Page 14 of The Last Viking

“Hmpfh!”

“Would it beggar your household if I ate one of your apples?” he added.

“Oh, really! That’s not the point.”

“Blessed Thor, woman talk makes my head ache. I’m tired and hungry and…lusty. If I must needs listen to nagging—and, yea I said nagging; ’tis what most females mean when they say, ‘let’s talk’—I want to have at least one of my appetites satisfied first.”

The wench’s open mouth snapped shut.

He smiled inwardly. Really, the wench was so easy to bait. No challenge at all to his superior talents. “Well, what do you want to discuss?” he prodded, tossing the fruit core into the exact center of the flames, where it proceeded to sizzle and throw off the delicious autumn scent of apples. She stood behind the bed-thing, glaring at him. “And, for the love of Freya, sit down so I don’t have to crane my neck up to see you.”

Before she had a chance to protest, he reached over his shoulder, seized her wrist, and yanked her over the cushioned backboard of the bed-thing and onto his lap, face downward. In the process, he got a close-up view of her rump before she righted herself.

His staff came immediately to attention. But then, he’d always had a fondness for a well-rounded female rump.

After he adjusted her squirming body to sit on his lap, he noticed her breasts pressing against the sheer silk of her shert. Not that he hadn’t noticed those same breasts a short time ago in the showering chamber.

“Stop looking at me like that,” she sputtered, slapping at his roving hands.

But he couldn’t stop looking, or roving, although he did try to conceal the smile that tugged at his lips. Next to a firm, shapely bottom, he did like a woman’s breasts.

In fact, he and his brothers had engaged in a profound discussion on the subject one time—they’d been drunk—and decided that women’s breasts were a gift to men from the gods. Jorund and Magnus had said that the bigger the tits the better—more to hold onto, or some such—but he believed there was allure in all sizes and said so loudly.

Then, with the wisdom gleaned from a tun of mead, they’d moved on to the disadvantages of bedding comely wenches.

“Winsome women are too full of themselves,” Magnus had declared with a loud belch. Odd that the belch remained so vivid in his mind. “They require an abundance of flattering afore they’ll part their legs.”

“And plain women try harder to please,” Geirolf had added sagely. He couldn’t remember if he’d belched or not.

“Yea, but there is naught better than a buxom wench who has enthusiasm for the bed-sport.” Jorund had sighed. At the time, his brother had been smitten with the fair Else, a dairy maid, who was giving him a merry chase.

His mother, Lady Asgar, had overheard the conversation and boxed all their ears, calling them “crude, disgusting oafs.”

“You crude, disgusting oaf,” Merry-Death hissed at him, jarring him back to the present. “Take your hands off of me.”

“Why?” He maintained an armlock around her upper body, pressing her to his bare chest with one hand, while he released the pins from her hair with the other and raked out the silken strands, down her back, over her shoulders, as far as the mounds in question. “I mislike talking intimately to a woman who has her hair skinned back like a nun,” he said thickly as he buried his face in the fragrant tresses. She smelled like drek.

Merry-Death gasped.

“Do you use drek on your nether hair as well?” he inquired idly as he tasted the sweet skin at the curve of her neck.

She gasped again.

Taking her gasps as encouragement, he nuzzled her neck, then moved upward. First, he nipped the sensitive lobe of her ear with his teeth, then began to explore the inner whorls with the tip of his tongue.

The wench went stiff with shock.

He was stiff, too, but not from shock.

Meredith fought against the erotic lethargy that pulled at her senses. She felt the clasp of Rolf’s belt pressing into her hip with an odd heat and wondered if it might really be a magic talisman. There was no other explanation for her attraction to such a crude man with overly sensual lips and octopus hands. Nor was there any logical accounting for an educated woman such as herself surrendering to raw impulsive lust.

But it felt so good. And it had been so long.

“No!” she insisted, mustering resistance. She managed to slip out of his arms to the other side of the sofa. Panting, she folded her arms across her breasts to hide her signs of arousal.

Rolf gazed at her, his chin lifted defiantly, passion hazing his amber-brown eyes. Then he slowly let out a pent-up breath and waited tautly for her next move.

“Who…are…you?” she asked.