removed his trews. The coolness of her chains slid along his thighs as she became more brazen. Stroking. Squeezing. “And how shall we do this, my Viking god?”
He drew back from enjoying the delicious breast he had glimpsed earlier. “How?”
She ceased her exquisite massaging and held up her hands. “Shackled. Chained. Staked.” With a wicked dip of her lashes, she lightly pressed a leg against his bandaged knee. “And you a hobbled steed.”
Suspicion dampened his lust just enough to give him pause. He edged back the slightest bit. “Answer me this. Would ye release a prisoner ye had only just captured?” He smoothed his hand across her hip and squeezed the buttock he had known would be wondrous and firm. “Even if ye did feel as though a bit of trust might be growing between the two of ye?”
“Fair enough.” After a glance at her ankle chained closest to the stake, she smiled and slid her gaze back to his. “Get beneath me and scoot downward with your legs on either side of the rods. Straddle them if you will.”
“Why?”
“Because I mean to ride you and need enough slack for a proper mounting.” She leaned forward and flicked the tip of her tongue along his collarbone as she increased the pace of her squeezing pulls. “And I warn you, my gait is a gallop. Not a slow, gentle trot,” she said softly, the tickling of her breath searing his skin.
Saints preserve him; he could feel his heartbeat pounding in his bollocks.
