Chapter 28
“You should have told me you were injured,” Katla scolded once they were back aboard the coracle and she discovered Brandr’s trouser leg was stiff with blood.
She settled the sleeping baby into the center of a coil of rope and tended to her husband’s wounds.
The short Scandinavian night ended, and the sun peeped over the mountaintops.
Brandr submitted to her nursing with grumbles and complaints, but she suspected he enjoyed the attention.
“I wouldn’t have made you catch that stray nanny so I could milk her if I’d known you were bleeding,” she said.
“Ja, you would, and we both know it,” he said with a laugh. “I didn’t mind. The last thing I want is to listen to a hungry babe crying all the way to Jondal.”
He hadn’t complained when she insisted they bring the baby with them.
He’d been concerned only about how she’d feed it.
Once they rounded up the goat, Katla was able to fill a skin with its milk.
Then she dipped her sleeve into the rich liquid and let Linnea suck the linen.
It was a slow process, but it seemed to work for now.
When the babe curled her tiny fingers around Katla’s, she thought her heart would burst with the tender sweetness of it. She decided then and there. Linnea was hers as surely as if she’d borne her inside her body for nine months.
Brandr had carried the baby down the steep goat track to the coracle. He actually seemed to like her a little.
Of course, Katla hadn’t told him she intended to keep the child yet. That was a talk best saved for smoother waters and a full night’s sleep.
“There,” she said as she tied off the bandage on his thigh.
He had such beautiful thighs; it was a great pity one would be marred with a slashing scar now.
She ran her hands up and down his legs, reveling in the light dusting of hair and corded muscle beneath his skin.
His tunic rose, and she knew his cock had come to life beneath it.
After all they’d been through during the night, his body still roused to her.
Men were so delightfully simple sometimes.
He pulled her down for a long, deep kiss. Desire stirred in her belly, but she tamped it down.
“I can’t,” she said as she broke off their kiss.
“I mean I want to…” Judging from the raging ache that leaped to life in her groin, she wanted to desperately.
Evidently her body was just as delightfully simple as his.
“But I’m filthy. Covered with soot and reeking.
And on a boat? How can you even think it? ”
Brandr laughed. “You’re alive and here, and I want you. You’d be surprised how little that part of me cares about such niceties as cleanliness or a steady foundation. But if you feel that strongly about it, then we should at least have a bath.”
“Where?”
“In the fjord, of course,” he said with a shrug as he stood to pull his tunic over his head, leaving him gloriously naked.
But she didn’t have long to admire him. He dove off the port bow, drenching Katla with spray. The water was so cold her throat closed off, and she gasped for breath. Brandr’s sleek head emerged from the dark blue water.
“Oof! I’d forgotten how cold this water is.
” He shook his head, and droplets scattered around him, sparkling like silver.
Then he windmilled his arms and cut across the surface back toward the coracle and climbed aboard.
The small craft dipped to one side, but he was quick enough that no water washed over the gunwale except the rivulets that streamed down his body and puddled along the bottom of the hull.
“With water that cold, that’s enough. Your turn,” he said with a grin as he settled back on the seat by the tiller to let the rising sun dry him. The quick dip had melted his erection, but he was still so beautiful to look upon, Katla’s eyes hurt.
“I can’t swim, remember? And I don’t much care for a salty bath.”
“The water’s brackish this far into the fjord. Enough fresh water pours in from rivers and streams to cut the seawater.”
Sure enough, no briny crystals clung to Brandr’s skin.
“I still can’t swim, but I think I could make do with a sponge bath,” Katla said cautiously. “Turn around.”
“Why?”
“It’s not like the laug at home,” she said. “I’ll be naked.”
“I’ve seen you naked,” he said, his body obviously warming to the idea again. “And not just in the bath house.”
“Not in broad daylight.”
“Katla, I’m your husband. Did you not promise to please me in our wedding vows?” He folded his arms across his chest. “It pleases me to look at you. All of you. Besides, if you dally much longer, there may be more ship traffic, and I won’t be the only one who gets a peek.”
He leaned back and stretched out his long legs, clearly enjoying the sun’s kiss on his skin. His clean skin.
Katla couldn’t bear the smoky reek of her underdress for another heartbeat. She wiggled out of it and leaned over the side of the boat to dunk her long hair into the water.
***
Brandr’s breath hissed over his teeth.
There was his wife, bare arse to the sky, breasts falling forward. She grasped the gunwale with one hand and rinsed her hair out with the other, setting the boat rocking. He was treated to quick peeks of her pink slit that appeared and disappeared as the angle of the deck changed.
Either she had no idea how erotically alluring that position was, or she was trying to kill him.
Then she washed off her sooty face and rose up, tossing her head, her long hair slapping her back wetly. “Oh, that’s cold!”
Nipples perked, gooseflesh rippling, she settled on the trunk. Muscles shivered under her smooth skin.
Brandr dipped a leather bucket into the waves and set it down by her feet. “Mayhap that’ll be easier than leaning over the side.”
It’d be easier on him. He was trying control himself after the horrific things she’d been through in the night.
It wasn’t every day a woman who was so used to being in control was abducted and powerless.
But when she presented herself to him like that, glistening and vulnerable, it was all he could do not to grasp her hips and rut her blind.
After the night she’s had, the last thing she needs is a hard swive.
Her gaze darted sharply to him, pinning him with a direct stare. Then she reached down and dipped a square of clean cloth that was left over from his bandage and began rubbing her skin with it, starting with an upraised arm. Water trickled down in rivulets, past her armpit and down her side.
When Katla swirled the cloth around each breast, he stifled a groan. He longed to lick the droplets of water from her pert nipples.
She washed her belly and down her legs to her curled toes. Then she spread her knees, parted her intimate folds and squeezed the cloth so water ran down her inner thighs.
He gritted his teeth so hard, he half expected one to crack.
Every fiber of his being longed to take her, to mount her like a ram mounts a ewe, to drive into her with abandon, his balls slapping against her thighs.
“Has it ever occurred to you, husband,” she said with a feline smile, “that sometimes a good, hard swive is exactly what a woman needs?”
She stood up and gave him her back. Then she bent over and splayed her hands on the deck.
A growl escaped his throat, because no coherent words would form in his mind. He was on her in a heartbeat, grasping her hips and sliding his full length home.
His whole world went suddenly warm and deliciously wet. Her tight inner walls snugged around him. She was more than ready. She wanted this with the same ferocity he did.
There was no finesse. No lover’s skill on display. He gave himself up to the animal joy of rutting.
Rough. Fast. Deep.
They fell into rhythm with the steady rocking of the coracle, one with the cadence of the waves.
Then just when he thought it couldn’t be better, he heard Katla urging him on in panting tones.
“Harder.”
Odin on Yggdrasil, I love you, woman.
***
He loves me.
More intimate than his cock penetrating deep inside her, Brandr’s words curled around her mind. The sound reverberated to her core. His voice caressed her soul.
It must be inn matki munr.
The link was potent but one-sided. He still couldn’t seem to hear her. She’d tried to send him any number of intimate messages, but he gave no sign he received them.
Surely that couldn’t be right.
But Katla had no more time to puzzle over the mystery. Her senses were so crowded by Brandr’s fierce strokes, she couldn’t think. She could only feel.
She didn’t need gentleness. She needed him hard and demanding. It was a reminder she was still alive and her body was still hers, and only her husband had a right to it.
He exercised his rights with such mastery, filling her, pushing so deep, she’d never feel empty again. She strained back against him to engulf him even more deeply.
Then he reached around and cupped her mound, stroking her aching place while he took and took and took.
She unraveled under him, her legs going rubbery.
He lowered her to her knees on the curved hull, never breaking their connection, while her insides rioted around his hard shaft.
When she stopped convulsing, he pushed into her once more, a long, slow thrust. She felt him pulse inside her, his seed spurting hot and deep.
Her breath came in short gasps. When he finished, she seemed to melt, go boneless. He rose and gathered her in his arms. Then he carried her to the waiting hudfat and tucked her in.
“If you were any sweeter, I’d die of wanting you,” he whispered before he kissed her cheek. Then he opened his trunk and pulled out a fresh pair of trousers and tunic.
“Aren’t you going to sleep too?”
He cast a glance at the sun creeping higher in the sky. “No, if we sail now, we’ll reach Jondal by tonight, and after last night, I’d rather take my ease in my own bed. A man sleeps better behind a stout door, knowing his friends are nearby.”
Katla started to rise from the makeshift pallet. “Then I’ll stay up too.”
“No, rest you now,” Brandr said as he adjusted a bit of one of the cloaks to serve as shade for the sleeping baby. “I don’t know much about bairns, but I do know when they sleep, you should too.”
Katla lay back down, closing her eyes and listening to Brandr slip the mooring line and haul up the anchor stone. She was aware of the moment of quickening when the coracle’s sail billowed with wind and the craft lifted in the water, surging on the waves.
Her senses were pricked to hear his voice in her mind again, but the deep timbre never came. Obviously she couldn’t hear him think whenever she wished. And just as obviously, he wasn’t sending his thoughts to her consciously.
Why could she hear him only sometimes? And more importantly, why did he never hear her?
***
Brandr ran a hand over his face, trying to wipe off the tiredness. He glanced at Katla’s still form, wishing he could lie down beside her and follow her into the land of walking shadows.
But it was more important to get her and the babe she’d somehow acquired to safety.
Of course, if his brother, Arn, had lost control of his chieftains, Jondal would be in turmoil. His service in the Imperial Palace had taught him that infighting between rival factions could be fiercer than single combat with a total stranger.
The jarlhof in Jondal would offer no safe haven if the Iron Crown didn’t rest steadily on his brother’s brow.