Page 47 of The Reluctant Viking

Oh, great! He was back on the outside-ejaculation business again. “It’s just as strange to me. Believe me, everything I’ve said and done since I’ve come to this blasted land has been out of character.”

“Did you practice birth control with your husband?” Thork studied her intently.

Ruby felt herself blush once again.

His right eyebrow lifted slightly. “Do you find my question too personal? How odd! After all you have asked me! Especially since you say I am your husband—of sorts.”

“Yes, we did,” Ruby admitted candidly.

“Why? Did you only want two children?” Thork persisted. Meanwhile, his clear blue eyes raked her sensuously.

“No. We always intended to have more, but it never seemed to be the right time,” Ruby answered nervously, hardly able to think when his eyes caressed her so openly.

“The right time? How curious!”

Ruby plopped down on the chair near the bed. She peered at him curiously. Actually, she couldn’t keep her eyes off him. “Are you still angry with me?” she asked, trying to maintain some semblance of dignity when what she really wanted to do was, as Jack would say, “jump his bones.”

“Yea, but not because of what you told those stupid women. Your actions disrupt my life, and I cannot allow that to continue.” Propping himself on his elbows, Thork turned serious. “Ruby, my life is set. There is no place in it for you, leastways not the place you would accept. I am a Jomsviking. Ever I intend to be. Can you not accept that I will never marry? That my sons must stay with Olaf and Gyda?”

Ruby knew that Thork was trying to be honest with her, not cruel, but tears welled in her eyes nonetheless. Sensing her dismay, Thork went on softly, “Honor demands I leave here as soon as possible, and you keep throwing stones in my path. Still…”

Ruby waited but he remained silent, his eyes deep pools of blue heat reaching out to her. Finally she could contain her curiosity no longer. “Still what?”

In one deft motion, so quick she had no time to react, Thork reached over, grabbed her by her waist and had her on her back under him on the groaning pallet. He adjusted his body on top of hers, and Ruby knew gloriously, without a doubt, what his “Still…” had meant.

“Thork, don’t,” she whispered, but, at the same time, her traitorous body betrayed her by shifting seductively under him. Her eyes froze on his sensuously parted lips, basked in the smoldering heat of his gaze.

“Shush,” he rasped in a husky whisper. “Don’t talk. Just lie still and…feel.” Thork’s wildly beating heart telegraphed erotic messages to her. Without moving, like a master puppeteer, he used just the pressure of his body to pull her sensuous strings to a vibrating pitch.

Thork’s lips brushed her eyes shut and swept like a whisper across her cheek, to the edge of her lips, then teasingly away toward her ear. The wet tip of his tongue traced its narrow whorls, then delved inside. In and out it plunged until Ruby arched against him, unable to stand the intense pleasure he had set throbbing in her center.

“A-a-ah!” Ruby inhaled sharply, arching her neck, and Thork countered with a husky moan deep in his throat.

“Kiss me, Thork. Please…,” Ruby begged. Then, “Oh!” as his warm lips brushed hers, back and forth, back and forth, like a butterfly’s wings, teasing the petals of her lips open, then tasting her nectar. “Sweet, sweet,” he rasped out against the softness, then kissed her hungrily, demanding more and more as he shaped and reshaped her lips. Softly persuasive, then fiercely devouring, he pressed, sucked, nipped, devoured until Ruby accepted his plundering tongue. “That’s it, dearling. Oh, yes, open for me,” Thork murmured silkily, filling her mouth, and slowly, seductively, set a cadence with his smooth, wet strokes, a fierce counterpoint to the movement of his lower body against her sensitized womanhood.

But Tyra’s loud shriek somewhere in the house recalled them both from their mindless passion. Thork groaned his frustration against her neck. Willing their breathing and aroused bodies back to normal, they lay still. Finally Thork pulled back slightly. Desire illuminated his eyes, and his warm breath fluttered against her lips.

“Still…,” he whispered hoarsely, “…still I am tempted to take the risk of making love to you, knowing I would be doomed to your siren’s spell.”

Ruby’s body hummed at his words as he buried his face in her hair. She pondered his softly spoken words while her breathing stabilized. She, too, would take the risk—if given the chance. Ruby was about to pull his face up to tell him just that, but she was appalled to discover that his body shook—not with spasms of hot passion, but laughter.

Laughter! The jerk was laughing at her!

Ruby gave a mighty shove and Thork rolled off her. He laughed aloud by now as he sat up on the bed, trying to tell her what was so funny but unable to get the words past his mirth. Finally, when he’d laughed himself out, while she fumed, he told her disjointedly, stopping every few words to chuckle infuriatingly, “You should have seen the look on Olaf and Dar’s faces when Sigtrygg told me why I had been summoned back—not because you had been doing that silly running thing again or sewing up frivolous garments, but teaching his woman how to prevent the bearing of his child.”

Then a hearty laugh rippled up out of his throat, and Ruby poked him in the ribs with an elbow, threatening, “If you don’t stop, I’m going to dump that pitcher of water on you.”

That sobered him a bit but not for long. “The funniest part was when he told us about the…the orgasms, I think he called them, and Dar asked him to explain what they were. And then…and then”—he went off on another fit of laughter—“Sigtrygg said something about multiple orgasms. I thought Olaf would have a fit on the spot. I think Dar swallowed his tongue.”

“Oh, no!” Ruby groaned. She hid her face in her hands. Could a person die of humiliation? She wished she could drop through a hole in the ground and disappear. To think that everyone, including Thork, had heard all those outrageous things she’d said.

Thork finally wiped his eyes and stood, preparing to leave. He reached down to her on the bed and ran a forefinger gently, regretfully along her lips. Then steeling himself back to his former cool composure, he told her of the time they would leave in the morning and warned her once again that, despite his lapse of laughter, she walked thin ice and must behave.

Stopping in the doorway, he gazed at her fondly, as if memorizing her features, but then he spoiled it all by getting in one last parting shot. “Fair warning, maid, I may decide afore these three sennights pass to discover for myself just how many of those multiple things you can have.”

Ruby threw a cake of soap at him, but he ducked and it flew out the door into the hall. She heard the echo of his laughter long after he walked down the steps and out of the house.

Chapter Nine