Sandra Hill (5 page)

“Oh, I daresay I will be here for
many
nights,” he drawled. “Leastways, till my ship is completed.”

“That’s what you think,” she retorted at the interruption. Then, flustered at the prospect of all those nights he alluded to, she went on, “I’ll admit that ‘Love with a Warm Viking’ is looking better and better. And hard as it is for me to believe, I’m actually
considering a meaningless sexual encounter. It’s just that I need some answers first.”

His lips twitched before he smiled lazily at her.

She hated it when he smiled lazily at her.

“Warm Viking?” he scoffed. “My lady, this Viking is hot.”

“Unleash your tongue,” he said. “I am listening.”

After throwing two more logs on the fire and stoking it back to life with a poker, he sank down onto the soft cushions of a narrow, bedlike structure facing the fireplace. Propping his long legs on the low table in front, he took an apple from the bowl in its center and began to chomp with a relish born of near starvation. That plate of “worms” she’d given him for dinner had done naught to fill his empty stomach.

When he looked up, Merry-Death was gaping at him and the half-eaten apple.

“What? You ne’er saw a man eat an apple?”

“Of course, I’ve seen a man eat an apple. It’s just that you make yourself at home…
in my home
. You don’t even wait to be asked if you’d like to sit down or eat or…whatever.” The last word came out with a tiny embarrassed squeal.

She couldn’t fool him. He knew why the wench was skittish. She was thinking about the pleasuring to come. Like a mare in heat, her body made ready for their coupling.

“By your leave, may I sit down, Merry-Death?” he inquired with amusement.

“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.

“Geirolf Ericsson,” he snapped, clenching and unclenching his fists, as if he could barely contain his roiling passions.

Meredith couldn’t recall a time when a man seemed to want her so much. It was a heady compliment. “Where are you from?”

“Hordaland.”

There he went again with those ancient words. Why didn’t he just say the southwestern section of Norway—
old
Norway, to be specific? “How did you get here?” She tried not to stare at the somehow erotic movement of his flexing fingers.

“My ship wrecked,” he said brusquely, obviously impatient with questions that interfered with his seductive plans, “and then I climbed the bloody cliffside to your keep.”

He was repeating all the things he’d told her before. But maybe he just had his story down pat.

She ignored his sizzling glance, which pretty much said,
Now can I jump your bones?
“Who sent you?”

He shrugged.

“Are you a shipbuilder?”

He nodded, and licked his lips slowly.

And very nice lips they were, too. And his tongue wasn’t so bad, either.
Oh, geez! Is he anticipating my questions winding down? Why am I having so much trouble concentrating? Could hormone overload cause a dumbing-down syndrome?
“Did you come here to finish the longboat project?” Meredith surprised herself
by being able to put more than two words together intelligibly.

He hesitated, and then answered, “Yea, I believe that is why I was sent here.”

“And you really can build a Viking longship?”

He flashed her an affronted glare. “Did I not say so afore?”

“How long would it take you to complete the project?”

“Well, from what I have seen, I would say that half of the work already done will have to be dismantled. Once that is—”

“It most definitely will not be dismantled.”

“My lady,” he said with exasperation, “do you have any intention of placing that vessel on water?”

“Of course.”

“It will sink.”

Her eyes narrowed angrily. “My grandfather was an expert builder. Are you saying he was incompetent?”

“Was he an expert sailor?”

“Well, no,” she admitted, “but—”

“Your grandsire nailed the overlapping oak planks together adequately, but he didn’t stuff the joints properly with rope. The ship is not watertight.”

She inhaled sharply at that news.

“There is a saying in my land, ‘
Oft veltir lítil þúfa þungu hlassi
.’”

She raised a brow, refusing to ask what he meant, or acknowledge his fluency in Old Norse.

“A small leak will sink a great ship,” he translated. “And here’s another worry for you: The keel is off-center.”

“Keel?”

“The timber beam that forms the central spine on
the bottom of the ship. It is the most important element in a ship’s frame. The boat will list if it’s off-center.”

Despite his dire prognosis, a sense of relief filled Meredith. Rolf did seem to know his craft.

“I will build this Viking ship for you, Merry-Death,” he assured her, “but it will be done my way, or not at all.”

What an arrogant, overconfident man! But she had no other choice right now. If he knew even half what he claimed, he would be perfect for the job. However, there was no way she’d let him control this project. She just wouldn’t tell him that yet.

“Why is this ship so important to you, Merry-Death?”

His feet were still propped on her coffee table, and one long arm stretched along the back of the sofa, where his fingers played with the strands of hair lying on her shoulder. She wished he’d stop doing that. It unnerved her. Distracted her from the serious business at hand. Made her think of very unserious things…like, just how hot was a hot Viking?

“Because it was important to my grandfather. He was a professor of medieval studies at the local college with a special interest in Nordic culture.” Once she started talking about her grandfather and the project, she lost her nervousness and the too-consuming awareness of Rolf as a man. Thank God! “All his life, Gramps dreamed about reproducing a Viking longship and actually setting sail, re-enacting one of the Viking voyages. Just like Captain Magnus Andersen did a hundred years ago.”

“You are making my head ache, Merry-Death. Who in bloody hell is Magnus Andersen?”

“Andersen built a replica of the Godstad ship in
1893. To prove how seaworthy a Viking ship was, he sailed it from Norway to Newfoundland in just twenty-eight days, despite several storms. Since boyhood, Gramps was inspired to do the same, in reverse.”

“Was your grandsire of Norse origins?”

She shook her head. “Gramps just believed there was much that could be learned from the Viking way of life, and especially Viking shipbuilding. This is a teaching college, and he always said that planning, hard work, and persistence, the talents learned in actually building a ship…well, all these things would help a student in any walk of life.”

“’Tis true, ’tis true,” Rolf agreed, nodding his head.

“Gramps died before he could complete his dream.” She wiped her eyes, then looked at Rolf with determination. “But I’m going to complete the project for him.”

“I understand.”

“You do? No one else does. Certainly not my parents, or my ex-husband.”

“Though I am loathe to say so, you and I have much in common. Like your grandsire, my father gave me a mission. Until it is complete, I cannot rest.”

His perception disconcerted Meredith for a moment. “Well, anyhow, that’s why I’m on a one-year sabbatical from Columbia, where I’m a professor of medieval studies. I’ve taken Gramps’s place on the staff of Oxley College until the Trondheim project is completed.”

Rolf stared at her blankly.

“What?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Half of your words have no meaning to me. What language is this you…
we
are speaking?” He rubbed the clasp of his belt while he spoke, as if for luck, or answers.

“English.”

“It can’t be. I speak both Norse and English, which are much alike, and your words come from neither.”

“Like what words?” Geez, this guy’s games wore thin. Okay, he seemed knowledgeable about shipbuilding, but did he have to keep up the pretense of being a Viking? “Give me an example.”

“Like profess-whore. I can hardly credit you as a whore.”

“I beg your pardon,” she bristled. “Professor is another name for a teacher.”

“Call-ledge?”

She frowned, then laughed. “You mean
college
. That’s a school…usually for young men and women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two.”

“Now I know you speak pure drivel. Men are long past the age of schooling by eighteen. Either they tend their own estates or fight their king’s wars. And women…women are well into breeding by then.”

“Give me a break! Listen, Rolf, I have too many problems to continue with this charade of yours. So, knock it off, and—”

“What is this made-heave-all you prattle about? Did you say you teach made-heave-all? Earlier this evening, you called yourself a dock-whore, and now you claim to be a profess-whore…a woman teacher? I think not.”

Dock-whore? Oh, he means doctor
. She should refuse to answer any more of his absurd questions, but his furrowed brow appeared genuine. Meredith was getting alarmed. He really might be a mental case. Even so, taking a deep breath, she explained, “Medieval refers to the period from the sixth to the sixteenth
century. My specialty is tenth-to twelfth-century Britain.

He made an incoherent sound, which she interpreted as the usual reaction to her devoting her life to such a dull subject.

She raised her chin defensively. “I come from a family of scholars. My grandfather was an expert in early Nordic culture. My parents are famous for late—Middle Age social customs. My brother Jared is an archaeologist who has worked on the Coppergate dig in York and is currently in Norway excavating a Norse farmstead. My sister Jillian makes Jelling-style jewelry.”

Rolf raked his fingers through his hair in confusion. “’Tis puzzling to me.”

“Why?”

“Well, I could accept learned men studying the past, but how can they study the future?”

“What do you mean…the future?”

He threw his hands out impatiently. “Anytime after this year, 997, is the future, is it not?”