Page 147 of The Outlaw Viking

“Is this the orphanage Ubbi spoke of?”

Selik looked surprised. He leaned against the doorjamb, watching her every reaction like a hawk. “Nay, ’tis much too small for that, if you would look closer.”

“Then what?” she asked, puzzled.

“A clinic. For you.” He looked at her with such hope in his eyes, almost childlike in open yearning for approval. “You said once you would like to open your own small hospitium—clinic, I mean—and, well, I did not know exactly what an examination table looked like, but I figured waist-high would be sufficient. And the shelves could hold your healing herbs and receipts. And—”

“You planned my wedding and my clinic? Without asking me first?” She couldn’t help herself. She started to cry.

“You do not like it,” he said, clearly hurt. “Ah, well, ’tis not worth weeping over. Hush now, I only wanted to please you.”

“The clinic is wonderful. It’s you. You’re impossible.”

“I know,” he said with absolutely no guilt.

“Selik, you can’t do underhanded things like this.”

“You did.”

“What do you mean?”

“You kidnapped me when you thought ’twas for my own good. You came after me in Winchester when you thought ’twas for my own good. You even bartered your pain when you thought ’twas for my own good.” Selik said the last words bleakly, his voice full of self-recrimination.

“And you think that excuses your planning my wedding without my knowledge? Because you think it’s for my own good?”

“Yea,” he said and smiled broadly, folding his arms across his chest.

Rain shook her head in wonder. “That’s the most convoluted, twisted logic I’ve ever heard in all my life,” she said, laughing.

“I love you,” he said softly.

She closed her eyes, trying to wipe out Selik’s image saying those wonderful words. She couldn’t. She clenched her fists and scrunched her eyes tighter.

“I love you,” he repeated.

Her pulse raced, and she felt an odd humming in her ears, rather like a wedding march. She opened her eyes and pleaded, “Selik, even if I could forget everything you’ve done, it doesn’t erase the fact that, at the first major injustice that arises, you are going to go off seeking revenge. It’s the kind of man you are.”

He smiled and breathed a deep sigh of relief, as if he’d just won a major battle. “’Tis odd you should mention that.” He pushed her onto a stool by the examining table and laid a heavy parchment in front of her. “There.”

She looked down at the thick paper with the indecipherable scratchings. “Selik, I can’t read medieval English. What is it?”

“A wedding contract.” He ignored her gasp and went on blithely, “I will read it for you.”

She looked up at him in amazement, and the humming in her head grew louder.

“I promise to love you forever, of course.”

“Of course.”

The humming intensified.

“And I will give you a dozen children.”

“A dozen? There are already a dozen children running around out there.”

“Nay, I mean a dozen more of your own.”

She slanted a cynical look up at him.