Chapter 2 #2
“No. My friend Eirik, the one who makes the mead, did. This one was an experiment and, in truth, it is too delicate for me. I never use it, as I’m too afraid of breaking it.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“I know. I’ve seen how you handle delicate objects before. And based on what I saw, I would trust you with anything of mine.”
He winked. The impossible man actually winked at her and, to her utter mortification, Eahlswith did what he had no doubt meant for her to do. She stole a glance at his groin.
He was hard.
What was left of the ale was gone in two gulps and Eahlswith decided to treat herself to another drink. It would help with the furnace burning in her body, would it not?
It did not, because apparently she was in no state to attempt even the simplest of tasks.
She was flustered, and the cask was not full, as she’d imagined, but almost empty, and therefore lighter than she’d expected.
It happened in the blink of an eye. One moment she was reaching for the tap, the next the cask had toppled off the shelf where it stood, landing straight on her right foot.
Somehow, despite the explosion of pain, she managed not to shout.
But she did cry out when she saw the beautiful cup on the earthen floor, broken in two. In her distress she had dropped it.
“Oh, no, I’m so sorry,” she cried out, making to reach for the biggest half.
“Don’t worry about the cup,” Sven said, stopping her before she could bend down. “I told you I never used it. But your foot is—”
“I’ll be fine.”
Yes. Eventually. For now, though, it hurt something fierce.
“But you’re not fine now. Sit down.”
There was a stool to his right. He grabbed it and made her sit on it. Her foot was throbbing so severely that she didn’t protest. How stupid of her. She was not usually clumsy, but neither was she used to dealing with impossibly forbidding men who knew the taste of her most intimate parts.
“Let me see,” Sven said gently, kneeling in front of her.
See? Did he really think she would agree to have him lift her skirt, remove her stocking, take her naked foot into his hands and feel for an injury?
With any other man it would have been embarrassing, with him it would be…
impossible. Pain or no pain, having his fingers on her would make her want to feel his hand creep higher, until it reached—
“You don’t need to do that. I’ll go and see Cwenthryth,” she declared, squirming on the stool. “She will know what to do.”
For a moment it looked as if Sven would protest but then he nodded. “Yes, perhaps it is for the best if she deals with it. Come.”
He straightened back up and held out his hand to her. Assuming he wanted to help her get up off the stool, she refused to take it. “I can stand on my own, thank you,” she said, doing just that. “It is not a serious injury, nothing is broken, it’s just a bit painful, that’s all.”
“Yes, I know that, but you cannot walk all the way to Steinar’s hut so I’ll carry you.”
His hand was still extended, he was still waiting for her to take it.
He wanted to carry her. Eahlswith gulped and looked down at herself. She was a grown woman, taller than most, and with curves to match. She would be heavy. “You cannot carry me all the way there. I’m…too heavy.”
He didn’t even blink. Instead, he leaned in toward her. “And I’m no weakling, as you know. Or have you forgotten the way I held you up against the wall while I pounded into you?” he purred into her ear. “I don’t recall hearing any protests then.”
Of course she had not protested, she had been far too aroused for that, and it had felt too good. Still.
“It’s hardly the same,” she said weakly.
“Yes, unfortunately.”
Oh. Her legs suddenly felt too weak to support her, and she knew Sven was going to have to carry her. “I should be able to at least try to—”
“Alva. Make no mistake about it. I will carry you to Cwenthryth’s hut. Whether I do so over my shoulder because you fight me or in my arms because you agree it is for the best is up to you. So, which do you prefer?”
There would be no convincing him. And if she were honest, she was dying to be held against his chest. This was as good a reason as any. The other option was to allow him to kiss her and that, she definitely could not allow.
“In your arms.” That was the least mortifying option, not to mention the most comfortable.
He nodded, before sweeping her up carefully, making sure not to jolt her. “Good girl. I knew I could trust you to be sensible.”
His eyes bore into hers, and she noticed that the blue was slightly tinged with gold in the middle of the irises. That explained why they could seem more luminous when his pupils closed in the sunlight. How fascinating.
They were now within kissing distance, and she could tell they both wanted to kiss.
The difference was, she knew it would be wrong whereas he didn’t seem to care about the consequences.
Perhaps he didn’t, because he knew this was not serious.
But Eahlswith didn’t have that luxury. Unfortunately, for her, it could all too easily become serious.
“Please, I’m ready. Let’s go.”
“Eahlswith, what on earth happened? I thought you’d left the village. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
Sven entered the hut and walked straight past Cwenthryth. He deposited Eahlswith into a chair and took a few steps back. He would let her explain to her friend what had happened.
“A stupid accident.” She winced. Whether it was in pain or in mortification, Sven wasn’t sure.
Probably both. “I had already left, as you said,” she continued, “and I was in the forest on my way back home, when I thought I saw something glimmer under a rock. I picked it up to check but it was too heavy and I dropped it on my foot… Your friend, who had gone to collect wood, saw me and kindly brought me back to the village.”
She looked at him meaningfully, indicating that he should go along with this version of the story.
Apparently she didn’t want Cwenthryth to know she had been in his hut, or that they knew one another.
“Your friend” she’d called him, as if he didn’t have anything to do with her, as if she didn’t even know his name, as if she had not moaned it, screamed it time and time again while he made love to her in every position imaginable last summer.
All that told him she had not mentioned their night of passion to her friend but, of course, he’d guessed that already.
If Eahlswith had told Cwenthryth she’d slept with her husband’s brother, the Saxon would have said something in the five months since the encounter.
The two of them got on well. A special bond had been created between them when he had ensured her protection shortly after her meeting with Steinar.
And yet she had no idea that he knew intimately the woman who claimed to be her best friend.
“Thank you for bringing her back to me, Sven,” Cwenthryth told him. It was clear she was not suspicious in the least. But why should she be when Eahlswith was acting so coldly toward him? “If you could go get Helga so she can have a look at Eahlswith’s foot?”
Sven bunched his fingers into fists. He was being dismissed, when he wanted to stay and check that Eahlswith was all right. He was going to have to let someone see to her injury when he wanted to do it himself. He was having to be silent when his lips were burning with words straining to get out.
It was not a rock that fell on her foot. It was the cask of ale in my hut. Eahlswith was with me in my hut, where I fucked her for hours on end last summer and felt my life being irremediably changed in the process.
Of course, he couldn’t say any of that, not when it was both crude and felt impossibly intimate, not when Eahlswith was looking at him with big, imploring eyes. There was no mistaking the meaning behind that look. She didn’t want anyone to know about them.
“Yes, I’ll get Helga for you,” he said curtly.
“Thank you.”
He’d barely taken ten steps out of the hut when he walked into Steinar, who was heading back home, an axe swung over his shoulder. He, together with their friend, Elwyn, had gone to fell some trees in the back of their parents’ hut.
“Sven. Have you come to see Liv?” A smile bloomed on his lips at the mention of his newborn daughter.
“No. I just brought in a friend of your wife’s.” He, too, could pretend he had no idea who she was, he thought savagely. “A tall Saxon woman with black hair.”
That description felt sorely lacking. Because she also had maddening curves, a bewitching smile, amazing breasts, mysterious eyes and the most infuriating determination to keep him at arms’ length.
“Eahlswith?” Steinar wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “I thought she’d left earlier this afternoon?”
“She had.” But then he had stopped her, because he was damned if he was going to let her slip through his fingers a second time. “But she hurt her foot as she was leaving and cannot walk home. Cwenthryth is seeing to her as we speak.”
“Is she all right?”
His brother sounded unusually worried, as if he cared for her.
This made Sven wonder if Eahlswith was the friend who had helped Cwenthryth a few years ago, when she had lost her unborn child.
Steinar had told him the tale shortly after his wedding to the Saxon and it was a sordid one to say the least.
The poor babe had been fathered by a man who’d posed as her half-brother in order to take advantage of her and her ailing father. The ordeal had gone on for months, until Steinar had killed the bastard the day he had walked in on him assaulting the woman he had come to love.
Sven gritted his teeth. If only he had asked her name that night he had pounded into her, he might have realized that the woman he was looking for was none other than his sister-in-law’s best friend. Well, it mattered not. He had found her now.
“I’m sure she will be fine but let me go get Helga to be sure.”
Steinar nodded. “Thank you.”