His Captive Bride (14 page)

Avril felt her cheeks turning red. “The storm kept me awake,” she added quickly. “After being inside all day, I found your keep rather stuffy, and while riding yesterday, I had noticed a path down to the shore. So after the rain abated, I decided to spend the night on the beach. I often did so when I was a child, in the summer, on the shore at home in Brittany.”

She was babbling. God’s breath, why was she babbling?

And why did the man not
say
something? No doubt he expected her to return to his
vaningshus
with him now.

All at once, a rush of heated images flashed through her mind like lightning: she and Hauk in his bed, his mouth on hers, his hard body pressing her down into the sheets, his hands in her hair, her fingers caressing his back, their voices blending in groans and sighs.

Shocked, Avril wrestled her thoughts under control, her heart thumping. She sat down, deciding she would spend the rest of the night right here, where she had planned. She staked her torch into the sand again. He could have his
vaningshus
all to himself.

A moment later, his cloak hit the ground beside her.

Startled, she glanced up. “What are you doing?”

“If you wish to spend the night out here, we will spend the night out here—together.”

Together
. Avril forced herself to remain still as he went to retrieve his pack. He was only being chivalrous again, conceding to her wishes.

Was he not?

The possibility that he might have a moonlight tryst in mind almost made her jump up and run. But she did not want him to know he had such an overwhelming sensual impact on her. Her feminine instincts warned her that would be a most serious mistake.

At least sharing a night in the open, she reasoned, was better than sharing the privacy of his keep.

“By all means,” she said lightly as he returned to her side. “Help yourself to a patch of sand.” She shrugged as if his actions did not matter to her in the least, then looked at the sea, as if she found the waves far more interesting than him.

He sat on his cloak, opening the pack and fishing through it until he produced a wooden trencher, which he tossed onto the sand.

Then he began untying the thongs that molded his boots to his legs.

“Now what are you doing?” she tried to keep her voice light, casual. Steady.

“I have not had supper yet. I keep a few nets and traps out there among the rocks.” He nodded toward the water, then slanted her a curious glance. “I often come here to enjoy the night air and some fresh shellfish. Must I change my habits now that I have a wife?”

She shrugged again, trying to hide her chagrin that the driftwood sanctuary she found so appealing also happened to be a favorite place of his.

“You do not have a wife,” she reminded him. “And pray do not change any of your habits on my account. If you wish to douse yourself in that freezing water, by all means do so.” She smiled prettily at him. “Mayhap you will develop a cramp and drown.”

“There is always hope.” He returned her smile with a slow, wry grin, a flash of white teeth that revealed dimples in his bearded cheeks. “But unfortunately for you, I am a strong swimmer.”

Avril could not summon a clever reply. Or tear her gaze from his. She had never seen him smile before, at least not with genuine amusement. The expression brought a warmth, an appealing gentleness to his rugged face that had a strange effect on her heartbeat.

“Milady?” Taking off his boots, he reached for his belt. “Am I offending your sense of modesty?”

“Nay, why would you think so?”

“You are staring.”

She glanced away, managed to laugh. “Fear not. I am hardly some blushing maiden who will faint at the sight of a man disrobing.”

“Indeed?” He stood.

She hoped it was too dark for him to tell that she was blushing as furiously as any maiden.

His weapons hit the sand—his sheathed knife and sword. His belt followed. Avril kept her gaze fastened on a distant rock in the darkness, wondering whether he meant to remove
all
his garments. Tensing, she poised to flee if he reached for the waist of his leggings.

“Would you care to help me, milady?”

“What?” Her voice came out as a squeak.

She heard him searching through his pack, and a moment later, something heavy hit the sand beside her.

A flat cooking pan.

“Start a fire and have that hot when I return,” he suggested.

Avril picked up the pan as he headed for the water, half tempted to fling it at him for teasing her. He had indeed left the leggings on, she realized.
Thank the saints
.

As she watched his tall, broad-shouldered silhouette moving through the moonlit darkness, she thought she might not need to start a fire.

The pan was already hot from being held in her palm.

N
ot even a cold midnight swim had been enough to cool his blood.

Hauk watched the firelight caress his wife’s skin and deepen the tempting shadow of the cleft between her breasts. Sitting next to Avril, before a crackling fire, he had barely touched the shellfish on his trencher. Though his hair and beard still dripped with icy seawater, he felt painfully aware of the heat simmering in his gut, his arousal rigid against the leggings he wore.

He had dreamed of her like this.

While on patrol, he had barely slept, tormented by a fevered vision of Avril looking just as she did now—her eyes languid and drowsy, her hair mussed from sleep, her body veiled by a thin shift, rumpled in just the right way to reveal an enticing glimpse of pale, feminine secrets.

A shift so delicate, he could slip it from her shoulders with a single brush of his fingertips.

His breathing deepened. His blood seemed to flow hot and thick in his veins. In his dream, she had not been sitting on a moonlit beach, daintily nibbling seafood, her kirtle half concealed beneath a green cloak.

Nei
, she had been in his bed, her lips parted for his kiss, her hands drawing him near, her whispers filled with wanting and welcome. And he had pressed her back into the sheets, poised to join his body to hers, to thrust deeply inside and feel her tight and hot and wet—

The snap of a burning driftwood log wrenched him back to the present. His heart thundering, he tore his gaze from Avril, unnerved by the power of the images that fogged his senses. By Odin, when he left two days ago, he had thought he would regain his reason, be able to deal with her presence in his life calmly and rationally upon his return.

Instead, his new bride wreaked havoc with his senses and ruled his thoughts all the more.

And if that were not annoying enough, she seemed oblivious to his suffering.

At the moment, she was ignoring him, her gaze on the flat rock she had found to serve as a trencher. She was using his knife to crack open a lobster shell.

“By all means,” he commented, his voice taut with a different kind of hunger, “enjoy my supper.”

“You are not eating much.” She broke a claw in half and fished out the steaming meat.

Words failed him as he watched her lift the morsel to her lips, watched the juices glisten on her fingers, on her soft, pink tongue as she drew the tidbit into her mouth. Her appreciative sigh of pleasure made his entire body burn with need.

It was a shame, he thought ruefully, that she could not plunge the knife into his heart and put him out of his misery.

She merely swallowed and continued eating, still blithely unaware of his plight. “I see no reason to waste all of this. It has been years since I—”

“Purloined a man’s meal from under his nose?”

An amused smile tugged at one corner of her mouth. “Since I have enjoyed fresh seafood. It is almost impossible to obtain inland.” Her voice became wistful. “When I was growing up in Brittany, my parents used to love to cook on the beach like this. Before my mother took ill.”

Her smile fading, she continued eating in silence.

Hauk toyed with a crab claw on his trencher, ignoring the curiosity that buzzed through his thoughts like a pestering fly. He was not going to question her about what had happened to her mother. Did not want to learn aught about her past, her family, her home—the life he had taken her from forever.

He already knew more than he wanted to know.

Studying her pale cheeks, the shadows beneath her sable lashes, he realized there was something different about Avril tonight, though he could not discern what it was. She spoke little, avoided looking at him... yet she remained by his side. As if she were a curious sparrow that had hopped near enough to steal a few crumbs from him.

He wondered if she would take flight if he made any move toward her.

He lifted the crab claw to his mouth, gnawing at the soft meat as he turned that thought over in his mind. Mayhap she seemed different tonight because this was, in truth, the first time he had seen her sitting still. The Avril he had grown used to was a vivid bundle of conflicting emotions, constantly changing, endlessly provoking him, always in motion.

He had never seen her like this: quiet, at rest, almost...

Nay, not tame. That word would never apply. But there was a certain sweetness about the way she sat there enjoying her lobster, her hair in tangles, her lashes dipping sleepily low over her emerald eyes, her bare toes peeking out from the hem of her rumpled nightclothes. She looked like she needed to be scooped up and carried to bed.

Hauk dropped his gaze to the sand, not liking the unexpected, unwelcome feelings that stole through him, softer and warmer than the desire that stirred his blood.

By all the gods, she was so young. So much younger than him. And she did not even begin to guess.

He crushed the crab shell in his fingers and flicked it away, annoyed. Seeing her this way—so vulnerable and sweet—only reminded him of how delicate his lovely
utlending
bride was. How different from him.

How fragile.

Reminded him too vividly of the fear he had felt earlier today when he cut his journey short. When he had discovered Thorolf missing from his enclave on the eastern shore.

The place had been deserted. Abandoned. Thorolf might have gone off somewhere to sulk, as he often did, but he was also vicious enough to seek vengeance against those he blamed for his punishment by the
eldrer
.

Including Avril.

For one moment, standing in the doorway of Thorolf’s empty dwelling, Hauk had felt a stab of cold fear—not for his people, or for his friend Keldan, but for the bride he had left alone and unprotected.

He had run all afternoon through the rain, not even stopping to eat, pausing at Keldan’s just long enough to warn him. Then he had finally reached his own
vaningshus
—and found Avril missing.

Hauk forced the memory away, not wanting to relive the dread he had experienced. Or the relief and gratitude to the gods he had felt upon finding her safe and well. He could not allow her to stir his heart this way.

Misery and torment
, he reminded himself.
She can only bring you misery and torment in the end.

Avril sighed in enjoyment as she finished her meal—and Hauk realized he had unintentionally fulfilled one of the commands set forth in the
Havamal:
A new husband was to discover his bride’s favorite foods and provide them for her.

Just as he was to discover all of her favorite, secret pleasures.

“Did you eat naught while I was away?” he asked, chagrined.

“What?”

“You eat as if you had been starving, and you are”—despite himself, he found his gaze drawn back to her—”unusually quiet.”

They regarded each other across the scant distance that separated them, the cookfire making the night air crackle with flames and heat.

As before, she held his gaze only a moment before she glanced away, color rising in her cheeks. “If I seem quiet, it is simply because I am tired. As I told you earlier, the storm kept me awake.”

Her blush deepened.

Hauk frowned at her in confusion, unable to fathom why she would turn scarlet because a storm had kept her awake.

Unless it was not, in truth, the weather that had disturbed her sleep... but something else.

He almost choked on his own breath, remembering the unfinished explanation she had offered earlier, just before she began babbling on about the storm.

I have had bad...

Dreams? Was it her dreams that left her blushing and breathless?

Had she been unable to sleep for the same reason as him?

His heart thudded a single, violent stroke then began pounding. He had heard legends of Asgard men and their mates who shared a bond so deep that they did not need words to communicate, even when distance separated them—a bond so strong they even shared the same dreams.

He had always dismissed such tales as fanciful nonsense.

But he could not dismiss the way Avril was reacting to him tonight. How different she seemed. His brain rioted with questions.

Had she been dreaming of him?
Was it desire that made her blush? Was that why she remained by his side—because she was drawn to him in the same powerful, inescapable way he was drawn to her?

How might she respond if he closed the distance between them now, if he drew her near and kissed her? Would it win him a slap? A knife in his gullet?

Or the kind of response he had dreamed of?

Her gaze still lowered, she wiped his knife in the sand and tossed it aside. It landed next to his discarded sword. “Sword, knife, battle-ax,” she mused. “You travel heavily armed, Hauk. Was your journey dangerous?”

“Were you worried for me, wife?” His voice sounded husky, even to his own ears.

“Do not call me that,” she chided.

He noticed she had not answered his question.

He also noted that at some point, she had started calling him by his first name rather than “Norseman” or “Valbrand.”

How would she taste?
Would her mouth be hot and hungry beneath his, or sweet and soft?

“Fear not,” he managed to say, “I am unharmed. I suffered naught but a small gash.” Lifting his right hand, he revealed an angry red mark that ran up his arm from wrist to elbow, earned when he slipped on a jagged outcropping of stone while running home through the rain.

She gasped. “Sweet Mary.” Lips parted, she started to say more, then stopped herself, regarding him with a look that held...

By all the gods, it was concern he saw in her gaze. Concern for his pain. For him. She
had
been worried about him.

Just as he had been worried about her.

He turned away abruptly, shaking off the feelings, unable to look into his wife’s sparkling emerald eyes a moment longer. He would not
do
this to himself. It was bad enough that she trespassed on his thoughts waking and sleeping. Bad enough that she made him
want
, in a way he had not wanted in half a lifetime.

He had to accept her presence in his life, had to protect her and see to her needs—but he could
not
allow her to stir the ashes of feelings he had forgotten how to feel. For the sake of his sanity, he had to leave them buried. Buried, like the sketches and belongings he kept shut away in trunks because he could not bear to look at them and could not bring himself to destroy them.

He stretched out on the sand, on his side, giving her his back. Then he reached for his cloak, pounding it into the shape of a pillow and jamming it under his head. Avril was merely a woman, like any other. He could control the desire he felt for her, and the other feelings as well.

It was only fatigue that made the task seem unusually difficult.

“You are going to sleep?” she asked curiously.

“It is what I normally do when I am tired after a long journey,” he grated out.

“Oh.” She remained quiet a moment. “I thought we might...”

He clenched his teeth to resist the suggestive replies that sprang to mind:
Kiss? Slowly undress one another? Discover how your naked body would feel against mine? Make hot, passionate love under the moon?

“Talk,” she said.

He released a harsh breath. “We can talk on the morrow.” Horn of Odin, if he had to look at her again, he was not sure he could keep himself from pulling her into his arms, pressing her down beside the fire, lifting the hem of her shift until her naked bottom met warm sand and his fingers found soft, wet silk.

He wrestled his unruly thoughts under control, thwacked his pillow for good measure. “Go to sleep, Avril.”

After a moment, he heard her move away a few paces, then stretch out on the sand. Grateful, he shut his eyes and prayed to all the gods to grant him sleep.

Dreamless sleep.

But apparently the gods were busy elsewhere this night.

“I am certain your wounded arm will heal,” she said quietly. “No doubt within the hour.”

“That does not make it hurt any less,” he muttered. The ocean breeze felt cool against his chest, the fire’s warmth hot against the bare skin of his back. The soothing, familiar sound of the wind and waves might have lulled him to sleep eventually.

If he had not been blessed with a talkative bride.

“How can that be?” she prodded. “How is it that wounds heal so quickly here? My jaw
was
broken in Antwerp, I am certain of it. And the other night, when I cut my hand, it healed almost at once. And
everyone
in the town seems to be in perfect health.”

He did not reply.

“Hauk?”

He glared into the night, annoyed with himself for having leaped to half-witted conclusions earlier like some naive, first-time groom. He had been wrong, of course. He and Avril did not share dreams or desire or any gentler sort of feelings.

This
was why she had remained near him: because she hoped to glean information about Asgard, while he was tired enough to be careless. Information that might help her in whatever escape attempt she was no doubt planning.