Chapter 3 #2
The tenderness in his voice was unmistakable. This was no casual lover. Whoever that woman was, she meant a lot to him. The heat in Gytha’s chest solidified into a ball of lead.
The woman walked away and a moment later Haakon appeared in front of the bench where Gytha was still waiting, fighting the unpleasant feelings warring inside her.
“Please come in,” he told her. “Unless you prefer to stay outside?”
As, despite the sun, it was not a particularly warm day, she refused the offer. Now that the flare of jealousy in her chest had vanished, she felt chilled.
“Do you want something to drink?”
For someone who had been caught with a lover exiting his hut, Haakon didn’t appear embarrassed in the least. But why should he be?
He could do what he liked with whomever he liked.
And she shouldn’t be interested, one way or the other.
They weren’t truly supposed to get married. She shouldn’t ask anything about—
“Was that your lover I saw?”
Gytha stared in horror when the question slipped out of her lips. But it was too late to take it back. Besides, now that it had been uttered, she might as well wait for the answer, because she was curious.
Haakon stared at her. “My lover?”
“Yes. The blonde woman who exited the hut.”
Who threw herself in your arms and thanked you for a wild night in your bed. Night that extended well into the morning, apparently.
Had they kissed after the declaration? Gytha was not sure, having averted her gaze to preserve her sanity.
“Why would you want to know who she was?”
“I don’t.”
“Except that you do. You just asked me.”
“I did and you haven’t answered. Are you ashamed to admit you know her?”
“I am never ashamed of the people I know.”
“Well, then.”
They stared at one another, neither prepared to back down, neither willing to admit that this was a ridiculous conversation.
Gytha had no idea why she had insisted. But in Haakon’s presence she became a different person.
Who that person was or why he had this effect on her, she wasn’t sure, but it was undeniable.
“Why are you here?” he eventually asked. “I don’t think you came to question me about my love life. But I could be mistaken. With you, everything seems possible.”
She ignored this last comment because he was right. It was better they focused on her reason for coming to the village rather than discuss who he bedded and when.
“My father couldn’t come so he sent me in his stead. He had something important to tell Wolf. But Wolf is not here so Merewen suggested I came to tell you.” If she had known who the Icelander’s friend was, she would never have accepted.
Haakon’s demeanor changed in the space of a heartbeat, forgetting the personal, petty squabble to give this information his whole attention. She understood then why her father had praised his character many times. With a man like this to help her, Matilda was sure to get her daughter back.
“Tell me all.”
Haakon had difficulty concentrating.
Though the information he was hearing was undeniably important, he could not believe who was delivering it. Gytha, of all people.
The woman he was supposedly betrothed to.
When he had seen her on his doorstep, looking even more stunning than in his memory, he had not been able to believe it. In the last week, he had reasoned that her eyes couldn’t be as bright as he remembered or her mouth as beguiling. But they were.
That and more.
Because all that didn’t even begin to compare to what she could do with those eyes and that mouth. Send thunder and lightning his way and kiss him with such passion that it left him breathless.
Yes, when he had seen the woman who could do all that on his doorstep, his heart had leaped at the same time as his cock. But it had quickly become clear that she hadn’t come for him. She had come to tell him that the little girl they had spent months trying to locate was gone.
It was a blow.
“I’m torn between relief and despair,” she was saying, looking at her hands. “I’m glad she managed to escape her tormentor obviously, but the problem is, now we don’t have the first idea where she could be. We are back to the beginning.”
He could only agree. On the one hand, the news that Osberga had escaped the man who’d bought her was reassuring, as it meant that she was no longer at the hands of a captor who could potentially hurt her.
But on the other hand, it didn’t mean that she was safe.
No longer a slave, she was still a girl of eleven summers alone in a dangerous world.
And they had no idea where she had gone.
She could be anywhere. She could also, though it did not bear thinking about, be dead in a ditch somewhere.
How would Matilda welcome this terrible setback?
“I will tell Wolf when he comes back tomorrow,” was all he said.
Gytha stood back up, agreeing with him that it was the best thing to do for now. “I guess I should leave now.”
“Yes.”
He had no reason to keep her any longer so he agreed. But he found that he didn’t really want her to go. Why? He had no idea. They had nothing to tell one another.
Except perhaps…
“I hope your friend’s father never found out she had lied to him?” Had either of them been hurt as a consequence?
“No, thank you for asking. And she’s come with me to the village today. She will now live with Halfdan. It’s for the best.”
Probably, if she was living with a father who was not above manhandling her.
Gytha walked out of the hut on shaky legs.
This had been a hard day. Between the shock of seeing that Wolf’s friend was none other than the man who had haunted her thoughts for more than a week, the disappointment of seeing him with a lover, the unpleasantness of their conversation, when she’d had to imagine a little girl at the hands of a cruel man, then at the mercy of ill-intentioned people, the reliving of the loss she had recently been through, and the knowledge that her father was having to face his angry brother-in-law when he was already crippled with grief, she felt utterly drained.
She turned to the door but Haakon stopped her with a hand at her elbow.
“Gytha, wait. I…I meant to tell you. We heard about your mother. I’m sorry. I cannot imagine what you must be going through.”
“No. My father is devastated,” she told him, fighting a sob. “Which is no surprise. It was such a shock. And he and my mother were very happy.”
She didn’t know anyone else whose parents were so in love, least of all Eadhild, who’d had to deal with a tyrant of a father all her life, and a mother who took out her misery on her at every turn.
When the sob finally escaped her lips. Haakon did a shocking thing. He drew her into his arms. It was not the embrace of a lover intent on seducing, or the hug of a friend intent on comforting, since he was neither. It was…something else. Just what she needed.
She melted into the solid chest offering the first moment of peace she’d had in days.
“My parents are a perfect match too, you know,” he said after a while, his voice rumbling against her ear.
It was a soothing sound and she wished he would hold her and keep talking forever, allowing her to forget the pain gnawing at her insides.
“My father is the goldsmith here, and also the only Saxon man living in the village. I have never seen him and my mother argue.”
Who would have thought this fierce Norseman would be the first person she had this in common with?
It had always made her feel inadequate at best, guilty at worst when her friends had complained about the atmosphere at home and wished they could have parents who actually got on with one another?
Her childhood had been so free of woe that she had often felt ostracised.
“I hope my parents die at the same time.”
The shocking statement shook Gytha out of the contentment she was drowning in. She stiffened then pushed herself away from him, her sense of peace shattered.
“What a horrible thing to say!”
She was truly horrified. How could he say something like that, worst of all to someone who had just lost their mother? How could he be so heartless, moments after offering wonderful comfort?
Haakon shook his head as if regretting his words.
“Forgive me, I didn’t mean it like that…
I don’t know what I was thinking. Only, my mother’s parents died in a cart accident long before I was born, when she was a young girl.
Their horse spooked, overturning the vehicle and them with it.
From what she tells us, they had been very much in love.
Though it was awful for their children to lose them both at the same time, at least it meant neither of them had to go through life without the other, like your father now has. ”
Oh. Guilt flashed through Gytha’s chest because now she saw that he hadn’t meant to be heartless.
Quite the opposite. He was saying that he’d rather take twice the amount of pain if it spared his mother or father some.
And she understood what he meant because she had thought the same thing.
Over the week, she had wished she could take some of her father’s pain away, even when her own world had collapsed.
As if the loss of her mother was not enough, she was now losing her best friend. Not losing, exactly, as Eadhild was only leaving to be with the man she loved, but it felt like that at the moment.
“I had better go,” she mumbled. She refused to cry in front of this man.
Haakon grabbed her by the wrist before she could move. The hold was tender, not restrictive. She felt it all the way to her bones and once again, it seemed to be exactly what she needed.
“Saxon, I truly am sorry.”
“Yes. I know.”