‘Shall we rest for a moment?’ Ragnar suggested, as they reached the other side of the square. Between them, her father moaned, shaking his head slowly from side to side. Blood, trickling from the gash on his forehead, flecked her bodice, pinpoints of red.
‘No,’ the girl managed to gasp out. The muscles along her spine ached with tension. Her father’s arm pressed heavily against her neck, dragging against her linen scarf. ‘I must take him back. His wound—’
‘The wound is not serious,’ Ragnar replied mildly. ‘And I doubt we will make it anywhere unless you rest now...’
‘Nay, I can manage,’ she protested, clearly annoyed by his judgement. ‘I’m stronger than I look!’
His emerald gaze flicked over her wan face, the purple patches of fatigue beneath her huge, limpid eyes. She was dressed like a nun, garments drab and muted. Her ill-fitting dress billowed out around her, blurring any outline of her figure. But he remembered what lay beneath. The slender curves that had jostled against him when he carried her from the mud and again when he had pulled her back from Eirik. The curve of her hip, a smooth sensual line. The rounded touch of her breast against his forearm. Delight stung him, a quick dart of sensual pleasure. His loins burned.
Surprised and irritated by the way his mind travelled, Ragnar twisted his mouth into a tight line. This woman had barrelled into his life with all the finesse of a spitting cat, yet, at the slightest contact, jolted his broad frame into shudders of desire. It made no sense. The girl had a temper; even now, the fierce rigidity of her expression appraised him with disdain. Despite her diminutive figure, her spine was straight, stiff and unyielding. Ready to do battle at any moment, like a Norse goddess of old.
‘Let your father rest then,’ Ragnar insisted, his voice gruff. ‘Even if you want to carry on, I think he needs to sit for a moment.’ Bending from the waist, he lowered the older man to a sitting position on a stone step outside a cottage. Forced to follow his movements, the woman allowed her father’s arm to slip from her shoulder. His head rolled back against the door, the sagging skin on his face a pallid grey colour. The deep lined pouches beneath his eyes were sunken.
Ragnar straightened up, looping his arms around in big, lazy circles, stretching his shoulder muscles, eyeing the girl with curiosity. ‘Most women would accept my help without question.’ His eyes drilled into her, green gimlets, flashing fire. ‘Why do you persist in arguing with me?’
* * *
Because you take away my strength, Gisela thought. She laced her arms across her chest, a guarded gesture. Around you, I feel vulnerable. She had always been able to fend for herself and her family. With her father and her sister, she had always been in charge, the one to make decisions, the person that they both leaned on and turned to in times of trouble.
‘Why?’ he prompted.
‘Oh, I don’t know!’ she replied testily. His glimmering gaze caught her, held her captive. ‘It could be any number of things: the way you keep hauling me about, your insufferable arrogance, or the fact that you’re a Dane!’ She planted her hands firmly on her hips, glaring at him, as if squaring up for a fight.
A wry grin lit up his face at her rudeness. ‘Or maybe,’ Ragnar said slowly, ‘it’s because I know your secret?’ He lifted his coppery eyebrows, thick and unruly. A question, left dangling in the air.
His low voice knocked into her, the slicing blade of a knife; she struggled to keep her features in a set, neutral position and not react to his words. What had happened, out there on the marshes, to give herself away? If only she could peel back the layers of fog that had engulfed her as the water swirled around her hips. She remembered being lifted high against his chest, carried, but nothing else. Tossing her head back, she fixed him with a wide-eyed sapphire stare. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Who are you then?’ Ragnar rapped out. He took a step forward, his leather-covered toes nudging hers beneath her mud-encrusted hem, his broad shoulders hulking over her, deliberately intimidating. ‘What is your name?’ He was being a bully, using his height and bulk to unnerve her.
Rearing back from him, Gisela felt her heels strike the cob wall behind her. ‘Why do you want to know so much?’ Her breath emerged in shallow truncated gasps. ‘Who I am should not matter to you!’
* * *
Aye, the maid was right. Whoever she was, and whatever she and her father were doing, was none of his concern. But ever since he had plucked her from the rising tide, he had felt a growing need to protect her, a duty of care in the face of her obvious vulnerability, despite her protests to the contrary. She seemed so alone, an outsider in this Saxon town, a foreigner speaking her oddly accented English, bereft of support or protection. Her bristling feistiness sparked his curiosity; her twilight eyes, breathtaking, kept him standing over her, rooting his feet to the spot. In a moment, he told himself, he would walk away, rejoin Eirik and his men. He should not be wasting his time on her, especially when he needed to concentrate on the other, more serious, matter of finding his sister’s abductor.
‘What matters,’ he said sternly, honing in on a plausible reason to stay for a little bit longer, ‘is that you attacked my commander and he will be asking questions about you. So you need to tell me something, maid, otherwise he is very likely to come after you in person. And he would not be as lenient as me.’ This was an outright lie, for Eirik would be well into his cups by now, having completely forgotten about the encounter with the maid and her father.
‘Why can’t you leave us alone?’ Lunging forward, the woman placed her palms flat against his chest, trying to shove him away in a futile effort to gain some space between them. Her delicate touch seared into him; his muscles quivered. The pit of his belly contracted, sending a ripple of delight down to a place that had lain dormant, barren, since his sister’s ordeal. Guilt had stifled his desire on that fateful day, choked the air out of all feeling. But this woman, with her quiet, understated beauty, ignited a devil within him, a devil that whispered in his ear, nudged at him and drove him on. The cool, logical part of his brain clamoured at him to stop, to hold himself in check. He ignored the warning. Self-restraint fled, chased away by the limpid blue of her huge eyes, the promise of her slim, curving body against his.
Ragnar leaned in, closing the gap between them, deliberately pressing his heavy thighs and chest against her. Her chin jerked up at the shocking contact: his taut, honed muscles against her slim thighs. Inches from his mouth, her lips shimmered, like the velvet petals of a rose, luscious and enticing. A sweet, plush curve that he longed to trace with his finger. And his mouth.
‘What are you doing?’ Her fingers clawed frantically at his tunic, digging into the fine red wool, trapped by the bulk of his body.
‘There are other ways to gain information.’ Ragnar trailed one lean forefinger across her cheek, savouring the satin of her skin. Awareness smouldered, a slow kindling fire engulfing his heart, his belly.
‘Nay! Not like this!’ she cried out. What did he intend to do? Throw her down on the cobbles and flick up her skirts, in full view of her father? ‘Go away!’ she said. But her voice was weak, lacked conviction.
Ragnar heard the faint surrender in her voice, the spark of compliance. His mind fell across it, seizing it like a wild animal. Wanting to take, consume, without thought or consideration. He dipped his head; a brindled lock of hair fell across his brow. Lust stirred his loins, a deep, visceral yearning. He gripped her shoulders like a starving man, lifting her up to him. A simple kiss, he told himself. Nothing more. Such a little thing to take, after all this time in the wilderness. His mouth slipped over hers, brushing her bottom lip. The softest touch. Blood pounded along his veins, gathering speed; his heart bumped faster, erratically. Her cheek brushed against his, the rose fragrance lifting from her skin, filling his nostrils. Beneath his questing lips, her mouth parted. Her fingers relaxed against him.
‘Gisela...?’ A wavering voice called up from the step. An old man’s voice. Her father.
Ragnar’s mouth broke from hers in a moment,