Hauk retreated and the redhead came forward. The door closed with him out in the hall. The redhead pretended to fan herself. ‘‘Is that yours? Oh, my, my…’’
Elli let a smile answer for her. She hooked her purse over her shoulder and went out to join her jailer.
Out in the parking lot, the attendant brought her car. She tipped him and got behind the wheel. Hauk hunched himself down into the passenger seat.
Elli drove—out of Old Sac, out of town, beyond the city lights.
More than once, she felt Hauk’s brooding gaze on her. She knew he was wondering where they were going. But he didn’t ask.
Which was just as well, since she didn’t know, anyway. She held the wheel and watched the road ahead and kept on driving.
They ended up on the river road, rolling through a string of sleepy little one-stoplight towns. When she was in her teens, she and her sisters and their friends—or sometimes she and one of those two boys she’d thought she loved so much—would come out here.
With a boyfriend, she’d end up parked by the levee, in the shadows of the cottonwood trees, kissing until her lips hurt, moaning and sighing and declaring undying love—all, of course, without going all the way.
Back then, Elli and her sisters would talk about sex all the time. They were young and they were curious about all the new and bewildering yearnings their bodies could feel. They had one girlfriend who’d gotten pregnant and had to leave school. And another who had tested positive for HIV.
Sex was so tempting. And yet they understood it could also be dangerous, that it had consequences, serious ones. They had formed a pact, the three of them. They called themselves the NATWC—the Never All the Way Club. Whenever one of them would go off to be alone with a boy, a sister was always somewhere nearby to raise a fist in the air and announce with pride, ‘‘NATWC!’’
It had worked. They all three remained full-fledged members of the NATWC—at least until college and then…
Well, even triplets, at some point, have to make their own decisions about love and sex and how far to go.
Elli made a turn, toward the river. She parked beneath a cottonwood and she got out and climbed the levee. Hauk, of course, got out, too. He followed in her wake, a shadow—always with her, never speaking.
The mosquitoes were still out. As usual, they found her delicious. She slapped at them now and then. Sometimes she got them—and sometimes not. The ground beneath her sandals was soft. The wild grasses, still moist and green in early May, brushed at her ankles as she climbed.
She reached the crest of the levee. It stretched out, a wide path, in either direction. Below, by the light of the fading last-quarter moon, the river looked dark and oily, flowing easily along. There were dangers, beneath the surface. Swirling currents. Undertows.
But from here, it looked so serene and slow. Hauk stood beside her. As usual, he made no sound. She couldn’t even hear him breathing.
She turned in the opposite direction and started walking. He came along behind her, but several yards back, as if he wanted to give her as much space, as much leeway, as he could and still follow the orders he’d been given by his king.
She stopped. Looked at her watch. Ten o’clock.
Hauk came up beside her. She sent him a sad smile. ‘‘I know. It’s not your fault. None of this. You can’t be who you are and behave any differently.’’
He said nothing. He stared out over the smooth-moving water.
‘‘Come on,’’ she said. ‘‘We’ll go back now.’’
When they got to her apartment, the princess wanted a bath. She asked nicely for an hour to herself in the bathroom.
Hauk wanted to shout No. He wanted to order her to come with him. Now. Out of here, to the airport, to the jet that awaited her.
But he’d demanded that they leave so many times already. She always refused. And then there was nothing more he could do. He had no rights here. He was to wait and to watch. And then tomorrow, if she continued to balk, he was to use force to see that she went where she’d agreed to go.
In answer to her request for time alone in the bath, he gave her a grunt and a shrug. He wasn’t talking to her, hadn’t for hours now. Talking to her only led to trouble.
She was too good with that mouth of hers. Whenever he let himself engage in discourse with her, she always got him thinking things he knew he shouldn’t let himself think. She would lure him close to doubting the wisdom of his own king, to questioning the way things were and had always been.
And beyond the dangerous questions she had him asking himself, there was that other problem, the one that kept getting worse: the way she roused him, as a man. Whenever she spoke, he would watch her full lips moving and wonder what else she could do with that soft mouth and that clever tongue.
She went into her bathroom and he turned for the guest bath. He emptied his bladder, washed his hands and cleaned his teeth. He returned to her bedroom and rolled out his bedding. And then he stood, waiting, all too aware of the scented moistness of the air, constantly turning his mind from the light beneath the bathroom door, from images of her, naked. Wet. That wheat-colored hair curling and damp from the steam that rose upward off the warm water…
By Odin’s one eye, he was doing it again.
He ordered his mind off the thought of her, naked.
He pondered the morning, when her time for stalling, for lingering here, would run out. Would she force him to bind her and gag her again, to toss her over his shoulder and carry her out of here as he’d started to do two days and a lifetime ago?
And the larger question: Would he do it if she did?
That he even asked himself that question spoke volumes about what was happening to him. Something had shifted—inside him. Something had changed. Something in his very self, in who he was.
He’d earned, over time, an inner contentment. Born from high stock, but a bastard, he’d been cast down. Both his mother and his father had past kings in their lineage. Had his mother agreed to marry his father, as a child of two old and powerful families, he would have been high jarl. Had his parents been married, he could now look at Princess Elli eye-to-eye. Even should her father have plans to marry her to another, Hauk would still be her equal, he could still court her. He would have a chance at her hand.
But though his mother succumbed to her passion for his father, she would not marry. She was kvina soldar: a woman warrior. If she married, she would have been forced to give up her warrior status. For a wife to be a warrior was not done. And, as a result, she condemned her son to start from less than nothing.
A warrior’s training was brutal. But Hauk had been born with his father’s size and his mother’s natural physical skill. He’d fought his way forward to the front of the pack. In recent years, he’d thought that he could see his future and that it was good. He’d believed he brought honor to his bastard name.
He had eight more years in the king’s service, and then, when his commission was up, there would be money enough. He’d ask a good woman, one only slightly above him—legitimate and jarl, but low jarl, from an unimportant family, a family only a generation or two up from freeman—to marry him.
And his sons and daughters would have a better start, a better chance than he’d had. Thus, the error of one generation found correction in the next. It had all seemed fitting. Right. Good.
Until now.
Until he’d been sent to kidnap the king’s daughter.
And ended up trailing after her wherever she went, looking into those deep-blue eyes, listening to that warm, musical voice. Sitting beside her in a darkened theater, across from her at her