Page 45 of The Blue Viking

Maire’s eyelids flew open.

He chuckled. “You do remember, don’t you?”

He couldn ’t possibly mean …

“I promised that every day I continued to bear your mark, you would bear mine … except mine would be the mark a man makes on a woman in the bed furs. Dost recall my words now, sweetling?”

He did.

“Methinks you do. I can tell by the stiffness of your spine. Here is a reminder anyway, just in case you are a mite dull in the head as most women are wont to be in the face of the superior male intellect.”

The man is a dunderhead, pure and simple.

“I told you that on rainy days, there would be more time to devote to your marking, and we might just spent day and night in bed because I have so much to teach you … so many ways to mark you.”

She shoved aside the hand caressing her breast, sat up, then jumped off the bed. With hands on hips, she glared at him in the dreary half-light. “I have had more than enough of your talk of sex markings and punishments and or-gaz-hims and bed fits and whatnot. If you intend to force me to couple with you, just do the deed and be done. Do not honey-coat it with all these other descriptions.”

He just stared at her, with eyes that she could now see were smoldering, like blue fire. He had changed his position on the bed and lay with his arms folded behind his neck on the pillow, his ankles crossed.

“Well, answer me,” she demanded, stamping her foot.

“Your nipples are hard,” he observed irrelevantly.

She gasped. “They are not.”

He arched a brow. “One of them is. Come here, and let me work the other one to equal arousal.”

“A-rous-al,” she sputtered out and spun on her feet so he could not see her breasts through the thin shift she wore.

“I can see your buttocks, Maire,” he informed her with a laugh. “Very nice, indeed.”

She spun back around, about to tell him what she thought of his perverted observations, but a flash of lightning cracked, fully illuminating the chamber, and Maire got her first good look at the Viking reclining in all his naked splendor. The man truly was the embodiment of male masculinity, with perfectly proportioned muscles in all the right places … right down to that… that… thing standing at attention betwixt his legs. He certainly had been telling no lies lately, as far as she could see.

She caught herself gaping and snapped her mouth shut. “Have you no shame?”

“Nay.”

“Cover yourself.”

“Why?”

“Because you look ridiculous, that’s why.”

“I do not,” he said, but there was a twinge of hurt in his voice. The foolish lout was ever sensitive about his appearance, Maire knew that, but this was carrying vanity too far. She noticed that he turned onto his side, as if to hide himself, because of her criticism. He didn’t droop, though, as some men might.

She turned away from him and tried to get her emotions under control. Maire couldn’t abide the overbearing rogue, but there was a part of him that touched her, too. That was the part she had to protect herself from. She had to.

“Maire,” Rurik said, “come here.”

“Why?” What a half-brained question that was! Really, it was debatable who was the idiot in this room … she or Rurik.

She thought then that he would tell her to come to him so that he could initiate her punishment, or put his male mark on her, or make her have bed fits. She thought he might smirk, or even laugh out loud at her. But when Maire turned back to the man in her bed, his gaze was stone-cold serious. And he said the worst possible thing to her, considering her vulnerable mood.

“Because,” he told her huskily, beckoning with the long fingers of one hand, “I want, with all my heart, to make love with you.”

Chapter Nine

Maire moaned.