Page 85 of Viking Unchained

“Then who will take over the vineyard when I am gone?”

“Maybe Marie.” Torolf grinned at his scowling father.

“Marie is only seventeen years old,” he scoffed.

“She won’t be seventeen forever.”

“I would think growing grapes has a lot in common with farming,” Lydia’s father interjected.

“It does. My sons still do not understand that I can take soil in hand and tell if it is good for growing by smell and taste. There is no modern test better than the human tongue. Fertile soil has its own taste.”

Her father nodded.

“Yuck! Do they eat dirt?” Mike wanted to know.

“Betimes.” Magnus reached across the table and ruffled Mike’s hair. He looked warmly at Mike, then Finn, and Lydia knew he saw the resemblance, as her father and mother did, too.

“How about you, Finn?” her father asked. “Do you have any taste for farming?”

“Daaaaad!” She was embarrassed that her father was so overtly thinking that if Lydia married Finn they might ultimately take over Mill Pond Farm, as Dave had never been inclined to do. Finn would probably get the same reaction from Dave’s parents tomorrow.

“What?” Her father played the innocent. “I was just asking.”

“Nay, I will not be a farmer. I hope to become a SEAL.”

And that was that.

Lydia tried to pull her hand from his, but he held on to her, tightly.

“What do you do with all your manure?” Magnus asked her father.

The question stunned everyone.

Except Mike.

"Manure is cow poop,” Mike announced in case anyone didn’t know.

Magnus’s sons just grinned, knowing their father’s obsession with anything agrarian, even cow poop.

“We spread it on the fields. And Mary likes it for her rose bushes and vegetable garden. We have tomatoes big as saucers, and her roses win ribbons at the fair every year.” Her father smiled at her mother, the love apparent between the two of them, even after all these years. That’s what she had thought she would have one day. If it hadn’t been for the military . . .

She snuck a glance at Finn and saw him watching her parents, too.

“Are you a Viking, too?” Mike asked Finn. He must have picked up that word from Magnus’s conversation.

“That I am.” Finn ruffled the boy’s hair, a loving gesture that no one missed.

“I have a book called The Viking Who Cried. Wanna read it with me?”

“Well, I do not know if that is a good name for a story about a fierce Viking man.”

Mike giggled. “It’s not about a Viking man. It’s about a Viking boy who ran away on a longship, and then he misses his mommy. That’s why he was cryin’.”

“Oh, well, then, it sounds like a fine story.”

“Why don’t I take Mikey up for his bath while you people talk about . . . other things,” her mother offered. “I can do the dishes when I come back down.”

“Thanks, Mom, but I can handle the dishes.”