Page 63 of The Last Viking

With a cluck of reproval, he asked, “Why?”

She raised her chin, refusing to open those wounds again. To her surprise and dismay, though, she blurted out, “Because you don’t want me.” I am pathetic, pathetic, pathetic. Next I’ll be begging him to make love to me.

“I love you, Merry-Death. How can you think I don’t want you? Is this a language problem we are having? Shall I fetch the talisman belt?” While speaking, he’d distractedly opened the front of her robe and taken her left breast in a wide, callused palm.

And it felt so-o-o good. Was she acquiring a taste for calluses now? Oh, lordy, yes! Were her tastes becoming as plebian as her parents said? Yep! Oh, geez, did she say…no, did she think, “yep?” Yep. Would she be ogling blue-collar workers at construction sites, like that guy in the diet Coke commercials? Probably, if they have long hair and washboard stomachs and tushes that…

While her mind was regressing, Rolf watched her and absentmindedly drew wide, abrasive circles over her breast. Every bone in her body began to melt, one calcium particle at a time. She wanted to slap his hand away, but she forgot how.

“Do you do everything you darn-well-Viking-please, without asking permission?” she asked in a suffocated whisper.

“Yea.”

She shuddered under his ongoing caresses.

“Let me,” he implored thickly. “Let me give you pleasure. After that, we can talk with a modicum of rationality about…so many things important to us.”

Was he saying she was irrational? “Aaaarrgh!” she shrieked and gave him a harsh shove against the chest. Caught off guard, he fell off the sofa and onto the floor.

Startled, Geirolf peered up at the wench with shock. He ever did love a good battle and his Merry-Death was giving him a fair chase. She’d knocked him right on his ass. With a grin, he congratulated her. “Well done, sweetling.” Then he launched himself at her afore she could scramble away. This time, he tossed her over his shoulder and carried her into the scullery where he flicked on the light lever, and then dropped her into a chair. “Sit,” he ordered, “and do not move.”

He went back to the great room where he found a pair of sweating braies. A man could scarce carry on a serious discussion when naked and lustful. On second thought, he scrounged through the small chest Merry-Death had given him for his belongings till he found a pair of the tight jaw-key undergarments men wore in this land. He needed something to bind his raging manroot if he wanted to speak in more than a drooling drivel to Merry-Death.

Returning, he sat in a chair on the opposite side of the table. Her robe was tucked neatly around her body now, but if she thought she presented a prim and proper picture, she was sorely mistaken. Her drying hair wisped out in wanton disarray. Her cheeks were flushed with anger and brush burns from his nighttime whisker stubble. Her eyes glittered with glorious fury.

“I love you,” he said, taking her hands across the table.

Her shoulders slumped. She tried to pull out of his grasp, but he laced their fingers and held firm. She averted her face.

“Look at me, dearling.” When she did, reluctantly, he asked, “What is amiss? Does my love displease you?”

“You don’t love me, and saying you do out of pity…that’s what displeases me.”

“I have ne’er told a woman I loved her afore…. Oh, do not look so skeptical. I have not. Therefore, if I fumble with my words, you must make allowance. ’Tis new territory for me.”

“Rolf, I’m thirty-five years old. I’m not a raving beauty. When I walk down the street, men seldom give me more than a passing glance. I’m not a scintillating conversationalist. My sense of humor is about nil. I devote my life to study in boring, cryptlike libraries. I can’t have children. So, when a man like you says he’s fallen in love with me…Well, pardon me, but I’m not buying it.”

He shook his head sadly at her self-assessment. Pulling their laced fingers up to his face, he kissed the knuckles of one of her hands, then the other. Her indrawn breath, quickly suppressed, ricocheted down her throat and lungs and out to her extremities. He knew that was so because he felt it in the rapid beat of her pulse where their wrists were joined. With great effort, he placed their hands safely back on the table where he wouldn’t be tempted to kiss more than knuckles.

Searching for the right words, he began tentatively, “I have met more beauteous women, ’tis true, and have enjoyed tumbling a few of them. Nay, I will admit, more than a few.”

Her lips twitched to hold back mirth at his stumbling admission. ’Twas a good sign, this half-smile.

“But my heart ne’er thundered like Thor’s mighty hammer when one of them walked into a chamber,” he continued. “The blood did not drain from my head, leaving me dizzy and gasping for breath at a mere smile from one of them. I did not tingle when one of them brushed my skin in passing.”

“Tingle? You?” She hooted with disbelief.

“Yea, you may smirk if you choose, but I have taken to tingling. My brothers would make great sport of teasing me if they knew of the malady, I can tell you. And the skalds would write a saga poking jest at me. ‘Geirolf the Tingling Shipbuilder,’ or some such.”

She did smile then, a full-blown smile that transformed her face and touched his heart. He closed his eyes and counted to ten. “Einn, tveir, þrír, fjórir, fimm, sex, sjo, átta, níu, tíu.” Upon regaining his composure, he went on. “As to your not having a sense of humor…I cannot credit that. You are funny to me. In fact, I cannot recall having smiled or laughed so much in all my born days as I have this past sennight with you.”

She squared her chin, unconvinced. The stubborn wench!

“You point out your less-than-exciting profession. Well, I know naught about that. When Jillian called you boring earlier—”

“My sister called me what?” Merry-Death squealed and tried once again to escape from his renewed clasp, no doubt to go attack her sleeping sister.

Her ferocity amused him mightily. “What I started to say was that, when Jillian called you boring, I told her she was blind.”