“Or any man!” he sneered cruelly.
“Nay, only you.” She smiled then at his snort of disbelief. Deliberately, she added in a teasing tone, “You are my heartmate, Royce. Begin to accept it. You will eventually.”
“You will never count me as one of your lovers, wench,” he stated emphatically.
She shrugged, the sigh she gave louder than necessary. “Very well, milord, if that is your wish.”
“Not my wish, the truth,” he insisted. “And you will cease to use your whore’s tricks on me.”
Kristen could not help but laugh at this order. “What tricks are those, milord? I am only guilty of looking at you, mayhap more than I should, but I cannot seem to help myself. You are, after all, the most splendid man here.”
He drew in his breath sharply. “God’s mercy, are all Viking whores as brazen as you?”
She had been called whore once too often. She knew she dared not deny it, for she wanted him in passion, not revenge, as he would surely take her if he knew she was a virgin. But his calling her whore now, after he had just ravaged her senses, grated harshly.
Irritation was ripe in her voice. “I know no whores, so I cannot answer that. What you call brazen, I call honesty. Would you rather I lie and say I hate you, that I despise the sight of you?”
“How can you not hate me? I have enslaved you. I keep you shackled and I know you hate the chain.”
“Is that why I wear it still, because you know I hate it?” she asked suspiciously.
He didn’t bother to answer that. “I think you do hate me, that you tempt me apurpose, hoping to have revenge by bewitching me.”
“If you believe that, then you will never accept what I am willing to give, Saxon, and I am sorry for that. I do hate these shackles, but not you. And being enslaved is not new to my family,” she added cryptically. “If I thought that I would always be enslaved and shackled, then aye, mayhap I would hate you.”
“So you hope to escape?”
Her eyes narrowed at him. “I am through telling you what I hope for, through speaking the truth to you when you will not believe it. Think whatever you like.”
She turned her back on him, but was tense, waiting for him to walk away. He did not do so immediately. She imagined he was fighting to control a new fury that she would dare dismiss him like that. She would have been much appeased if she had seen that his eyes had simply moved over her, revealing for one unguarded moment the yearning in his soul.
Chapter Fifteen
Kristen was in no fine mood the next morning. She had been open and honest with the Saxon, baring her feelings to him, giving him that advantage over her, and he her enemy, and she got only his hypocrisy in response. He wanted her, yet he was determined to deny it to himself and to her, making them both suffer instead. If that was not enough to unsettle her stomach and make her think herself a worse fool than he was, Eda had witnessed their whole confrontation and was none too pleased.
“Taunt him no more, wench,” she had warned Kristen angrily. “You will be sorry if he does take you to bed, for you will never be more than a slave to him.”
It might well be true, and it made Kristen furious. Was she prepared to give up her innocence to a man who might never care for her? She had been so sure she could make him care, but now she had doubts, and she did not like being doubtful. It undermined her confidence and depressed her terribly.
They were cleaning the chambers this morning on the front-yard side of the house, as they did every morning. Royce’s chamber was one of these. Kristen had looked at his bed before with a feeling of excitement. This morning she felt like ripping it to shreds. She pounded the pillow so hard, in fact, that feathers flew out of the seams.
“From one extreme to the other,” Eda remarked, shaking her head at Kristen. “Think no more of him.”
“Leave me alone,” Kristen warned. “You said your piece last eventide.”
“But not enough, I see. If you think to harm him now, you had best think again.”
It was the last straw for Kristen, after spending a miserable night confronting the new emotions the Saxon had provoked in her. “Harm him?” Kristen snarled. “If I harm anyone, woman, ’twill be you if you do not cease to nag me!”
Eda backed away warily. She had grown lax around Kristen, who had showed no hostility until now. She had begun to like the girl, forgetting that she was of a race that thrived on death and destruction. She had grown lax enough to be alone with the girl as she was now. And it was made plain to her, looking at the tall young woman seething with emotion, that it would be a simple matter, chained or not, for Kristen to pick her up and throw her out the open window. She was big enough and strong enough to do so. Not that she would be foolish enough to do it. But shecoulddo it.
Eda moved swiftly toward the door, grumbling more testily with each step that put her safely out of Kristen’s reach. “Threaten an old woman, will you? And after I kept the others from abusing you?” At the door she turned to glower. “Finish here alone. And your attitude had best be improved, wench, ere you come below, or you can spend the rest of the day locked away, and without your supper. See if I care. And do not dawdle, or I will send one of the men up to fetch you down. You will not have such an easy time throwing a man out that window.”
Kristen wondered about the woman’s last unusual statement for a moment, then dismissed it from her mind. This was the first time she had been left alone in an unlocked room. And it was his room. In no time at all she could destroy its contents. There was no one to stop her until the deed was done. Royce would beat her then, and she would welcome the pain it would bring, the oblivion, the hate afterward, for she still did not hate him. She should, but she did not.
The idea was tempting, but more tempting was the possibility of finding an axe, the one sure weapon that could aid her escape. She had wasted too much time concentrating on the Saxon, when she should have been thinking only of leaving this place. An axe would sever the chain that bound her feet. An axe would open the shutters that were locked in her chamber each night. She had only a thin blanket and a rough sheet on her pallet, but with those and her own clothes tied together, she might have a long enough length to throw out the window and climb down. That same axe would then open the door that locked in Thorolf and the others. If she could find an axe, she could hide it in her chamber now before she went below. Then tonight…
There was not a single axe among the assortment of weapons hung on the wall. Kristen quickly bent to the large coffer at the base of Royce’s bed and opened it. Carefully she moved the clothes on the top, but only found more clothes underneath. She looked to the smaller coffer between the windows, but the iron lock on it stared back at her.
