Heart's Ease (The Northwomen Sagas Book 2) (22 page)

He had yet to ask her if this was what she wanted. She hoped he would not.

This was not a pale shadow of what they’d had before, which had been gentle and peaceful, which had been innocent. This was dark and bitter, full of all that had happened. This was not a giving; Olga had nothing left to give, and perhaps that was true for Leif as well. On both their parts, this was a taking.

And yet, in its ferocity, their love still pulsed, deep and steady.

As his mouth ravaged hers, and she returned the punishment, Olga plunged her hands between them and pulled the lacing of his breeches loose. She could feel his sex, forged iron under her hands, and as soon as he was free of his leather, she shifted and hiked her skirts up. She clutched him hard in her hand and dropped down onto him, impaling herself so fast and deep that Leif tore his mouth from hers, threw back his head, and roared.

She had taken him too deeply. It hurt her, felt almost as if he were piercing her, but she didn’t care. She wanted it to hurt. She wanted this pain to cleanse the other from her mind and heart and spirit. She wanted to feel him inside her for days, for weeks if that were possible. For the rest of her life.

Flexing on him as hard as she could, Olga bit down on her own lip and sought the pain. Every rough bounce brought a groan from Leif that sounded like she had taken his guts in her clenched fist, and she was glad of that, too. She wanted him to hurt like she did. She wanted him to remember this, to feel it, forever.

He brought his head forward and jerked the neckline of her underdress over her shoulder, baring her breast. Then his arms clamped around her again and he pushed her backward until she was arched over the vise of his hold. Still, she rocked and bounced with as much power as she could call up, and when he dropped his bearded mouth on her breast and sucked hard, she tangled her hands in his hair again and pulled until she could feel the strands popping free. He made that animal noise again and sucked harder.

Olga was violently dizzy; the swirl of emotion and sensation, this driving compulsion for the pain that was bound up in her still-consuming love and need of him, the man she had thought him to be, was more than her unstable world could withstand. Her heart skittered in her chest like a snared rabbit. Her stomach spun and flopped. And through it all, all around her, was the scent and touch and sound and taste of Leif. Her love.

Suddenly, the pain she needed became something else. She still ached viciously, but now she could feel pleasure rise up and coil around it—not the pleasure in the pain, that twisted need that had come upon her, but the pleasure she had known with him before. She felt the molten warmth soak her joints and make her loose. She felt her body open for him, seeking more, wanting everything.

The room swam around her, and Olga could no longer be sure that anything that was happening was truly happening. In the dark room, all of this could have been smoke and ash.

Leif’s hands gentled and smoothed down her back until he gripped her bottom in his palms. In that hold, he took control of her brutal rhythm, changed it to something no less intense but without that bruising pain she had sought. He left her breast and claimed her mouth again, and this kiss bore only the passion of need. The fire of the pain was gone.

The thing that had clutched at her, made her want them to hurt each other like this, was gone. It was just them. She was in Leif’s arms, twined around him. And for one short moment, a heartbeat only, she felt warm and safe, home in his embrace.

Her release came over her, wave after wave of it, until she thought she would truly drown. She broke free of his kiss and hooked her arms around his neck, burying her face against his neck. The silk of his hair stroked her cheeks. And still he moved her on him, his hands yanking her to and fro, to and fro, until he threw himself—and her with him—backward and his hips came up off the floor. He groaned and groaned, one long, anguished sound that barely left his throat but rumbled sharply against her chest.

Then he went slack, and they lay on the floor, next to her bed, in her still-dark house, tangled together and panting like hounds.

“
Unistan sinust nii päeval kui ööl
,” Leif gasped as his arms came up to cradle her to his chest. “
Ma armastan sind. Ma armastan sind
.
Igavesti
.”

Too tired to think of anything, still dizzy and breathless, Olga left his beautiful words in the air and closed her eyes.

“Olga?”

Her weight had settled fully on him, and her body had become soft and yielding. Leif might have worried, if the position he’d found himself in hadn’t been so comfortable and familiar. She had fallen asleep on his chest, while they were still joined, while he had not yet gone soft. They’d slept like this often in Estland—she snuggled on his chest, his arms around her—though normally he had been propped against the stead of her small bed.

Perhaps the rough floor of her Karlsa house was even less inviting a place to sleep, but he was with Olga, he had her in his arms, and he would have lain on spikes and called it perfect.

He didn’t understand what had just happened between them. He didn’t know if he’d been forgiven, if she was with him, if anything had, in fact, truly changed. What they’d done was different from what they’d had before; it was angry and painful, and she had been so unlike herself that Leif felt unmoored.

It had hurt her, what they’d done. He’d seen it, and he’d seen her want it, seen her—felt her—move to
make
it hurt, and he didn’t understand. She’d found pleasure, too, he knew that. He could still feel the memory of her throbbing sheath.

He didn’t understand, and he knew some worry because of it.

But he was lying with Olga in his arms. Their bodies were joined, the scent of their coupling hung in the air around them, and she slept quietly on his chest. They could not have been more close, in physical space at least, and it was more than Leif had hoped to have again in his life.

For now, in this waning dark, it was enough. He turned his head, burying his nose in the tousled braids of her hair, and kissed her temple. Then he closed his eyes.

~oOo~

“
Oh
! Olga?
Oh!”

Leif woke at the young voice before Olga did. The room had brightened with the day, and sun pushed through the edges of the shutters. A wide bolt of light lay over the floor. He craned his neck to look behind him and saw a small pair of boots and the hem of a hangerock. Further investigation showed that the voice belonged to a pretty young woman with hair like fire.

“Hello,” he said, and Olga stirred at his voice.

The girl blinked. “You are Jarl Leif.” She dropped her head in deference, which Leif found absurd, considering the circumstances of the moment.

Olga tensed in his arms and sat up with a gasp. She was exposed, her gowns rumpled at her waist, and she noticed it at the same moment that he did and crossed her arms over her chest.

“Frida!” she snapped.

“Forgive me. I…I’ll…forgive me.” The girl backed to the open front door and left.

Leif turned back and looked up at Olga. He smiled, but she wasn’t looking at his face. She stared instead at his chest.

“You bleed.”

He had forgotten about the way this encounter had begun. Now, remembering, he knew an ache in his chest, sharper and more physical than the one that always resided there. It was nothing important, though, and he doubted he still bled. But he lifted his head to regard his chest and saw the stain of blood on his tunic. When he turned back to Olga, he saw the dried smears over her bare chest and shoulder, too.

“It’s of no consequence.”

She didn’t like that, and he saw the hard sheen of offense in her eyes. Abruptly, she yanked her underdress back over her shoulders and cast her eyes about for the brooches to her hangerock. Leif lay still and watched her until she pushed off from him and stood.

He had softened and fallen from her body while they’d slept, but he’d hardened again since waking, with the natural thickness that came in the morning, and with the press of her bare mound on him. Even in this awkward moment, his body could not resist her any more than his heart could.

As she affixed her brooches, she glanced down at his ready member and then looked away. “I will check your wound.”

He stuffed himself into his breeches and tied his lacing before he sat up. “It needs no care. Olga…”

“I will check your wound,” she said again. “Come sit.”

He stood and went to the stool she’d indicated, but he remained standing, towering over her. When she finally looked up at his face, he lifted his hand to brush loose strands of hair from her eyes, but she flinched away from his touch.

No, then. What had happened between them in the dark hours had not been a true unity.

“Sit. Remove your tunic.”

He obeyed. As he laid the tunic across his lap, he asked, “Will you not speak with me?”

Perhaps she had not heard him. She was staring at his chest, but her attention was not on the fresh, relatively small wound over the many others. She reached out and traced the wide scar that sliced him from side to side, and not until her fingertips met the clotted blood of a newly-forming scab did her eyes shift to his.

“How many times have you almost died?” she whispered.

“A few. But I’ve known no pain from scars such as these as great as the pain I’ve known since I lost you.” He grabbed her hands and held them to his chest. “Olga, I love you. I want you to come to Geitland with me. Sit at my side as my wife. Marry me.”

Their eyes locked, and Leif tried to read love or hope or some kind of encouragement in her dark depths. All he saw was turmoil.

She pulled her hands free and went to a table against the front wall of the room. When she came back, she had a bowl of water and a clean linen, and he sat back and let her tend to the wound they had made.

In silence, she washed his chest and examined the cut. She cleaned it and daubed a creamy green paste, then laid a clean strip of linen over that.

When she turned away, Leif grabbed her hand. “Olga. Will you not answer me? Have I lost your love entirely?”

She peered into his face, and he knew that at last, at least, she would answer—and that he wouldn’t like it.

“I love you. I gave you all the love I had to give, and it is yours forever. But the trust I gave you with it is destroyed, and I have no more left of that. I am glad you came to me in the night. I’m not sorry for what we did, but now we are at our end.”

It was nothing he hadn’t believed already, but to hear the words aloud, from her lips, was like that blade of hers striking its target.

But Leif was angry, too, as he’d been with Vali. He had not broken faith with anyone he loved. He had made mistakes, yes, and he’d not seen far enough to predict the many dark consequences of that last night in Estland, but only he had been acting to control the damage Åke would have done.

“I don’t know how to make you see that I didn’t betray you. You say I left you before Åke arrived, but
that is not true
. I could not stay, and you could not leave. We decided that
together
, and it broke my heart. I was tortured by the loss of you, but what I ended between us purposefully that night was only a better goodbye than the one we knew was coming. I needed to keep you distant from him, and that meant staying away myself. You never left my thoughts. I told you all this then.”

“Yes, you did. And yet I was left to the whims of savage men.”

The thought of Geir assailing her had Leif wishing the man still lived so that he could kill him in his own way. But if she’d complied with his wish, she wouldn’t have been in Geir’s path. “I would avenge you if I could. I would cut off every part of him that touched you and feed it to the swine. But I wanted you to leave the castle. You chose not to.”

Anger flashed in her eyes. “The village was no more safe. My brothers died in the village. Hundreds died there.”

“That was my only error, and my regret for it is deep. I should have seen that Toomas would break the peace, but I had no time to think through every chance.” He squeezed her hands. “I am sorry that your brothers were lost. I’m sorry for your pain. I truly thought the village would be safe. But Olga, I have not betrayed your trust in me. If it is destroyed, it’s your anger that ruined it.”

That was the truth of it. She would not forgive him. She didn’t love him enough to offer him that.

She shook her head. “It is no matter. It is dead. I will not go with you. I will not marry you.”

He dropped his head with the weight of his regret. “And yet you say you still love me.”

“As much as ever I have. I would that I did not, but I have no choice in the matter.”

That answer did little to offer ease. Leif sighed and let her hand go. As he had with Vali, he understood that he’d reached the end of his atonement, the end of his power to change a heart and mind. Now, the option he had left was only to leave her to her own choice and accept the consequence. “Then the unhappiness we both feel henceforth
is
your choice.” He stood and pulled his tunic on. “I will love you as long as my soul lives. That is my vow to you. But I’ll not vex you further.”

He bent low, and she tipped her head as if expecting his kiss. Instead, he rested his forehead on hers. “
Ma armastan sind
,” he whispered.

He wanted the last time he could tell her he loved her to be in her own words.

~oOo~

Later that morning, Leif sat in the hall with Vali, Brenna, Orm, Bjarke, Harald, and Jaan. Until this meeting, Leif had not comprehended how fully he’d been exiled from the family he’d been part of in Estland. Of the few who had survived since that time, only Astrid was with him in Geitland. Only they two and Brenna had been sworn to Åke. The others had been Snorri’s men or Estlanders, and they were all here in Karlsa. They made up Vali’s inner circle.

He had known this in his mind, of course, but until this moment, a guest in Karlsa, shunned by Olga, sitting in Vali’s hall as the outsider, he’d not felt it so keenly.

They all regarded him as an outsider, and even those who had fought with him against Calder and his raiders had picked up Vali’s skepticism.

But he was done with defending himself, done with apologies. Karlsa and Geitland were allies, and that would have to do until and unless Vali let the past go—or broke the alliance.

And then they would be enemies.

Now, he unrolled a piece of thin, pale hide until it took up the middle of the table. Vali and the others all leaned in.

“This is like the table in Estland,” Brenna noted.

“Yes. When Calder and the ships returned, they came very late—winter was nigh. Ulv told that they had gone south, meaning to raid there, but a storm took them and turned them west. They thought they were lost. But they struck land. It was settled, but by people who had never seen raiders before. Unprotected. With a stone building filled with gold and jewels, nearly so much as Prince Vladimir’s bounty, and no blade in sight to guard it. They found this among the plunder, but they didn’t know what it was. Ulv kept it because he thought it pretty.” He smoothed his hand over the lines and shapes on the hide. “But Astrid and I knew. You know.”