Sandra Hill - [Vikings I 05] (20 page)

Hearing a soft sob, he unshuttered his eyes … and saw that Maire was weeping silently.

Nay!
he rebelled silently.
Nay, nay, nay! Do not reject me now. ’Tis unfair. I think I am going to die
.

He did not die. Nor did he withdraw. In truth, he was not certain that he could withdraw, so huge was his “Lance.” But he did ask, “What is it, sweetling? Am I hurting you?”

She shook her head, though her beautiful green eyes continued to well with crystal-like tears that spilled over and ran down her cheeks.

“What ails you then? Do you … do you want me to stop?” Holy Thor! He could not believe he’d asked her
that
. In no way did he want to give her an opportunity
to stop such exquisite bed sport. She shook her head again.

Praise the gods!
“What is it then?” he questioned, leaning down to kiss her gently on lips that were moist and parted… from crying. Not to mention swollen … from his recent kisses. Rurik was still embedded only halfway inside the wench, and he was amazed at his calm in inquiring about her distress when what he wanted to do was tup till his brains fell out.

“You,” she answered.

“Me?”
Damn. Damn, damn! What have I done now? Did I unarouse her with some coarse gesture? Or did I say something perverted that frightened her off? Did I—oh, I hope I didn’t—mention tupping my brains out?

“You are so beautiful,” she explained.

Ah! So, I’m not as uncouth as I feared
.

“… and this thing you do to me … this feeling I get when you couple with me”—she shrugged, unable to come up with the precise words she searched for—“I did not know lovemaking could feel so … so glorious.”

Glorious? Aha, she likes me… she likes me… well, leastways, she likes how I look… and how I make her feel
. That was all Rurik needed to hear. With a roar of masculine exultation, he plunged himself in to the hilt. Pausing briefly to adjust himself from side to side, which caused her inner muscles to shift in accommodation and his erection to elongate, he whispered carnal words against her ear, recognizing that some women liked wicked words in the bedplay.
“Your woman folds feel like hot fingers on my sex.”

“Your manpart is like soft marble. And it pulses, betimes,” she replied.

Some men liked wicked words in the bedplay, too, Rurik had to admit. He was one of them.
Joy, joy, joy!

“Do you like it… not my cock… I mean, the way it moves … bloody hell, I did not mean to sound so crude,” Rurik said with a groan. Blessed Freyja, he was stuttering about like a bumbling lackbrain of no experience.

She smiled softly. “Aye, I do.”

Rurik felt himself lurch inside her at that admission … one she would perchance hate herself for later; it was exactly what Rurik’s male ego wanted to hear.

He began his long strokes then, trying his best to keep them slow, dragging against her delicious friction, but it was not easy, especially when she went wide-eyed with wonder and asked, “Am I going to have another sex fit?”

He laughed, or attempted to, but it came out as sort of a gurgle. “I hope so.”

She nodded, which was astonishing, really … that she could nod and ask him seemingly casual questions whilst his heart was thundering and his blood nigh steaming. “Will you be having a sex fit, too?”

Questions, questions, questions!
he thought. But what he said was, “Most definitely.”

He was silent then, and she was, too, as he initiated the serious, pounding rhythm that came instinctively to the male body. Soon Maire caught the idea and
raised her buttocks up off the mattress, undulating in counterpoint to his driving strokes. Logical thought was beyond him now. With other women, he might have pondered which was the best method for achieving this or that passion-goal. But not with Maire. Rurik was out of control, lost in a white-hot arousal, and—
Thank you, Odin!
—Maire appeared to be the same.

When Maire began to keen with heightening stimulation, he moaned his own excitement. Soon she was spasming around him… a sensation so pleasurable it approached pain … and Rurik withdrew, at the last moment, to spill his seed into her woman hair. As much as Rurik yearned to come inside her body, he had promised her no pregnancy. Even so, he reached the height of ecstasy, and sagged down atop her body.

Both sated, they breathed heavily into each other’s necks, trying to return to calm and sanity … though Rurik was not sure he could ever achieve either again.

She took him by both ears then and raised his head to scrutinize him intently.

“What? What are you looking at?”

Her lips seemed to twitch with some mirth. “I’m just verifying whether your eyes are rolling back in their sockets.”

He laughed and took a playful nip at her shoulder before he moved off her and the mattress to stand next to the bed. “They were, for a certainty,” he informed her. “And I would wager I engaged in fitlike tremors, too.” Then, he ordered, “Stay here.”

He went behind a screen in the corner where he washed himself. While there, he checked the mirror to see if his blue mark was still there. It was. He smiled, guessing he would have to endure more lovemaking
with Maire. Still smiling, he brought a pottery bowl of water and a soft cloth back to the bed, where he proceeded to wash her female parts.

He would have thought that Maire might have protested that intimate act, or that she might try to cover herself in modesty, as some women did, now that the lovemaking had ended, but, nay, she reclined back on the pillows, legs slightly spread, and allowed him to tend to her. The wench continually surprised him.

But it might be a good idea if he changed the subject for a bit in order to give his body a chance to renew itself. Glancing about the room, he noticed once again the unfinished tapestry on the wooden frame in the corner. Even in the dismal half-light caused by the rainy weather, the picture was exquisite. Rurik would never claim to be an expert on art, but he knew talent when he saw it. It was not just the brilliant colors, but the different textures of thread and patterns of sewing that gave a dimensional aspect to the scene, which included a man and a woman, seen from the back, holding hands as they watched a young boy playing in the shallow waters at the edge of a loch. The figure of the man was incomplete, as were the white clouds skimming the blue sky, the shredded threads of lavender-hued heather, a red deer peeking out of the forest in the distance.

Something about the scene pulled at Rurik’s heart in a way he could not explain. Not just its beauty. Nay, it was the image it portrayed of a family … the kind of family Rurik had dreamed of as a child. A fantasy, really. That’s what it was.

“What are you staring at so intently?” Maire inquired, putting a hand on his forearm.

He jerked his head back to look at her. She still reclined on the bed, but she’d drawn the bed linen up and over her breasts in modesty.

“The tapestry,” he answered. “Who did it? Your mother?” Someone had told him that the large dusty tapestries in the great hall, which had been taken down the day before to be cleaned, were done years ago by her mother and grandmother. That would explain why this tapestry was unfinished.

Maire laughed softly. “Nay. My mother has been dead for more than twenty years. I did the needlework … or rather started it and never got around to completing the design.”

Rurik wasn’t sure why, but he was shocked. “You?”

“Why are you so incredulous?” He shrugged with uncertainty. “It’s so beautiful.”

“And that shocks you? Methinks I should be insulted.”

“It’s just that… I don’t know … well, why would anyone who could create such beauty do aught else? I mean, why practice inept witchly arts? Or work manually about your keep till your hands turn red and raw? Or waste all the years of your youth trying to hold a hopeless clan together?”

Maire bristled at his assessment of her life.

He rushed to explain himself. “You could become famous for your needlework, Maire. I know kings who would pay you great treasures to create such beauty for them.” He paused, then added, “Why did you never finish it?”

“There is ne’er enough time. Other concerns always
interfere.” It did not seem to matter all that much to her.

He harrumphed with disbelief that anything could be more significant than her talent.

She shook her head sadly at him as if he just did not understand.

He didn’t.

“Rurik, there are more important things in life than beauty.”

“There are?” His question sounded dimwitted, even to his own ears.

She nodded. “Like honor. And family. And giving of oneself for a greater good.”

Rurik did not disagree that those were important values. But this tapestry gave Rurik a new view of Maire that he would like to contemplate more. Later, though. Not now.

Tugging the sheet down to expose her breasts, he told her with a waggle of his eyebrows, “I have talents, too.”

Her somber mood lightened immediately.
“That
was ne’er in doubt. Although, I will tell you this, Viking, if your lovemaking had been like this the first time we came together, I would no doubt have trailed after you across the oceans, no matter your desires.”

Still sitting beside her on the bed, he glanced up at her through his lashes, without raising his head.

“Oh, do not look so alarmed,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t intend to chase after you now.”

“I was not alarmed,” he protested.

“Aye, you were.” She laughed some more.

“What’s so different now?” he asked, crawling back into the bed and taking her into his arms.

“Now, I am responsible for a child, and a clan. But you
are
a tempting morsel.”

Rurik was not sure he liked her speaking thus to him. ’Twas the man’s role to tease in the afterglow of love. She was too candid and uninhibited by half.

Nay, he immediately amended to himself with a smile. Her lack of inhibitions was priceless, and to be encouraged, not discouraged.

“You know, Rurik …”

What was it about women… that they felt the need to prattle on after lovemaking? What was wrong with silence … or sleep? “What?”

“… that really wasn’t any punishment.”

“Explain yourself, wench,” he grumbled, pulling her even tighter against his side, with her face resting on his chest. If she was going to chatter endlessly, he was going to be comfortable.

Twirling his chest hairs about one finger, she remarked, “You have been implying that you would take me to your bed furs as a punishment. But, in truth, it was more like a reward.”

Rurik felt both elated and disgruntled by her observation. So he jabbed back, “Ah, but now you bear my man mark, and I swear, by the time this day is over, my mark on you will be indelible.”

She seemed to consider his words for a long time, still playing with his chest hairs and throwing one knee over his thigh. It rubbed up and down, and up and down, and up and down. Finally, she peered up and fluttered her thick lashes at him, coyly. “Dost think you could start now?”

Rurik almost bit his own tongue.

Of course he could. Definitely. But ’twas best not
to give too much to women in the bedsport lest they think they held the upper hand. So, he said with false indifference, “Perchance.”

He saw immediately that he’d miscalculated with Maire. Disappointment shone on her face at his less-than-enthusiastic response, but, even worse, she was proceeding to sit up and get off the bed. “Oh, well, never mind,” she said with as much lack of enthusiasm as he had just demonstrated. How dare she! “Mayhap I will go find Nessa and we can put up some honeycombs in pottery containers for the winter months. What else is there to do since the weather is so poor outdoors?”

“Hah!” he exclaimed, immediately regrouping as only a good soldier could. “Nay, nay, nay! You are not escaping my clutches so easily, you slippery wench, you. There will be honey made at
Beinne Breagha
today, I warrant, but not of the bee variety … more like the sex-honey variety. And as to what else there is to do, I daresay I have a few ideas.”

She paused.

Quickly, he grabbed her by the waist and hauled her back. She landed atop him, thanks to his deft handling. Her hair billowed forward, shrouding her face, and landing in his open mouth. He spat out a few strands, then informed her, “I was only jesting when I said that
perchance
we could resume making love again. What I meant was that we
definitely
would.”

She brushed her hair back off her face and behind her ears. Then she raised her head to look at him. To his astonishment, she was smiling. In fact, by the shaking of her body, he would guess that she was barely suppressing outright laughter.

“I knew that,” she told him with a saucy grin.

Then, of all things, the witch winked at him. And it became clear as the skies over Oslofjord that she did, indeed, have the upper hand.

Now what?

Maire was new at this game of bold wanton. She’d just made some outrageously suggestive remarks, but now she was unsure how to follow through.

He stared up at her with those compelling blue eyes of his, waiting for her next move. She had no clue what it would be. Yet.

“Come, Maire,” he urged. “What additional things would you like me to do to put my mark on you? Do not go tongue-dead on me.”

“I’m thinking,” she snapped, not the best way to respond, she supposed, when sprawled atop a naked Northman. But
tongue-dead?
She should just clobber him over his smirking face with the pottery bowl that still sat on a low chest next to the bed. However, the man had uses.
Aye, that’s it. I want to use the lecherous lout for my purposes, but how?

Oh, Rurik was still the same insufferable Viking, but making love with him had been a joyous event, and Maire had experienced little enough joy in her life these past few years. Was it so wrong to gather more while she could?

In truth, the man had surprised the spit out of her with his superb lovemaking skills. Who knew such an earthy exercise could be so …? She couldn’t settle on exactly the right word.