Branded By Etain Page 4

  “Aye, my lord. More than well, much, much more.” She sighed and dared a tentative sketchy caressing of the grooves of his ribs.

  He captured her errant hand and kissed the middle of her palm. “Brand.”

  Shy all at once, her cheeks roasting, she murmured, “Brand.”

  “The pain has eased?” He threaded his fingers through her curls. The gentle caress made her want to purr with contentment.

  “’Twas momentary and now long forgotten.” A flash of worry and uncertainty made her blurt, “Did I please you, my lord?”

  “You sent me to Valhalla, wife. ’Tis our version of your Christian paradise,” he explained, lifted her, and his pecker withdrew with a loud, wet plop.

  She bit her lips to repress a squeal of protest.

  With infinite care, he eased her onto her back alongside him, and then rolled off the bed.

  Confused, Étaín followed his long legged strides to the washing basin on a table adjacent to the hearth. She shifted to see him better and something oozed from within her and trickled down her thighs. His seed. Margie had told her of this, that men spurted semen when they found their pleasure.

  She relaxed into the fine linen, thrilled at her achievement. She had his seed inside her.

  “What has you smiling so sweetly?” The straw dipped as he sat.

  Flustered, she averted her gaze. “I am pleased that I pleased you.”

  He nudged her legs apart, set a warmed cloth to her mound, and proceeded to clean and scrutinize every little crevice of her womanhood.

  Shocked at his actions, Étaín stilled and bit her tongue. Margie had not warned her that he would inspect her woman parts so closely his breath whispered over her engorged folds.

  “Your bleeding has stopped. ’Tis a good sign.” He toyed with her damp curls.

  Not knowing what was expected of her, and worried she had failed in some way, she blurted, “I know not my duties now. Do I cleanse you as well?”

  He flicked her chin and kissed her. “Mayhap after two moons have elapsed. Frown not, Étaín. You are new to the intimacies ’tween a woman and a man. Should you touch my tadger now, I would want to swive you again. You are too tender for another joining.”

  Tadger? Yet another word for a man’s shaft.

  Standing he made quick work of washing his tadger. ’Twas fascinating the way he rolled back the skin to reveal the enormous crown. Should not have the thing reduced in size? For he had spilled his seed. Étaín searched her memories. Nay Margie had not spoken of the after the breeching of her maidenhead. She needs visit Margie soon and ask the scores of questions jamming her mind.

  He slipped under the covers, pulled her to his side, and drew the furs over the two of them. Tipping her chin up, he asked, his stare direct and fixed, “Now, wife, let us speak a while. Why did you not inform your father that I am Norse? You knew so, since you took the time to learn our dialect.”

  Chapter Three

  Brand had deliberately left the oil lamp hanging from the rafter above the bed lit because he wanted to catch every nuance of Étaín’s expressions. His life and that of his family had been saved too oft by the flicker of an eyelid or a swift change in breathing to chance his plans coming undone because of his new wife.

  Étaín neither blinked, nor did her rhythmic breathing hitch.

  “I knew not ’twas Norse. ’Twas simply another dialect.” She did not avert her gaze from his.

  “No monk taught you our language.”

  Her lashes fluttered. She shook her head. “Nay. How know you this?”

  “It matters naught. Who was it?” What game did she play? Had he failed to notice some devious malice in her?

  She snagged her lip with a tooth. “’Tis difficult to explain. I am a truthsayer. When I awake from a truthsaying trance, my mind is filled with the words and speech of the person whose deceit or truth I test.”

  He digested not only her words but that she trusted him with such a revelation. No noble woman he had ever met showed her genuine emotions. Nay, they masked the schemes they wove with simpering smiles and coy, sidelong glances.

  “Why did you tell me ’twas a monk from whom you learned our tongue?” He abhorred falsehoods from any source, but none more so than from a female.

  “I have learned many languages from travelling monks. ’Twas not a lie.”

  “You quibble details. I would have an explanation in full. Now.”

  A wash of color stained her cheeks. “’Tis a lengthy tale and not one to be told in the great hall during The Choosing.”

  Her voice quaked, and she tugged at her throat with trembling fingers.

  The gesture awoke an urge to settle her nerves. He captured her hands and held them, rubbing a soothing caress over her jumping pulse. “Be at ease, Étaín. I am not angered, merely puzzled.”

  She slid him a quick peek. A brief smile chased away the worry lines between her brows and she relaxed, reassured by his bland expression.

  “When I was but seven summers, a Saracen trader visited with many warriors and ships. Da suspected he intended to invade, arranged a private conference with him, and commanded me as a truthsayer. I spoke Farsi after my trance and for some time did not recall my native tongue. Whispers of me being possessed by Satan coursed through the settlement. Some tried to harm me. ’Twas the reason my guards took me from the hall after I swooned. To protect me from any who would accuse me of witchcraft.”

  Confounded, Brand sifted through her declaration. He tested her in Farsi, “What did my brother tell me after I questioned you about knowing our dialect?”

  She answered with Nikolas’s exact wording in the same language.

  “I have displeased you, my lord?”

  The distress in her query stabbed at him. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears and her hand jerked in his hold. He brought each one in turn to his mouth and kissed the tips of her fingers.

  He had pushed the matter too far and was not responding to her as he should, a lover and an affectionate new husband. During their loving, her response to him had been naught but delightful and intoxicating. His pecker stiffened as he recalled her arching to meeting his thrusts.

  That she would prove even more passionate in time he did not doubt. By Odin, she was entrancing, even on the verge of tears. Unable to resist, he thumbed lips the hue of a garnet, and now plumped to pouting, evidence of their earlier fevered kissing. “Nay. You have been naught but pleasing to me, Étaín. I have ne’er met a truthsayer before and seek but to understand the whole of it.”

  A tremulous smile curved her lips. “Some are repulsed by truthsayers. Some say Satan has a hold o’er them.”

  ’Twas the preachings of the rabid monks obsessed by their Christian God, he was cert. In the last two winters, the priests he had encountered had become more and more virulent about this Satan.

  His sisters had converted to Christianity and he had not objected. But when they urged him to refute his Norse heritage, he made it plain that every man and woman was entitled to worship the deity of their choice.

  “I hold no such belief. Forsooth, in my eyes your truthsaying is a boon I had ne’er expected. Who has dared say such about you? About my wife?”

  She beamed at him and stroked his cheek. “Da banishes any who calls me she-devil. He is a most fierce protector. But I give you my thanks, my lord, for assuring me that you hold no disgust of me.”

  Brand choked back a growl. He was her protector now. She belonged to him. He wanted her relying on him, not any other man, not even her father. But he knew better than to voice such a notion. ’Twas time to remind his wife who was her master. He drew her hand to his erection. “Disgust? Nay, Étaín. Feel this.”

  Her eyes widened. She dropped her gaze, and her mouth opened. She peeped up at him from under fluttering lashes. “’Tis always full?”

  What delight he found in her unfettered, innocent curiosity.

  “’Twill remain so for this night. For you will be tender here for a time. Are you sor
e?” Brand cupped her mound, and the heat she radiated had his prick jerking to attention. Forsooth, she had given him the most memorable climax of his life this eve, and his cock had no right thickening, particularly since he could not take her so soon again.

  She blushed all over. “Mayhap. Nay. Aye. ’Tis tender there.”

  Guilt assaulted him. He had had every intention of wooing her gently and not taking his pleasure this eve, but her naive passion and vocal declaration of such had fractured his famed control. Her throaty moans and gasps of delight, her insistence on more, had scattered his warrior discipline.

  “I seek only to please you, my lord.”

  Unable to resist the sincerity in her eyes, he feathered kisses across her temples, the tip of her upturned nose, and the cleft in her chin.

  She sighed and tilted her head back.

  The invitation proved more tempting than any siren’s practiced posing. Clasping her cheeks, he licked the seam of her mouth, and she opened for him at once. He explored the sensuous heat of her, touched his tongue to hers, and retreated.

  When she pulled back and arched a brow, he coaxed, “What is good for the goose—”

  “—is good for the gander,” she retorted, and grinned at him. “You must close your eyes.”

  Happy to obey her command, he lowered his lids and waited.

  She was going to kill him.

  His stones drew up tight and hard on the first graze of her satin-soft lips to the side of his mouth. He took a deep breath in the hope of hanging onto his self-control, but the action rebounded because he inhaled the arousing aroma of their joining and her blossoming woman’s spice.

  When she touched her tongue to his lip and ventured a tentative caress inside, her honey drenched his fingers, and he growled his frustration.

  Immediately, she withdrew and pushed away from him. “’Twas wrong?”

  “Nay.” He forced his hand away from her quim, strangled the temptation to lick his fingers, and leaned his forehead on hers. “’Twas too right. You are tender. ’Tis not the time for loving. I will douse the lamps, and then we can speak and drowse. For there is much to do on the morrow.”

  Brand edged off the bed. He saw to the fire, adding more logs and prodding the base until flames whooshed up the flue. Then he pinched the lamp’s flickering wicks and joined Étaín under the bedcovers. He arranged her so she lay on her side with one leg draped over his thigh and tugged at the furs.

  After tucking the soft pelts around her shoulder, he blew out a long sigh and kissed the top of her head. Some flowery smell wafted from her hair when he threaded his hand through her curls. She relaxed into him and a whiff from her gentle breath tickled the hair on his chest. He snagged his arm on the curve of her waist and marveled at the feel of her skin, all pillow-soft and smooth.

  “My lord?” she whispered.

  He frowned, having liked the way she spoke his name, as if lingering over a sweet treat. “Brand, Étaín.”

  “Aye, my lor—Brand. Do we have much to do on the morrow?”

  Inform her father she had wed not only a Viking but a bespelled berserker, prepare for an invasion, and determine the source of his and Nikolas’s tingling necks. He stifled another sigh and replied, “Your father and I must speak of the marriage contracts.”

  “Oh.” She yawned making a tiny delicate sound like a kitten’s mew. “Aught else?”

  “My langskip is in the harbor, and I must see to unloading the cargo.” Brand fell silent, stared at the rafters, and mused about her father’s reactions. He hoped all would go well, but what needs be done would be, even if it meant capturing the castle by force.

  His petite, fairy-like bride emitted a snore worthy of a fat little piglet. He grinned and swept a glance over her face.

  She had fallen asleep like a babe, one instant awake, the next not.

  Though ’twas full dark, his beast vision allowed him to see her nostrils flaring and the sudden twitching of her lips.

  Was she all she seemed, his elusive truthsayer wife?

  The myriad years spent in the Danish courts living amidst constant deceit and scheming had taught Brand and his brothers to trust none.

  Memories of his first wife surfaced and left a bitter taste in his mouth. It had been a marriage of alliance, and she had come to him with another’s babe in her belly. Not that he knew it until the child was born and had the coloring of a Moorish King who had visited the courts the winter past. None had dared contest his declaration of divorce.

  Brand gritted his teeth. Nay. ’Twas not the time to dwell on his first wife’s savage revenge on him and his entire family.

  They had survived the banishment to the isle of Bärvik. That the fire-spewing mountains of the island had sparked some enchantment in them did not matter. The dreams that bedeviled them for three long seasons had showed, with the coming of spring, the path they all had to follow, the beasts of Bärvik.

  Once again, he examined his slumbering wife.

  Did such purity still exist in this wicked world?

  Tempted though he was to weave his way into her dreams, Brand did not do so. Time enough for that after he had secured his kingdom. He lay awake analyzing and planning until the first rays of dawn filled the cracks in the shutters.

  The bunched muscles in his neck relaxed when he surveyed his sleeping wife yet again. Not for a moment did he attempt to repress the smile of pure pleasure that tugged at his lips.

  In repose, Étaín resembled the angels he had heard the priests describe down to the ring they called a halo. Sunlight formed a circle above the wisps of her hair and deepened the peaches in her cheeks.

  He slipped off the bed and stood staring at her. Fisting his hands, he vowed not to let his heart soften to her. Any more than it already had since his first glimpse of her laughing and twirling and lifting her face to the sky.

  •●•

  “’Tis time to greet the day!”

  Cedilla’s booming greeting startled Étaín awake. Wincing when her nurse banged the shutters open, she knuckled the sleep from her eyes.

  Memories of Brand and his magnificent pecker surged. She scanned the room. Disappointment sank low in her belly when she glimpsed Cedilla tending to her trunk.

  Where was Brand? Had she dreamed all again?

  She levered onto her forearms. The sheets slipped away and she grabbed at the linen as an icy draft wafted across her bare shoulders. Slumping back onto the bed pillows, she shifted her legs, and all at once recalled Brand cleansing her woman parts.

  Surely, she had not dreamt such an unheard of thing?

  Cedilla lumbered to her side and thumped onto the mattress. “How fare you this morn, me lassie?”

  Étaín blurted, “It happened then? I wed Brand of Bärvik last eve?”

  Her nurse’s graying brows vaulted. “Aye. You remember naught?”

  “Nay. Aye. I recall the all of it.” And indeed she did, the images of their coupling tumbling a carnal waterfall in her mind. Embarrassed, she snatched a bed cushion and set the cool fabric to her burning cheeks. His scent infused the pillow. She breathed in his spicy maleness and hid a broad smile.

  “I have ordered a hot bath. ’Twill ease the pain from his breeching of your maidenhead. Was it bad?” Cedilla tucked a curl behind Étaín’s ear.

  She shook her head. “Nay. ’Twas but a sharp, momentary prick.”

  Prick, was that why men called their shaft a prick? Étaín grinned. She stretched her arms over her head, arched her back, and pointed her toes. A knock sounded on the door.

  “That will be the boys with the buckets and tub. Enter,” Cedilla called out.

  Étaín dragged the covers to her chin. She was only half-aware of the bustling activity in the room, too busy recollecting all the details of the night before.

  “Child, have you heard a word I’ve said?” Cedilla shook Étaín’s shoulder. “Make haste now. I must strip off the sheets and see to their hanging. You are to break your fast in your da’s chamber.”
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br />   “Da’s chamber? Why?”

  Étaín frowned, slipped off the mattress, skipped to the wooden tub, and hopped into the hot water. Steam rose from the rolling surface in long curls. She hummed with sheer hedonistic glee when the sloshing scented liquid covered her bare shoulders. Dried peachy petals bobbed a merry dance around the tub. Étaín flicked an errant flower from her collarbone.

  “Methinks he wants to judge how you fare this morn. He fair paced the ramparts last night. Dunk.”

  Étaín complied with her nurse’s order, broke through the surface, and wiped her dripping face. “Did Da and Brand speak?”

  It gave her a secret thrill to speak his name aloud and in front of another.

  “Aye. From the crack of dawn until not long past. I fear your step-cousin’s trying to cook mischief ’tween the two of them.”

  “What did you hear?”

  Cedilla had her ears attuned to every bit of gossip running through the settlement. Étaín oft believed the older woman knew what was going to happen before it did.

  “Sean the Sad says Lord Irvin objected to your choosing Brand of Bärvik. He says Lord Irvin tried to bribe Father Peter to refuse to wed the two of you.”

  By the time Étaín finished bathing and dressing, Cedilla had filled her in on all the events she had missed the night before because she had been too enthralled with Brand to pay attention to anyone or anything but him.

  “Think you Irvin really intended to press Da for my hand? We are cousins. ’Tis against the church’s dictates.”

  Étaín sifted through a small basket of ribbons, chose one the color of burnt umber, and gave it to Cedilla to weave through her single braid. She picked a woven leather braid that matched her gown and slipped the worn hide over her right hand, touching the scar on the underside of her wrist thrice, as was her habit.

  “Step-cousins. The church would have allowed it. I trust not the man, and that one wants killing. Howbeit, Lord Irvin and his men boarded their ships and left on the morning tide. We are well rid of him and his scum.”