Rescued By The Viking

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* * *

Ragnar laughed. For such a little thing, the maid showed astonishing courage. Either that or complete stupidity, he hadn’t decided yet. As he and Eirik had approached earlier, she had been completely surrounded by his fellow men, those big lumps of masculinity who towered above her. And yet she had seemed completely in control, swishing that small blade around as if she would tackle each and every one of them in hand-to-hand combat.

Was she even afraid of him? Of what he might do? Eirik had asked him to punish her. Not a trace of fear showed in her face. Her skin glowed, fine marble in shadowy light; a delicate rose colour flushed her cheeks. The sapphire sparkle of her magnificent eyes dominated her face, flashing with defiance. Her whole frame bristled with undisguised hostility; he should have been annoyed, but strangely, he found himself drawn to her shrewish, belligerent manner. He liked it. The majority of women he met, and that was not many, to be fair, seemed pathetic and feeble, pale ghosts compared to this firebrand.

He brought his hand up, deliberately cupping her cheek, knowing such a gesture would rile her. ‘Did we spoil your little game, maid?’ His thumb rubbed across the satin pelt of her skin, a cursory touch; she flinched at the contact, jerking her head away.

‘Game?’ she flared at him, jerking her head at her father’s defeated posture. Her red shawl looked incongruous around his shoulders, the one bright spot of his drab attire. ‘That is my father sitting there! Attacked and left for dead, his money stolen...by them...’ She jabbed a finger in the direction that Eirik had taken his men. ‘I wanted them to give it back.’

‘So you thought that pushing a knife into the King of Denmark’s son would be the solution?’ Ragnar stuck his hand through his hair, no doubt leaving the vigorous blond strands sticking upwards, haphazard. His gaze narrowed. ‘What on earth possessed you to do such a thing?’

‘You mean that dark-haired oaf is a prince?’ she replied scathingly.

‘Aye, maid,’ he confirmed, his mouth twitching with amusement, ‘that dark-haired oaf, as you like to call him, is the heir to the whole of Denmark. So you had better watch your step.’

‘But the money—’

‘Hell’s teeth, woman, are you completely stupid? Leave it alone. Go home and shut the door and try not to go around threatening to stick knives into people. Do you understand? No wonder your poor father has his head in his hands, with a daughter like you! First the mud and now this!’

Gisela glared at him, her mouth compressed into a wilful line.

Ragnar shook his head at her, a boyish grin pinned to his face. ‘And don’t you look at me like that, maid. You can hate me as much as you like, but you know I speak the truth. Go home. You might be foolhardy, but you’re certainly not stupid.’ He brought the harsh contours of his face closer to hers. ‘And your use of the Saxon language seems to have improved since I saw you last.’

* * *

Shock flooded through her, a chill shudder of foreboding. How could she have forgotten? Somehow she had given herself away out on the salt marsh. Ragnar had spoken to her in French, but she hadn’t responded. He hadn’t guessed her true identity, had he? For, as far as she could remember, she hadn’t uttered a word of her mother tongue in his presence.

Down on the ground, her father was trying to scrabble to his feet. To her surprise, the Dane leaned down, grabbing his upper arm to help him up. Gisela leapt to his other side, and together they brought the older man on to his feet.

‘Which way?’ Ragnar said companionably as he laced her father’s arm around the back of his neck.

Gisela, her arm supporting her father’s waist on the other side, peered around to Ragnar in astonishment. Suddenly, her father’s fragility was all too apparent, his gaunt frame hanging off the Dane’s broad shoulder. A wave of vulnerability washed through her. ‘We don’t need you,’ she replied resentfully. ‘Don’t you think you and your lot have done enough for this evening?’

A look of disdain crossed his lean features. ‘As you wish.’ He pulled away roughly so that her father’s full weight fell heavily against her. She staggered backwards, heels striking the wall as she fought to hold him upright. Her slight frame buckled beneath her father’s bulk and she wondered whether she was even capable of taking one step forward. She hated the fact that the Dane watched her, saw her weakness with his knowing eyes.

‘I can do it!’ she whispered fiercely as he came towards her.

Scooping the man’s arm around his neck, Ragnar regarded her coolly. ‘No, maid, you cannot. Even I am not so heartless as to leave you here, at the mercy of a town full of drunken Danes.’

Chapter Five (#u475d1c65-9d50-5af8-97b7-065701d442bc)

As the odd trio made their way across the crowded square, Ragnar curtailed his long stride to take account of the maid’s shorter legs and her father’s staggering gait. He led the way, shoving his tall, solid bulk through the jostling hoards of people, forging a path. Her father’s head lolled against his shoulder, sour waves of alcohol rolling off his breath; Ragnar suspected the girl had little idea of how much he had drunk. He had no wish to tell her, to burst her bubble of self-delusion. He glanced with grudging admiration at her mud-smeared features, the exhausted lines of her face. She wilted beneath her father’s considerable weight, her slim frame hunched forward, chin jutting out with fierce determination. The maid had endured enough today. Let her believe that her father’s stumbling gait was caused simply by the blow to his head.

‘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, a swift, brutal ending. His head rocked back in shock, strips of colour searing his high cheekbones. His hands fell from her shoulders, dropped to his sides, chastened. His strong sinewy fingers curled into tight fists. By Odin, what on earth had possessed him?

* * *

Bereft of his grip, Gisela staggered back on useless legs, knocking back against the cottage wall. A flake of loose plaster dislodged itself, scattering small white pieces across her dress. Dazed, she brought her hand to her quivering mouth, almost in wonderment. Her fingers trembled, shaking with reaction. Why was she not shouting at him, berating him for what he had done? Slapping him across the face? Instead she sank back, knees barely supporting her, belly wound tight in a coil of longing, a craving for...what?