The Norse King's Daughter

  “I have news for your princess, my undangliness is going nowhere.” Without your help. He stood to do her bidding and noticed her staring not just at his cockstand, but at his rear end, as well. And she liked what she saw.

  Once he lay down beside her again in the pitch black, he said, “See, I can still see your flower buds in my head. I have mind pictures of you wearing the harem girl garment I bought for you with your red flower buds showing through the sheer fabric. Then I have mind pictures of your hennaed nipples growing even bigger and redder with the nipple rings. And then, whoa! I have this most scandalous mind picture of you—”

  “Stop! Enough with the mind pictures!” She rolled over on her side, turning away from him. The tip of his dangler was touching the tip of her buttock.

  Oh joy!

  But then she ruined the mood, or enhanced the mood, depending on one’s perspective, when she muttered, “Bloody hell! Now I have mind pictures, too.”

  “Of your nipples?”

  “Nay, not of my nipples, you idiot. Of me riding a horse naked.”

  He put the same mind picture in his head and was musing over it, erotically, when she added something else.

  “And the horse is you.”

  He groaned aloud.

  He would never sleep tonight. Is this what they meant by that old saying, “Impaled on his own lance”?

  Chapter Twenty-three

  It wasn’t Appomattox, but it was a surrender . . .

  Drifa hadn’t slept much at all the night before, and by the sounds of Sidroc’s grumbly mood, he hadn’t, either. He started picking on her as soon as they arrived at the stable where coins were being paid for the horses, above the trade value of the camels.

  “What in the name of all the gods and goddesses are you doing now?” he bellowed, nigh knocking her to the ground with surprise.

  “What does it look like I’m doing, lackwit?”

  “Shoveling camel shit into a leather bag?”

  “Yea. I am taking it back to the Norselands with me. The gardener at the Imperial Palace told me it makes a wonderful plant fertilizer.”

  Sidroc was standing, hands braced on his hips, staring at her as if she were demented. “Do you honestly think I am going to allow you to carry shit in a bag for the two or three days it will take us to return to the city?”

  “Do you honestly think you can allow or disallow me to do anything? It’s not like I’m carrying it on your horse anyway.”

  He shook his head as if she were hopeless while she continued to shovel up the piles. She was holding her breath as she worked; so, at first, she didn’t hear what he was saying. Then she saw him handing her some garments.

  “These should fit you. They belonged to the stable master’s son.”

  “Boys’ clothing? For me?”

  He nodded. “Disguise yourself as best you can. Wear the cap, too, and tuck all your hair under it. Try not to pucker your lips in that flirty way of yours.”

  She ignored the flirty-mouth remark and took the items he handed her. “Dost think it necessary?”

  “Why take chances? At some point we will be followed, for a certainty. Let us just hope we make better time than they do.”

  She couldn’t argue with that, and so a short time later she emerged from the bushes, no longer Drifa, but a slim boyling in tunic and braies.

  “Drifa!” Sidroc exclaimed on first seeing her.

  “Not Drifa. My new name is Askell. I always liked that name.”

  “Pfff! More like Ass-kill. That would be more appropriate for our situation.”

  She just smiled at his mispronunciation and showed him all sides of the new attire.

  He groaned, which was what she’d intended, knowing how tight the braies were across her buttocks. He deserved the torture after what he’d put her through the night before with his “mind pictures.” This morning, too, truth be told. Every time he shot her one of his hot glances, she felt the heat all the way down to her bones. That must be why she gave her bottom an extra wiggle as she walked away from him.

  His muttered curse was her reward.

  They rode steadily that day, avoiding villages or farmsteads because Sidroc said, and she agreed, that the less notice they garnered, the better. They stopped only occasionally to water and graze the horses, and eat their own cold repasts. The smoked snake was long gone, thank the gods! Now they had slices of mutton, hard cheese, and bread, which Stamos and Vera had given them on their departure this morning from the farmstead, washed down by the cool water of a stream cupped in their hands.

  The entire day—and this was what caused her tension and abetted her exhaustion—attraction sizzled between the two of them. And it went both ways, she knew it did.

  He would glance her way as they cantered side by side, and her nipples would harden.

  She glanced his way and saw the bulge betwixt his thighs, which seemed to be always present.

  When she bent over to get a drink, she noticed his eyes riveted on her bottom.

  When he bent over to get a drink, her eyes latched on to his bottom.

  He licked the excess water from his lips, and she imagined those lips in other places.

  When she put her hand to the small of her back and stretched her aching muscles, he watched her with what could only be described as hunger.

  She would be hair-tearing barmy by nightfall if she didn’t do something. So, as they rode side by side through the mountain path, she tried to divert herself with conversation. “Tell me about your plans,” she urged. “Oh, not what you intend for Runa. What were your plans when you decided to leave the Varangian Guard, before you knew about your daughter?”

  “Finn and I had both grown tired of Byzantium. The endless fighting in a war that was not our own. The climate. Yea, we actually yearned for deep snow and blistering cold on occasion. And it was too soft a life for a Norseman.”

  “And what did you decide was preferable?”

  “Well, when I came to you for marriage, I was without home or coin, my home and belongings having burned to the ground the season before that. My situation is different now. I plan to settle in my own home.”

  “In the Orkneys? Is that not the site you mentioned one time?”

  “Nay. I had considered the Orkneys, and whilst many Norsemen live there, I prefer the Norselands. Nowhere near my father, but still in my homeland. And that is all I will say on the subject. So do not consider asking how my daughter fits into that picture.” She could tell that his inadvertent use of the word picture brought forth thoughts of those other “mind pictures” they had discussed yestereve. Thus he asked his own questions, to divert their already aroused attentions. “Why have you ne’er married?”

  She shrugged. “I always intended to, but every time a man offered for me, I found some reason to decline. And they were not all bad, either, though some of the specimens my father paraded before me would make the most desperate maiden cringe.”

  “And you were not desperate.”

  As you were when you proposed to me? “Not even when you offered for me.”

  “Why did you accept me, then?”

  How much of the truth can I tell him? How much of my emotions can I spill like fallen blood? She hesitated. They were entering dangerous territory. Dangerous for her, leastways. “I thought you were a man I could love.”

  “And you thought I loved you?” The tone of his voice was incredulous and, yea, insulting. But honest, she had to give him that.

  “I assumed you had a warm regard for me and hoped that it could perchance grow into love, over time. Foolish of me, wasn’t it?” Do not laugh. Oh please, do not laugh.

  After a long pause, he said, “Not so foolish. My time constraint for regaining my daughter was too desperate for me to think of much else, but methinks my attraction to you, even then, could have grown into something more.” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

  Drifa didn’t know whether to be dismayed or hopeful.

  He grinned at her then. “You sai
d something else when I rescued you. Not just about hennaed flower buds. You mentioned marble phalluses. Like the ones in the marketplace?”

  “Just like,” she said with an air of disgust.

  “What did you do with them?”

  “Not a thing, but I would have been forced to if I’d remained there much longer. Mainly they were used for teaching tools.”

  “Phalluses for teaching tools? Now I am really intrigued.”

  “Don’t be. ’Tis not what you are thinking.”

  “How do you know what I am thinking?”

  “Hah! I’ve known what you were thinking, all day long. It does not take an experienced harem houri to know what has been on your mind.”

  “Your mind, too, m’lady. Do not place all the blame on me.”

  And so they rode, mostly in silence, toward their destination.

  Drifa was in torture. The coarse material of her tunic abraded her nipples. The undulations of the horse between her thighs caused her woman-dew to weep. Sidroc’s smoldering gaze gave her ideas . . . erotic ideas.

  By the time they stopped for the night in a secluded clearing near a stream, Drifa was so aroused she could scarce stand. She glanced over at Sidroc, whose glowering demeanor told her, without her asking, that he was in a similar condition.

  She moaned.

  He groaned.

  And before she could say, “I yield,” she was lifted and braced against a tree trunk with her legs wrapped around his waist. He kissed her voraciously, and she met him with wet, openmouthed kisses of her own.

  At one point he drew his head back and stared at her through passion-glazed gray eyes. And all he said was “I care.”

  That was enough.

  It was the Perfect Storm . . .

  Sidroc was shocked at the intensity of his arousal.

  He’d been aboard a longship one time during a violent sea storm that buffeted the boat and all the seamen about like specks of dust. That’s how he felt now. A fleck of lust-dust on the wind. Totally under the control of an erotic storm, unable to fight its power. Uninterested in fighting it, truth to tell.

  “Should we lie down?” he gasped between kisses.

  “Can’t wait,” she gasped back, and surprised the spit out of him by beginning to unlace his braies.

  That works for me. He was a quick learner and began to unlace her braies at the same time.

  Without any foresport, he surged up into her wet channel and pounded her against the tree. She didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she was rubbing her breasts back and forth across his chest and making keening sounds of satisfaction.

  For a moment Sidroc rested, in her body to the hilt, his ballocks touching her body. He felt the vise of her slick glove shift to accommodate his size and seize at him, as if to keep him inside. He could swear he grew even more.

  Sidroc had been with more women in his thirty and one years than he could recount. He’d engaged in some interesting exercises with a few of them, way beyond what Ianthe, or Drifa, would call perverted. But this . . . this act of bliss with Drifa . . . was like nothing he’d ever experienced.

  Even though it was his cock plundering her narrow sheath, every part of his body was involved, from his ringing ears to his tingling toes. He could no more have stopped swiving her than he could have stopped breathing.

  In the end, he roared out his peaking in harmony with Drifa’s sweet screams of ecstasy.

  Well, that was short and sweet.

  And belatedly realized that he’d forgotten to withdraw at the last moment.

  And possibly disastrous.

  Was this how he was to be trapped into matrimony? Was this something Drifa had planned? Nay, no one in the world could have planned something this spontaneous.

  Carefully he eased himself out of her and lowered her legs until she could stand. She stared at him dazedly. “Was that another perversion?”

  “Nay, Drifa, that was normal sex. Almost boring.”

  Her eyes widened. “Were you bored?”

  “Hardly. More like so interested my eyeballs might have been rolling back in my head.”

  She smiled then. “Good. I was worried that I would only like perverted sex.”

  He could swear his heart expanded as he smiled at her. Was there anything better than a woman who could make a man smile during sex?

  “Can we do it again?”

  Mayhap he’d smiled too soon.

  Stepping back from her, he noted both of their braies pooled at their feet, as if they were overeager youthlings. He toed off first one, then the other of his half boots, and shrugged out of his braies. Then he took a blanket off his horse and shook it out on the ground.

  “You. Blanket. Naked. Now.”

  He half expected that she would balk at his order. But instead she licked her kiss-swollen lips, cast him a sultry look from slanted eyes, and said to him, “You. Blanket. Naked. Now.”

  Gods help me. I think I am falling in love. A little.

  A short time later, after Drifa demonstrated something to him that the harem ladies had been taught about phalluses, he knew he was falling in love. A little. Milking the Tree, indeed! What man wouldn’t develop an attachment to a woman who could do that? He couldn’t wait to see what she would do next. Wait. It was his turn to surprise her.

  “Driiiifffaaa,” he drawled out.

  She was lying sprawled on her back, arms thrown over her head, legs spread. She claimed that he’d depleted her. Hah! She was the one who’d depleted him; he’d only returned the favor.

  She slitted her eyes at him. “What?”

  “Have you ever heard of Riding the Rolling Log?”

  Here comes a total eclipse of her heart . . .

  Sidroc had told Drifa at one time that she would be his love thrall, but she never realized that she would enter that thralldom so willingly. After two days and nights of lovemaking, Drifa was good and truly enthralled by the man.

  And she didn’t dare tell him. One word of love and he would be running off to the horizon. With her daughter. Rather, his daughter. Leastways that’s what she feared. Even now that they’d been so intimate, the future loomed before Drifa. Uncertain. Frightening. Empty. Dark.

  Best not to think of what-ifs. What would happen would happen. And soon. Because they should arrive in Miklagard sometime on the morrow.

  To give him his due, Sidroc seemed as enthralled with her as she was with him. In fact, more than once he’d murmured in the sex-husky voice she’d come to relish, “What are you doing to me, princess?”

  As much as I can, sweetling. As much as I can.

  They made love often and every which way but upside down, and every one of them was unique and satisfying to her, even the “normal” ways. But then she no longer knew what was normal and what was not.

  He touched her all the time, even in passing. And she was like a kitten that preened and rubbed against him, begging to be petted. Pitiful, really, except she could tell he liked her constant touching, too.

  He regaled her with wicked words of what they would do next as they rode their horses ever onward toward Miklagard. Twice they’d had to stop because he’d aroused them both so much. With words!

  She’d even ridden her horse naked from the waist up one afternoon to test the theory of the sun fading hennaed skin. She didn’t know if it had done any good, but it did arouse her to the point of lust madness. When they’d stopped to rest, she’d nigh jumped him for sexual favors.

  “Are you sleeping?” he whispered now.

  “I just woke up,” she lied, and nestled closer into his embrace. It was the way they slept now, wrapped in each other’s arms, as if afraid one or the other would skip off during the night. Or mayhap just because they fit together so well.

  “We should be in Miklagard soon,” he told her, not for the first time.

  “And then what?”

  “Ivar knows the route we will follow into the city. He should connect with us soon and let us know whether it is safe, or not.”

&nbs
p; “You expect trouble.”

  “I do. Leastways, ’tis best to plan for the worst. Then if naught happens, we have only lost the time spent on caution, not a life.”

  She smiled. “That reminds me of the proverbs Rashid used to quote all the time. Rashid was Adam’s healer assistant. ‘Pray to Allah, but ride a fast camel.’ ”

  “Precisely.” He squeezed her tighter against his side.

  “Honestly, Sidroc, I think if I go to the empress and tell her what happened, she will place me under her protection.”

  “Do you ever listen?” he chided her. “In the past hundred and fifty or so years, more than a third of the emperors have suffered violent deaths. I mean, dozens, Drifa. Not just a handful. And empresses have not been immune, either. When politics is involved, no one is safe.”

  “Is it not the same at every court?”

  “ ’Tis worse here because it is such a rich country. Greed corrupts. But more than that, when religion is involved, any means are justified, or so assassins think. And do not doubt that the Byzantines think they are fighting a holy war against the Moslems, and the Moslems are equally certain Allah is on their side.”

  He was probably right. For a long while she remained silent, and he did, too. But other things were on her mind, as well as her safety.

  “Sidroc,” she broached carefully, “were you in love with your wife, Astrid?”

  He stiffened for a moment. “Where did that question come from?”

  “I just wondered. You are so determined to take Runa and raise her yourself, I thought it might be because you loved her mother so much.”

  “Must I remind you, we decided not to discuss Runa for the time being.”

  You decided. Not me. “Sorry I am, but the question just popped out.”

  She felt him smile against her hair. He was probably thinking of other things that had popped out of her mouth. Like her tongue. On his manpart. He did answer her, though. “Nay, I was not ‘in love’ with Astrid. I do not think I even ‘loved’ her. But I did care about her, best I could. Let’s face it, I am not a man for loving.”