“Alva. Make no mistake about it. Iwillcarry you to Cwenthryth’s hut. Whether I do so over my shoulder because you fight me or in my arms because you agree it is for the best is up to you. So, which do you prefer?”
There would be no convincing him. And if she were honest, she was dying to be held against his chest. This was as good a reason as any. The other option was to allow him to kiss her and that, she definitely could not allow.
“In your arms.” That was the least mortifying option, not to mention the most comfortable.
He nodded, before sweeping her up carefully, making sure not to jolt her. “Good girl. I knew I could trust you to be sensible.”
His eyes bore into hers, and she noticed that the blue was slightly tinged with gold in the middle of the irises. That explained why they could seem more luminous when his pupils closed in the sunlight. How fascinating.
They were now within kissing distance, and she could tell they both wanted to kiss. The difference was, she knew it would be wrong whereas he didn’t seem to care about the consequences. Perhaps he didn’t, because he knew this was not serious. But Eahlswith didn’t have that luxury. Unfortunately, for her, it could all too easily become serious.
“Please, I’m ready. Let’s go.”
“Eahlswith,what on earth happened? I thought you’d left the village. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
Sven entered the hut and walked straight past Cwenthryth. He deposited Eahlswith into a chair and took a few steps back. He would let her explain to her friend what had happened.
“A stupid accident.” She winced. Whether it was in pain or in mortification, Sven wasn’t sure. Probably both. “I had already left, as you said,” she continued, “and I was in the forest on my way back home, when I thought I saw something glimmer under a rock. I picked it up to check but it was too heavy and I dropped it on my foot… Your friend, who had gone to collect wood, saw me and kindly brought me back to the village.”
She looked at him meaningfully, indicating that he should go along with this version of the story. Apparently she didn’t want Cwenthryth to know she had been in his hut, or that they knew one another. “Your friend” she’d called him, as if he didn’t have anything to do with her, as if she didn’t even know his name, as if she had not moaned it, screamed it time and time again while he made love to her in every position imaginable last summer.
All that told him she had not mentioned their night of passion to her friend but, of course, he’d guessed that already.If Eahlswith had told Cwenthryth she’d slept with her husband’s brother, the Saxon would have said something in the five months since the encounter. The two of them got on well. A special bond had been created between them when he had ensured her protection shortly after her meeting with Steinar.
And yet she had no idea that he knew intimately the woman who claimed to be her best friend.
“Thank you for bringing her back to me, Sven,” Cwenthryth told him. It was clear she was not suspicious in the least. But why should she be when Eahlswith was acting so coldly toward him? “If you could go get Helga so she can have a look at Eahlswith’s foot?”
Sven bunched his fingers into fists. He was being dismissed, when he wanted to stay and check that Eahlswith was all right. He was going to have to let someone see to her injury when he wanted to do it himself. He was having to be silent when his lips were burning with words straining to get out.
It was not a rock that fell on her foot. It was the cask of ale in my hut. Eahlswith was with me in my hut, where I fucked her for hours on end last summer and felt my life being irremediably changed in the process.
Of course, he couldn’t say any of that, not when it was both crude and felt impossibly intimate, not when Eahlswith was looking at him with big, imploring eyes. There was no mistaking the meaning behind that look. She didn’t want anyone to know about them.
“Yes, I’ll get Helga for you,” he said curtly.
“Thank you.”
He’d barely taken ten steps out of the hut when he walked into Steinar, who was heading back home, an axe swung over his shoulder. He, together with their friend, Elwyn, had gone to fell some trees in the back of their parents’ hut.
“Sven. Have you come to see Liv?” A smile bloomed on his lips at the mention of his newborn daughter.
“No. I just brought in a friend of your wife’s.” He, too, could pretend he had no idea who she was, he thought savagely. “A tall Saxon woman with black hair.”
That description felt sorely lacking. Because she also had maddening curves, a bewitching smile, amazing breasts, mysterious eyes and the most infuriating determination to keep him at arms’ length.
“Eahlswith?” Steinar wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “I thought she’d left earlier this afternoon?”
“She had.” But then he had stopped her, because he was damned if he was going to let her slip through his fingers a second time. “But she hurt her foot as she was leaving and cannot walk home. Cwenthryth is seeing to her as we speak.”
“Is she all right?”
His brother sounded unusually worried, as if he cared for her. This made Sven wonder if Eahlswith was the friend who had helped Cwenthryth a few years ago, when she had lost her unborn child. Steinar had told him the tale shortly after his wedding to the Saxon and it was a sordid one to say the least.
The poor babe had been fathered by a man who’d posed as her half-brother in order to take advantage of her and her ailing father. The ordeal had gone on for months, until Steinar had killed the bastard the day he had walked in on him assaulting the woman he had come to love.
Sven gritted his teeth. If only he had asked her name that night he had pounded into her, he might have realized that the woman he was looking for was none other than his sister-in-law’s best friend. Well, it mattered not. He had found her now.
