The Viking Takes a Knight (15 page)

I do?
“Show me.”

Thus began a tortuous venture starting with a wet sensation on his shoulder. Was she licking his skin? By the saints! She was. Now it felt as if she was lightly scraping the surface with her fingernails.

What followed fulfilled all his longings for her touch. Sweeping caresses from his back to his ankles. Deep massages that soothed sore muscles. Kisses at the small of his back and the backs of his knees. When she sucked on one of his toes,
and thank God I bathed tonight
, he'd had enough of her torture and turned over onto his back.

“Methinks you need new territory to explore,” he husked out, “but not below the waist. I do not want to disgrace myself by being overeager.”

This should be a particularly enjoyable exercise since he could not only experience the pleasure of her touch, but he could watch her doing it. Men were visual characters. They liked to watch whatever they were doing.

But back to Ingrith. Her eyes were fixed on his erect phallus. “Methinks your ‘new territory' has a different idea.”

Hah! Ideas like you wouldn't believe, sweetling.

Before he could stop her, she lifted his cock and peeked closely underneath at his ballocks as if they were wondrous objects.

Do. Not. Peak
, he ordered himself, and he meant
peak
as in spill his seed, not the kind of peeking she was doing.
Do. Not. Peak. Do. Not. Peak.

“They are like peaches, with that fine fuzzy hair.”

Peaches! That was a new one! He tried to laugh but it came out as a gurgle. “Enough of this ‘territory' for now,” he told her and lifted her body up so that they were face level. He was about to
kiss her when she tapped his lips with a fingertip. “Uh-uh! I am leading this expedition.”

Am I in Valhalla? Is she a Valkyrie come to grant all my wishes? But wait, I am not a Viking. I am Christian. She must be an angel. A fallen angel?

She leaned over to touch the tip of her tongue to one of his flat nipples, which was nice, and not nearly as dangerous as her foray into his man-parts.

“Are your nipples as sensitive as mine?” she asked.

He blinked through the haze of his arousal. “'Twould seem so.”

“Good,” she said. And spent an inordinate amount of time playing with them.

Then the hair that ran from his chest in a
V
down to his crotch fascinated her, with a few dips along the way in his navel. “I hate a hairy man. You have just enough,” she declared. “I saw a man once who had so much body hair he looked like a bear. My father said it kept him warm in winter. Hah! He smelled like a bear, if you ask me.”

John couldn't believe a naked woman with breasts brushing his belly was discussing some Viking man's body odor. “Could you move on, Ingrith? Please.”

She skipped over his most important parts, which was just as well, considering the state of his excitement, and went to his feet once again.

“No sucking of toes,” he warned her.

“You're ticklish,” she hooted with glee. Then, as she licked and kissed her way up one leg and thigh, she glanced up at him and inquired with her usual disarming bluntness. “Are you as aroused as I am?”

He choked out a laugh and waved a hand at his bobbing cockstand. “How can you even ask? Come here, sweetling. We are going to have to continue this touching exploration another time.”

He lifted her up to lie on top of him, and what an excruciatingly delicious position that was, with her breasts nestled in his chest hairs and her curly mons touching the tip of his cock. “Top or bottom?” he asked against her parted lips.

“Both.”

“You greedy wench!” He helped her to rise on all fours, then ease herself down onto his cock. When he was in to the hilt, and every drop of blood in his body had drained from his fevered brain, she rose up on her knees and cast him such a tantalizing smile that his heart lurched.

She jiggled her rump on him, even as she was impaled, to get a better fit, he supposed.

Bloody hell!
He closed his eyes. He was fairly sure his eyeballs were rolling back in his head.

Before he could catch a breath, she began to move on him. He didn't know where to look. At her sliding up and down his cock. At her breasts jiggling with her energetic bouncing. Or at her glo
rious hair with its mass of blonde waves tumbling down her back, over her shoulders, and brushing his chest when she leaned forward.

“This is fun,” she said.

Fun
would be a vast understatement.

“Look, when I spread my knees and lean forward a little, I hit that little bud in my woman-folds on the downstroke. Can you see?”

“I see. I see,” he husked out.

“How am I doing?”

I am in sex heaven.
“Fairly well.”

“Oh. I thought you wanted me to be gentle. Guess I'd better work harder.”

“I was only teas…oh, my God! What are you doing?” Blood was pounding throughout his body, all running thickly to that part of his body Ingrith was using like her own personal butter churn. “Easy, dearling, easy.”

She stopped suddenly, and her eyes went wide with wonder as he felt her inner walls grasping and ungrasping—milking, for the love of all the saints!—his cock in a seemingly never-ending peaking. “Oops!” she said, when the peaking stopped, but not to worry, she was about to resume her bouncing.

Worry? Hah! Enough of this torture! “Bottoms up,” he said, putting his hands on her hips to hold himself inside her channel, then rolled over. He stared down at her as he arranged himself better, cupping her buttocks and tipping her up.

Propped on extended arms, he began to ride her hard. He couldn't help himself. To his amazement, her inner spasms resumed, and it felt as if he were plunging into a flexing fist.

It was the most incredible sexual experience of his life.

And it wasn't over yet.

Fierce tremors overtook him. Even worse, his emotions were out of control. He had never intended to let himself fall under Ingrith's spell, but all his good intentions were for naught under the onslaught of his desire for her.

What happened to the sane, logical man of yestermonth?

And who the bloody hell cared?

His head and shoulders reared back as he felt his ballocks tighten and rise, presaging an imminent peaking. He wanted desperately to stay inside Ingrith, to shoot his seed to her womb, not to breed children but for the sheer pleasure of the natural culmination of the sex act. But that was not to be.

He disengaged quickly and spilled his essence off to the side. Then he turned away from Ingrith, not wanting her to see him in this state. But sensing his distress, she curved her body into his, knee to knee, breast to back. With one arm wrapped around his waist, she kissed his shoulder. “Regrets?”

“Shouldn't that be
my
question? I'm a selfish bastard, Ingrith, taking your maidenhead.”

“You took nothing, you idiot. I gave.”

“To answer your question. How could I be sorry for such an experience? Thank you.”

“I know you don't want to hear this, John, but I have to tell you. I love you. Nay, nay, nay,” she said as he started to turn, “stay where you are.”

Which was all right with him. He didn't want her to see his face when he was this defenseless.

“I don't expect you to return my sentiments. You are safe.”

Dolt that he was, he said nothing, and soon he felt her even breathing against his back. He put his hand over hers, which was resting on his waist.

Only then did he whisper what he could not in good conscience say aloud. “I love you, too. God help me, but I love you, too.”

H
e never promised her a rose garden…

When Ingrith was young, she loved to climb trees. One time she even hung from a limb by her knees, her
gunna
fallen down to cover her face, and the summer breeze warm on her nether parts.

But she was a girling no more, and she couldn't recall the last time she'd climbed anything higher than a bush. Still, she was hanging, and—

Her eyes flew open, and she saw by the torchlight that John was lying between her legs. Correction. John was kneeling between her legs, and her knees were in the shameful position of hanging from his bare shoulders.

“What?” she shreiked. “This is surely perverted. Do not try to convince me it is not. Put my legs back down, you…you lecherous lout.”

“Shhh. Do not wake the horses. I am just doing a bit of exploring myself.” He blew a warm breath against her exposed cleft.

She realized then where the breeze of her dream
had come from. The lackwit was the windbag at her most intimate parts.

“See. There is this cave here that begs exploring. But first an expert explorer must brave the slick water of the channel that protects the cave opening.”

She wanted to protest his actions, to get her legs down to a modest position, but she burst out laughing.
I never realized that sex could be fun.
Until, that is, said explorer's tongue did a long, lapping survey of the wet folds.
I am definitely not laughing now.
“Oooooh,” she groaned.

“You like that, do you?”

She refused to answer, just wallowed in the erotic skills of his tongue and, yea, his teeth, too.

“Hark! I see danger up ahead. A little boulder.”

“A what?”

He parted her folds wider with his fingers, then flicked that nubbin of pleasure she had only discovered under John's tutelage.
Oh, that boulder.
She was about to marvel to him that she was almost thirty and one and was just now discovering her body parts when he began to suck softly on that bud of pleasure and at the same time stuck a long finger inside her.

Holy Thor! Instant peaking!
“Oops!” she said, mortally embarrassed at her hasty, wanton response.

“Oops indeed!” He grinned. “Now, my dear, there is something I have wanted to do ever since you forced me to shave my head.”

“As if I could force you to do…aaarrgh! Get your head out of there.”

He was rubbing his shaved head against her slick folds and the erect bud. The short bristles caused the most incredible friction. To her shock, she peaked. Again.
Is there a crack in the earth where I can fall in?

He chuckled and rose to his knees. There was an embarrassing dampness on his fool head.

Yea, a big wide crevice where I can hide my shame for an aeon or so.
“Where do you learn these things?”

“Needs must,” he said. “When you cannot have children, you are forced to be inventive.”

“But how—” Her question was cut off. In fact, she forgot what she wanted to ask as he cupped her buttocks and slid his erect phallus into her tight inner channel, which welcomed him in its usual way. With her muscles clutching him a heated vise.
Is there any pleasure in the world, for a woman, that matches this fullness…this sense of becoming one with the man you love? I cannot believe my sisters never told me. All they ever mentioned was men's dangly parts that turn from snake to pole in a matter of seconds. I will have a few words for them, to be sure.

He made a hissing sound through gritted teeth, which she assumed meant that he was equally aroused. “You are incredible.”

“I am?” She wanted to participate in this mating but was unable to do so with her legs locked wide and her knees still planted on his shoulders. It
was a vulnerable position, and she did not like giving up all this control. Not one bit.

Liar!
her conscience immediately chided. She was liking it too much. “Release my legs so I may participate,” she demanded.

“Participate all you want, but you are not lowering your legs. Touch your breasts while I swive you, Ingrith.”

Did he actually say…?
“What? Nay, I will no—”

Even as he was buried inside her, he took her hands and encouraged them to play with her own breasts. She had not realized that she could pleasure herself in this way.

“That's the way, sweetling.”

Unbelievable!
Ingrith felt as if she were floating above her own body and could not believe that wild, uninhibited creature was her.

Whilst she examined her nipples with tentative fingers, he pummeled her below with deliberately long and slow thrusts, deeper than before because of the tilt of her body, she assumed. “It is hard concentrating on two titillations at once, you brute. Halt and let me catch up.”

“Titillations!” He laughed, a joyous sound coming from a man who had so little humor in his life. “Do not concentrate then. Just let it happen.”

“In other words, give up control,” she gasped out.

“Exactly.”

As John worked his magic strokes in her, she
admired his body with her own magic. Caressing his wide shoulders. His sensitive paps. The hard ridges of his abdomen. The well defined muscles of his arms, which were braced on either side of her. His blue eyes were stormy with arousal under half-shuttered lids. His deliciously full mouth was parted as he panted with excitement.

This time, she rose to an even higher peak and surrendered to all the sensations assaulting her. A heated flush covered her from forehead to toes. Blood thickened and rushed to her female parts. Breasts swelled and ached. And then, as his lunges became shorter and harder, she arched up, mewling little cries of agony…a sensuous agony. She could scarce see John through the haze of her need.

And then…and then it came with a wild shattering. The scorching heat stemmed from the place where they were joined, but it was flaring out to all her extremities. She must have fainted, because when she came to consciousness, she was lying on her side in his arms, and he was making soothing sounds of comfort.

“Did you peak?” she asked.

He chuckled and kissed the top of her head. “Yea, I did.”

“In the straw?”

“Of course.”

Ingrith might not know exactly what it was like to complete the sex act, but her woman instincts
knew and missed having him spill himself inside her body. How much more incomplete it must feel for him. “Oh, John!” she started to say.

At the same time, he started, “About what you said earlier…”

She knew that he referred to her declaration of love, a revelation she should have kept to herself with a man who shunned such emotion.

“Ahem!”

They both jarred to attention, finding Hamr leaning over the stall rail. Dawn light was coming into the stable. She quickly grabbed for the blanket, almost knocking John over in her attempt to tug it out from under him. When she was covered, she ducked her head with embarrassment. How long had the rogue been standing there? She feared she knew the answer.

John had already risen and was donning his
braies
. “How did you find me here? And what is so bloody urgent that you had to disturb me?”

“I found you because all the stable hands were sleeping in the cow byre after you ordered them out of the stable last night. And, yea, it is urgent.”

“Oh, my gods! Is it Henry?”

“Nay,” Hamr assured her. “But Loncaster has struck.”

She and John both stiffened with dread.

“You know that rose garden you have on the south boundary of the estate?”

She and John exchanged glances.

“Yea, what of it?” John asked. He'd already pulled his tunic over his head and was fastening a braided belt around his waist.

“Burnt to a crisp.”

 

You could say he was the Marquis de Hawk…

For the past three days, Ingrith had become a regular watering pot, leaking tears all over the place. All because of his ruined rose garden.

“Ingrith, it was only flowers. It can be replaced. No one was injured. We must count our blessings.” He said this to her as she knelt in the burnt flower field along with two gardeners. They were pruning back the plants to see if any could be saved.

Some could.

Most could not.

Actually, this reprehensible act of Loncaster's enraged him. And there was no doubt in his mind that the Saxon commander had done the deed, or leastways his men had.
How dare he destroy my personal property? Even worse, what or whom will the spineless cur target next?
But he was a methodical man. He did not act impulsively…well, not usually, he thought, his one act of recklessness staring at him through beautiful blue eyes.

“But you told me yourself that it took years to gather these roses, and that some of them are very rare. You must be devastated.”

Bloody hell! She's weeping for me.
He shrugged.
“'Tis not seemly for you to be digging in the dirt like a laborer.”

“Pfff! You surely planted some of these yourself.”

He would tell her that it was different for a man, but he'd lost that argument before. “Come back to the keep, Ingrith. A hundred of my men have arrived from Gravely, and your new cook is threatening a kitchen revolt.”

“Oh,” she said brightly, standing and rubbing her dirty hands on her dirty apron. If there was anything to grab her attention, it was a challenge…better yet, a cooking challenge.

She was a remarkable woman in so many ways. How could he have not seen that in the past? Her blonde hair hung in a single braid down her back. A few new freckles dotted her nose from being in the sun. Her skin glowed with good health. In essence, she looked comely beyond all reason to him, especially since he knew what was hidden underneath her garments.

“I brought my own horse.” She pointed to a gentle mare tethered to a stake in the ground. Apparently, she'd been talking whilst he'd been only half attending.

He went over and saddled the horse for her. Before helping her mount, though, he took her into his arms and inhaled her sweet scent. Even so, he said, “You smell like dirt.”

“You smell like horse.”

He pinched her rump playfully.
Playfully? By thunder! When did I turn playful?

She pinched him back…on his rump, independent wench that she was.

They smiled at each other.

He leaned down then, meaning only to give her a quick kiss, but her softness drew him in, and he was soon tongue kissing her with fervor. And she was returning the favor, bless her Viking soul.

It was only the awareness that they were being watched by the two gardeners that made him stop, finally. “I missed you,” he said, putting her away from him. And, Lord help him, she was staring back at him with glazed passion in her blue eyes. How he enjoyed her quick arousals!

“How could you miss me? I just left your bed at dawn, and it is scarce noon now.”

He put out cupped hands to help her mount her horse. She rode astride, with her
gunna
bunched between her legs. Never let it be said that Ingrith did things in the usual female way.

“I cannot get enough of you, and you know it,” he replied. “Methinks you and I need a sennight or two in bed without disturbance.”

“And then you will have enough of me and send me on my merry way?” He could tell she regretted blurting out that question even before she added, “Forget I asked that.”

John saw the brief flash of pain on Ingrith's
face. She pretended that his resistance to marriage didn't matter, but it must. He should let her go. Let her find a man who could offer marriage, give her children. But he could not. He just could not.

On the other hand, Ingrith had said on more than one occasion that she was resigned to not having children, that at her age she no longer expected to marry. Mayhap they could come to an arrangement. Mayhap she could be content with her menagerie of orphans. Mayhap marriage was not impossible. Mayhap—

“You're looking very serious,” she said, riding alongside him.

“I have a lot on my mind. Now that we have additional men here, I can feel secure in leaving.”

“What will you do when you find Loncaster?”

“I'd like to kill him outright, but he is the king's man. In the best case, we would capture him and take him to the Witan for trial. If that doesn't work, we will take matters into our own hands. Either way, he will be punished.”

“I am divided in my thinking about Loncaster's fate. On the one hand, being drawn and quartered seems a perfect punishment for him. On the other hand, I wish we could just let him go. I know he burnt the orphanage and your rose fields, but now that we know how dangerous he is, we can be better prepared. Defense is the best weapon betimes. Then again, a sword to his heart would not come amiss.”

He noticed how often she used “we,” and oddly, he didn't mind.

“And I can always go to the Norselands with the children. Henry would be safe there.” She made this offer through quivering lips.

It was his cue to say that he didn't want her to leave, but once again guilt hammered at him, and his confused brain wavered.

If Ingrith thought she was divided in her thinking, she ought to look inside his muddled head.

Could a woman really accept the kind of marriage he could offer? He doubted it. Eventually it would wear thin. Or when contemplating a lifetime of lovemaking with one woman, especially one as responsive as Ingrith, there might be a time when he was so overwhelmed in the bedplay that he failed to pull out in time. Odds were not in his favor.

He was so confused, but now was not the time for that particular matter. “Henry is going to be a problem that needs resolving,” he told her. “He is the king's son, and a man has a right to his own blood. Don't give me that angry look. I'm not suggesting that you turn the boy over to Loncaster, but ‘kidnapping' is not an answer either, and believe you me, taking a royal child out of the country would be considered a crime.”
Besides that, I do not want you to leave. Leastways, not yet.