Page 32 of The Viking’s Captive

He shrugged. “My sister Adela used to play the lute. It just reminded me of a time …” He shrugged again. “It just reminded me,” he said with a sigh.

“And so, what do you think of my sisters?”

His gaze swept over her then, bemused. Taking in her manly attire, no doubt. And her bigness.

She raised her chin. She would not bow under any man’s condemnation. She was who she was. So there!

Grasping one of her braids in his hand, he tugged her closer. “Your sisters are beautiful … each and every one of them in her own way.”

She blinked, hoping her disappointment did not show. What was wrong with her? Of course he considered her sisters beautiful. Everyone did. Why had she even asked? Why had she invited the comparison?

He tugged more on her braid till she was forced to lean forward from her chair, till she was so close she could smell the soft soap on his skin and the mead on his breath.

“If you are asking, however, which one I would choose to share my bed furs for a night … if I could renegotiate our pact …”

She wanted to protest and tell him that that wasn’t what she’d meant at all, but it was. It was, may the gods have pity on her pathetic soul.

He brushed his lips against hers … a whisper of a kiss, but so powerful she nigh shook from the aftereffects. Like fire it was. Sweet fire.

And then he finished his statement.

“… I would still choose you.”

It was only a kiss…

Adam’s bedchamber door swung open two hours later without anyone having knocked. At first he thought it might be Alrek and his brood back again, wanting to do him another unwanted, disaster-ending favor, like the recent hose laundering in which his hose had become food for several hunting dogs. But, nay, it was Tyra this time.

He looked up from his book, which he was reading by candle light … a copy of Hippocrates’s journal outlining head wounds and how they might be treated by trepanation.

“You kissed me,” Tyra charged. She was wearing some kind of sleepwear … a voluminous chemise of white linen, which probably belonged to one of her sisters because the sleeves were too short and the hem fell about mid-calf. Her pale blond hair was loose and wild about her enraged face.

She was beautiful.

Nay, not beautiful.

Different?

Sensual?

Spectacular?

He couldn’t quite come up with the proper word to describe her. She was not pretty, by any definition, but she was definitely attractive … to him, leastways.

In answer to her kissing charge, though, he merely said, “Yea, I did.”

“Don’t do it again.”

“Why?”

“Because … because that’s not what I agreed to.”

He tapped a forefinger against his lips, which were pressed together to avoid smiling. “Methinks kissing would be good practice for nude snuggling in the bed furs. Don’t you?”

“Oh … oh … oh!” she sputtered.

He was willing to wager that she rarely, if ever, sputtered in front of her fighting men. That must mean he was different in her mind. That could be a good thing. Like her being different was a good thing to him.

“Wouldst like to try again? Practice-kissing, I mean,” he offered in his most conciliatory tone, as if he were offering to do her a big favor, when in fact he would be the one most favored by such an act. The woman, despite all her manly attributes, did have the most irresistible, kis-some lips. “In truth, that barely counted as a kiss. ‘Twas a mere brush of skin against skin. A true kiss betwixt a man and woman should last much longer.”