Dedication
This book is dedicated to my granddaughter Jaden, who is princess to the bone. She would fit in perfectly with my five Norse princesses. Plus she’s got a bit of Viking in her blood.
As the mother of four sons, I somehow lost the girlie gene. The desire to wear chiffon and ruffles with sparkly shoes to school, and the ability to pull it off. How to shop like an Energizer Bunny, and find all the best bargains. The love of a good cuddle, even with your girlfriends, or especially with your girlfriends. The talent for climbing a tree one moment and dancing a delicate ballet the next. The way you can say, “I love you” without hesitation or fear of rejection.
So here’s to you, Jado, may you always be a princess in someone’s life.
Epigraph
A wench’s word let no wise man trust,
nor trust the troth of a woman;
For on a whirling wheel their hearts are shaped,
And fickle and fitful their minds.
The Poetic Edda
Hávamál
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Reader Letter
Glossary
An Excerpt from Kiss of Pride
About the Author
Romances by Sandra Hill
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Comes a time when all good Viking men must bite the shield . . . and wed . . .
“Toss the babe in the fjord. Or leave it on the cliff. Either way, the whelp will be dead afore morn.”
Sidroc Guntersson, third son of Jarl Gunter Ormsson, was a noted warrior who had seen cruelty in all its forms, but his father’s pronouncement about Sidroc’s newborn child turned his blood cold. “How can you suggest such for your own kin?” Why am I surprised? No doubt you wish you’d ended my life in the same manner.
His loathsome father, who had the paternal sensibilities of a rock, shrugged and leaned back in the throne-like armed chair atop the dais in his great hall. Even as he spoke, one paw-like hand stroked the long, pale blonde hair of his latest concubine, a girl no more than thirteen. In all his twenty and six years, Sidroc had many times witnessed his father’s lusty appetites appeased by the more danico, multiple wives, as well as numerous mistresses, bed thralls, and any serving maid of passable appearance. On occasion, all at the same time. The gods only knew how many by-blows he’d bred, along with his four legitimate sons and two legitimate daughters.
“ ’Tis a split-tail,” his father pointed out, as a defense for abandoning a newborn.
Sidroc bristled. “Yea, ’tis a girl, and the mother is dead.” Sidroc’s voice was raspy with emotion. He’d seen men cleaved from head to belly in battle, but the image that would stay with him forevermore was of Astrid lying in a pool of her own blood. With a bloody mass of squalling, flailing arms and legs lying betwixt her thighs, its cord still uncut.
Eydis, the wet nurse serving his brother Svein’s one-year-old boy, had agreed to take his daughter to teat, but only until he hired another suitable maid, or until his brother found out. Svein did not share anything with anyone, especially not with him, ever since Sidroc thrashed him as a boyling, despite being five years younger. As he recalled, he’d been provoked by Svein’s drowning a stable cat, just for sport.
Sidroc was full aware that it was the practice in some parts of the Norselands to put a newborn out to die when it arrived underweight or handicapped in some way. After all, living was difficult in the harsh northern climate, and survival was indeed best reserved for the hardiest. But to stand by and watch a child, one not handicapped in any way, be killed, well, it was something he could not do. Whether it be his child or some other’s.
To be honest, he felt no strong connection with the baby, less than a day old now. But he would be less than a man to abandon its fate to others like his father.
“ ’Tis not uncommon for a woman to die of the childbirth fever,” his father remarked coldly. “You are too missish by half.”
Missish? Sidroc shook his head at his father’s perception of him. He was a far-famed warrior, adept with halberd and broadsword. But all his father saw was a man not in his selfsame mold of cruelty.
His wife had not been a love match for him; as in most noble families it was an arranged marriage for gain, but he had held an affection for Astrid from the start. Not that he’d seen much of her in the two years they’d been married, what with his a-Viking and fur trading. “I promised Astrid on her deathbed that I would care for the child.”
His father shrugged again, and now his hand was groping his concubine’s small breasts. The silly girl giggled and preened at the attention of her master, even such a public display.
Sidroc knew he did not have his father’s full attention. Still, he persisted. “Signe deserves to live.”
“You named the child?” His father made a tsking noise of disapproval.
It nigh gagged him to ask his father for favors, but needs must, he chastised himself. His much smaller keep at the edge of the Vikstead estates had burned to the ground last winter, along with a storeroom piled to the ceiling with precious furs intended for market. He and Astrid had been living with his father until he could rebuild. Even that favor had galled him. “All I ask is that Svein’s wet nurse be permitted to continue caring for the baby here at Vikstead until I return from a commitment I have made to the Jomsvikings. Once I have regained my wealth—”
“If you care so much, take the babe with you.”
“They do not allow women or children at the Jomsborg fortress.”
“How long would you be gone?”
Someday, old man . . . someday! he seethed with tightly fisted hands. As a third son with two healthy older brothers, Sidroc knew he would never inherit the jarldom and that he must accumulate wealth enough to purchase his own lands, hopefully away from Vikstead this time. Joining the elite Jomsvikings had been his best option for increasing his fortunes. “Two years. Three at most.”
“Pfff!” his father scoffed. “Find a wife then, a rich one this time, for Thor’s sake! One with lands.”
This was a refrain he’d heard from his father many times in the past, a demand he’d resisted mightily. No doubt he’d married Astrid in part because she carried no dowry, just to defy his father. At the time, he’d had wealth and property enough that it had not mattered.
“Six sennights I give you to find a bride and a home for the whelp,” his father conceded. “At the end of that time, the babe goes. That is my final word.”
How had this argument with his father snowballed from a disagreement to a battle of wills? How had he allowed himself to be backed into a corner? “I suppose you have someone in mind, even with Astrid scarce turned to ashes in her burial pyre,” he gritted out.
“King Thorvald of Stoneheim has one more unmarried daughter. Try her.” His father
gave him an evil grin. “Or not. It matters not to me.”
Sidroc knew the woman his father referred to. Princess Drifa. Although she was long in the tooth for a woman—at least twenty-four years old—she was not unattractive. Being half Norse, half Arab, her features were exotic with slanted dark eyes, and her body was fine-boned. As he recalled, however, she had an outlandish passion for growing things. There was ofttimes dirt under her fingernails, dried leaves in her black hair, and she was known to bring flowers and bushes indoors. On one occasion she even reeked of manure that she claimed made her flowers sweeter.
Ah well, he supposed there were worse things. He would need to find a mother for Signe eventually, in any case. Besides, it was good to have a ready bedmate when no other was available.
Thus it was that Sidroc Guntersson of Vikstead, instead of going a-Viking this springtime season, as was his norm, or rebuilding his home, went off a-courting. May the Norns of Fate guide him!
Chapter One
Beware of rogues with bad intentions . . .
Drifa, daughter of the Norse King Thorvald, was being seduced, good and well.
After twenty-four years of resisting matrimony, even when she viewed the good examples of her four married sisters, Drifa was falling in love a little bit. Or in lust, leastways. And after only three sennights of the man launching his game of pursuit.
And what a handsome rogue, he was! Sidroc Guntersson was not much older than she. Perchance only twenty-six. She was of average height for a woman, but he was at least a head taller. With shoulder-length, chestnut hair, dark gray-green eyes framed by thick, dark brown lashes, a full sensuous mouth, and a battle-honed body, he was pure Viking man at his virile best.
He had been wed before, not that that mattered to her. His wife had died. What was odd to her, though, was that he refused to talk about her death. “Later,” he kept saying. “Not now.”
On the one hand, she thought his pursuit of another woman was disrespectful so soon after his wife’s death. On the other hand, some men were like that. If they loved hard enough, they wanted to replace that love with another. Not that he had said all this, but his silence on the subject was telling to Drifa. Who could not be drawn to a man who had loved so much?
“Open your mouth for me, princess,” Sidroc murmured against her lips, which were already swollen from his numerous kisses. Somehow he had managed to find her in a secluded section of her herb garden, where he had her backed up against a stone wall.
“Why?” she asked, which gave him the perfect opening.
His tongue slipped inside and began to stroke her with an in-out motion that mirrored what he was doing down below. With his hands cupping her bottom and his thighs separating her legs, which were dangling off the ground, he undulated his hips against her. It was impossible not to notice the hard rod of his lust as it sought her woman-channel.
“My sap runs thick and hot,” he rasped out. “Quench me, m’lady.”
Oh! Oh! She began to swoon with utter ecstasy, especially when he sucked lightly on her tongue.
So this was what her sisters had sighed about.
So this was all the fuss the maids were always whispering about.
So this was why the gods had created men and women.
How could she have been so ignorant for so long? Was her sap rising, too? Did women even have sap? Was it this man alone, or was the time ripe for her to yield? Oh, good gods! Was she overripe? Nay, she did not think she would yield to just any man. Holy Frigg! What is he doing now?
“Tell me you will be my wife,” he whispered against her ear, which he was also plying with wet-tipped tongue and hot breath. “I. Need. You.”
“Why?” she asked again on a keening wail of torturous pleasure.
With a chuckle, he pressed the evidence of his need against her. If possible, it was bigger . . . and harder.
“Why me?” she elaborated.
“Because I want you above all others. And because you want me, too,” he asserted with the usual arrogance of a Norseman.
She was confused. How could she answer when she was beset with so many conflicting emotions? She was unaccustomed to yielding to a man’s attention. In truth, more than two dozen Norsemen, and a few Saxons, had offered for her in the past ten years. None of them had affected her like this. What an understatement! My blood is boiling in my veins. My bones are melting. My brain is one big throbbing mass of sexual fog. “I . . . I . . .’tis too soon.”
“Nay. Betimes too much thinking clouds a person’s thinking. Betimes a person must jump into a decision. Betimes a woman must wed or go barmy from lack of carnal bliss.”
What? You are making that up. She had no chance to say that, though, because he was kissing her again. And caressing her breasts. And rubbing himself against her nether parts.
A flush of arousal swept over her in waves, and when he asked again, “Please, sweetling, be my wife,” she answered, “Yea, I will.”
Then—oh, praise the gods and all the goddesses!—he used his wicked, wandering hands and his thrusting hips to bring her to a peak that would have had her screaming her woman-joy if his tongue had not been firmly planted in her mouth.
For long moments she lay boneless against his chest, her face nestled in the crook of his neck, panting like a warhorse.
What just happened? Have I died? Was that what he meant by carnal bliss? Best I pretend that this was not a shocking happenstance for me, or he will laugh at me. “That was nice,” she said in as calm a voice as she could muster.
He laughed. The brute just laughed at her. “We will go to your father this eventide,” he told her between quick, nibbling kisses, as he helped her straighten her gunna and the long, open-sided apron worn by most Norse women.
Did I say him yea? I must have, but . . . “Mayhap I should approach him first, alone.” And mayhap I need to think this through in some quiet place far from his tempting self.
He shook his head. “Together. We will go together. And we will be wed within a sennight so we may return to Vikstead and present you to my father.”
That was not going to happen so soon, for the simple reason that the sixtieth anniversary of her father’s birthday was to be celebrated in ten days’ time. Everyone was coming, including three of her sisters who lived in Britain. Her father would never countenance her absence from such an important event. “Why must we rush?”
His face flushed, but all he would reveal was “ ’Tis not important, but you will understand in good time.”
He’d landed in the royal barmy bin where all the king’s men . . . and women . . . were missing a few stones from their turrets . . .
Later that day, Sidroc sat on a bench on one side of the hearth in the largest solar of Stoneheim, surrounded by members of the Norse royal family who had come from far and wide to celebrate the king’s upcoming sixtieth birthing day anniversary. They were all that a family should be, and all he’d never experienced himself.
After at least a dozen futile attempts, Sidroc had yet to ask King Thorvald for his daughter’s hand in marriage. He supposed that he should have told Drifa from the beginning why he must marry, and with haste yet, but he was experienced in the love arts, and he knew, sure as gammelost stinks, she would have balked if he told her it was not so much that he needed her, as that he had a newborn baby who needed a mother. Women wanted to be courted. Later . . . he would tell all later. They would both laugh about his craftiness.
For now, Drifa’s sisters were eyeing him suspiciously. This family did naught but talk and laugh and shout over one another, and the subjects they discussed were outrageous. Like some experiments being done with honey on a man’s staff to prevent conception, for the love of Frigg! “Now, if a man could lick his own cock, that would be another thing,” the king had proclaimed, and they’d all laughed, even the women.
In truth, going by the glaring sisters, he would not be surprised if someone asked Drifa in front of one and all if she still had a maidenhead. Actually, he hoped they di
d. Mayhap then he would have a chance to make an offer of marriage and get it over with.
In the midst of his elation this afternoon over Drifa’s acceptance of his proposal, he’d forgotten her having told him days ago of the planned feast, but she hadn’t warned him of the deluge of guests who would arrive so soon. If she thought he was going to linger around this overcrowded castle for ten more days, without a wedding, he had news for her. “King Thorvald, can we speak in private?”
“Later, my boy, later,” the king said jovially, turning back to a servant who was carrying a tray with goblets of mead.
Drifa, who sat on the bench beside him, squeezed his hand. “Have patience.”
Patience! He gritted his teeth, trying not to appear overanxious. He’d already wasted three sennights in this drafty, hodgepodge, stone and wood castle, designed by one of the sisters, Breanne, who had a passion for building things. Chairs, tables, pigsties, castles, and whatnot. In fact, Breanne sat beside her husband, the Saxon Lord Caedmon, on an opposing bench whittling on a stick to amuse a child who hovered watchfully over her shoulder.
Another sister, Ingrith, was returning from the kitchen, where she’d been engaged in her particular passion. Cooking. As evidenced by the delicious aromas wafting through the air. Roast hare and honey oatcakes would be his guess. Ingrith’s husband, another Saxon lord, John of Hawks’ Lair, who seemed bemused by the whole situation, said near his ear in passing, “You are a dead duck, my good man, once these barmy birds get their claws in you.”
Lord Hawk was the one doing the experiments with honey, cocks, and male seed caps. He had no room to complain of barmy birds, in Sidroc’s opinion.
“I wish you would get your claws in me. Quickly. On the marriage bed,” he whispered to Drifa.
“Patience,” she said again, though she was now wearing a pretty blush on her face reminding him of how close to swiving they’d come today. Mayhap he would visit her bedchamber tonight, to seal the deal, so to speak.