“This isn’t an appetite. There’s something between us. Even when you were furious at me in the library, you wanted me. Even when I was running from you, when you brought me up on the back of that horse, I felt…your heat. Part of me wanted to lean into your strength, rather than run away from it—I can’t explain it. But we have this time. This marriage. Why can’t we enjoy it?”
“You want me,” he said. Because everything else she was saying was difficult to hold onto. In his lust-addled brain it was moving through too quickly.
“Yes, Ragnar. I want you. Not because you kidnapped me, and not because we got married. If I had seen you across a crowded ballroom, if you had always been the king of this country, if you had been in the life you should’ve had, and I had been in mine, I would’ve wanted you.”
She wanted him. She was choosing him. Of all the limited choices that Fern had been able to make in her life, he nowcounted as one of them. There had been spare few pleasures in his life that he could remember. Only small moments of joy.
But this stood out as one of the greatest. One of the most profound. It was nothing like the potential for satisfying an appetite. It was something deeper. Something that reached through the garden walls around his heart and touched him.
Touched his soul.
He hadn’t even thought it was possible. He wasn’t even sure that he retained a soul. In much the same way he had lost his faith in anything divine.
But then, he kissed her. And it was like looking into the heavens. An experience beyond anything he had ever had before. She was a virgin.
And yet he might as well have been.
He had always looked at sex as something divorced of any emotional connection. He had honed his skills, because he did not believe in using a person for pleasure without giving it in return. But it was only his body involved. While now everything felt locked in. Everything felt engaged.
And then every pass of her lips over his, of his tongue against hers, felt like something new.
He lifted her up, sweeping her into his arms, the way that he had done on the Isle of Skye when he had plucked her off the ground. Only this time, he did not put her on the back of his horse. This time, he held her against his chest as he carried her down the long corridor, and to the spiral staircase that led to his chambers.
The room was sparse, and he still was not in the habit of sleeping on the bed. When he opened the door, his bedroll was still on the floor beside the large canopy bed, and his eyes went to it, even though he wished she wouldn’t notice.
“What is that?”
“I’m not accustomed to sleeping in a bed. I spent most of my life sleeping on the floor. And then on the ground outside.”
“Oh but that’s…”
“It’s all right. I have been saving this bed. I needed a reason to use it. And you have given me that.”
She smiled, and it was like something had been lit up inside of him. “That was almost funny.”
“I feel almost amused.”
With her lips still curved into a smile she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him again. He growled, laying her down in the center of the bed. The mattress was soft. And so was she. He looked down at her, at all that glorious gold over her beautiful body. He touched her face, and for a moment, he could only stare in reverence at all of her beauty.
She truly was glorious.
Not a conquest. Even better than that, she was giving herself to him. Joyfully.
She had chosen him.
That reality echoed inside of him, stronger than any heartbeat. Stronger than anything.
If this was joy, then he could understand why people threw away their duty, their honor, their everything to pursue it.
He himself was unfamiliar with the feeling. He had felt something like it when they had finally managed to reclaim the country, but even then it had not been pure joy. Because on the other side of the victory lay a long road ahead.
While this was all about the moment. Not a race to the finish line, not the beginning of the next step. He intended to take his time with her. To devour her. To luxuriate in this.
“What do you know about sex?” he asked.
“I have not spent these past years in the woods like you. I think I know quite a bit about it.”
“Yes? You think?”
