Heart's Ease (The Northwomen Sagas Book 2) (8 page)

“Put your legs around me.”

She did as he’d asked her—or told her; that didn’t matter now—folding her legs around his waist, and her arms around his neck as well. He held her close, and she could feel the rod of his sex on her bottom. This was no way that she had ever experienced coupling before, but with his heat against her folds, she could imagine it.

She very much could imagine it. So much that she squirmed against him, making them both grunt like beasts.

“I don’t wish to cause you pain, Olga,” he said in that low, roughened voice as he walked to her bed. “You are so small.”

Always he told her how little she was. Until these strange large people had taken over her life, she had never thought herself remarkably small. Skinny, yes, but otherwise, only smallish. But seated as she was in his immense arms, against his broad chest, her thighs stretched around his middle, she indeed felt tiny.

And now, understanding his meaning, she felt a thread of trepidation weave into her desire. What she’d held in her hands would fill her, would go deeper inside than she had room to take. She knew the pain of that, and it could never become pleasure.

She found his eyes and let him see her dawning fear. But he smiled. “If you want this, I know a way. But you must lead us.”

“I…I don’t know how.”

“I will show you.” He sat on the side of her bed. Olga realized then that her bed, like her body, was too small for him. If he stretched out, his feet and calves would dangle off the end.

With her still wrapped around him, he turned and leaned his back against the headstead. Her legs were trapped between his back and the bed, but he lifted her hips, and she drew them back until she was kneeling, straddled over his hips.

Before he set her back down, she thought she understood what he wanted her to do. “Like this?” she asked.

“Like this. You choose when to stop.”

He moved a hand between them, between her legs, and brushed gentle fingertips over her folds, then between, his path smooth and silky and wet. Such a tender touch was unfamiliar to her, and she flinched and whimpered—and felt her body wet him even more.

“Ah,” he breathed. “You are ready. So soft. You want this.”

Not a question this time. A statement. And correct. Olga nodded. “
Jah
.
Jah
.”

He took hold of himself and, with the hand that still grasped her hip, urged her to settle onto him.

She did, moving slowly, not for fear, but for the desire to feel him, all of him, come into her. Both of his hands grasped her hips again, his fingers pressing deeply into her flesh, but he let her move and didn’t force her to take him in more quickly than she wished.

Her legs were not yet settled on his when she felt the tip of him press against her limit. Then she opened her eyes. He was staring at her, his eyes on fire. She leaned forward, trembling when her slight movement shifted him inside her, and kissed him.

For long breathless moments, time stopped, and all there was in the world was the tangle of their tongues together and the fullness of his body in hers. She didn’t move on him, and he didn’t make her. She knotted the golden silk of his hair in her fingers and kissed him, tipping her head to and fro so that his beard would brush again and again over her cheeks and mouth, making her skin tingle and grow hot.

Then the ache of need inside her grew too sharp, and she couldn’t be still. She didn’t think about it; she simply moved in the way her body clearly wanted, making his sex touch her in the way she needed. They kissed, and she moved, and their breaths got louder and louder, until her thighs began to burn with tension and Leif’s breath was nothing but bestial groans that filled her mouth.

And oh, what was happening inside her. She knew the feel of a man in her sheath, and yet she did not. There was no punishing pressure, no pain, no shame. There was only building, burgeoning pleasure, her body heating, her urge changing again and again, shifting from pleasure to desire to need to something without definition.

It wasn’t only the slide of their sex together. His tongue in her mouth, his beard on her face, the harsh rasp of his breath, of her breath, the bind of his hair around her fingers, the ache of his fingers pressing into her skin—all was part of a greater whole, one she could no longer contain or even comprehend.

Just when her need became so great that she lost control over the flex of her hips and the pace of her breaths, Leif tore his mouth from hers with an otherworldly growl, and he pushed her back, taking control for the first time, but not of their rhythm, except for the way his movement had interrupted it. Instead, leaving her to her desperate, syncopated flexing, he bent down and caught her right nipple in his mouth, sucking deeply, ravenously.

She arched back so hard at the explosion of pleasure that she sat down on his legs, taking him almost fully into her, deeper than she had thought she could. And then she needed more than she knew how to meet. The flex of her hips on his thighs wasn’t enough. The grasp of his hands wasn’t enough. Not even his beautiful mouth, his glorious beard, on her breast was enough. She didn’t know what she needed.

But he did. She knew that Leif knew. “Take me!” she gasped.

At her words, he left her breast, and Olga whimpered with loss. “Olga?” His voice spoke all the strained need she felt.

“Take me. Please. Please. I need—I don’t know. Take me. Us. Take us.” Words wouldn’t come except in bursts.

But he understood her. He gathered her into his arms and rolled them over. Now she was on her back, in a position she knew well, but the face above her, looking down on her with care, sheltering her in the drape of his hair—that was new and wonderful.

He kissed her and began to move. His practiced, attentive rhythm began slowly, but she didn’t want slow, and when she writhed under him and drew her nails up his back, he sped up.

This was what she’d needed, this pressure of his body, this chance to feel and give up thinking. To give up. To give over. To give. To choose it.

He broke free of their kiss again and looked into her eyes, and what she saw in his was the end and beginning of her life.

Her release broke over her like fire and ice together, making her body tense and release again and again in a series of flailing spasms, and when his mouth covered hers again and muffled her, she realized that she had been nearly screaming.

His body went rigid while hers yet spasmed, and then he dropped his head to the bed next to hers. They panted in each other’s ears until their breath, keeping time together, settled.

This was nothing like what had been done to her before. It was barely even the same physical act. This was what the girls who went giggling, and the men who chased them, were always after. She understood now.

More than that, she understood what drew Brenna and Vali so tightly together. Not merely a coupling. A bonding.

Leif pulled out of her, moving slowly, his eyes on hers, and then rolled to her side. “Are you well?” he asked.

Feeling full and sore, but a good, satisfying, happy kind of sore, a life-changing kind of sore, she rolled to face him and drew her fingers through his beard. “I am very well. You?”

“
Sa oled mulle kõige olulisem.
” He kissed the tip of her nose.

Olga snuggled against his chest, tucking her head under his chin. He was the most important thing to her, too.

~oOo~

The next day, Olga stood at the window in Brenna’s room. Brenna slept, buried in furs, her pallid face stark against the bearskin under her chin.

Her chest rose and fell fitfully, and the sounds of her breath grated. Olga worried. Her friend still bled from the birth, and from the damage done to her by her fall, and by the earth only knew what else. She bled more than between her legs, in places Olga could not reach to staunch. Though she dripped as much healing brew as she could into Brenna’s slack, dry mouth, if mother did not follow child into the earth, Olga doubted it would be for any help she’d been able to give.

Thorvaldr was not going into the earth, however—the cold was too deep, and the earth too hard, to take him. Instead, Leif and a few others had made a small funeral pyre in the woods just outside the castle walls, and Vali had carried his son, still in the basket Olga had nested him in, out to send him to the next world the raiders so valued.

She had opened the shutters, letting in the cold for just this moment, because from this room, she could see the little pyre. Vali had chosen the spot because their chamber looked down on the small glade where he, and Leif, and most of the other raiders, and a few of the villagers, now stood, circling the pyre with still, bowed heads.

Olga watched as Vali set his son atop the peaked wood. When he took a step back, Orm, the oldest of the raiders, spoke; Olga could hear his speech but not the words themselves. Leif then came forward with a torch, but Vali stopped him with a hand on his arm and took the torch from him. He set his son’s pyre afire himself.

When Olga finally closed the shutters, worried that the room had grown too cold for Brenna’s healing, Vali and Leif yet stood, now alone, watching dwindling flames.

Thorvaldr was gone.

~oOo~

Not long after, Vali came into the room. With his great shoulders curled as if under a heavy burden and his expression slack, his eyes drawn, he was the embodiment of sorrow.

Olga had turned Brenna to her side so that she could massage her back—gently, taking care not to cause greater hurt to what was likely broken inside—and urge the blood up from her lungs. Though she groaned in her sleep, her breathing seemed steadier on her side, and Olga left her like that as she went to Vali and set her hand on his arm.

He smelled strongly of smoke. Without acknowledging her nearness or her touch, he asked, “Why won’t she wake?”

She remembered when he’d last asked her that question, when Brenna had swooned and fallen from her horse. Then, she’d had happy news to give him as a reason: his seed taking root inside her.

Now, the babe that had grown from that seed had wafted into the air as smoke and spirit, and Brenna lay weak and pale as ash.

“Her sleep helps her heal, Vali. It is good she not wake until she is strong enough to bear her loss.”

“Our loss.”

Olga didn’t argue. He couldn’t understand how much greater Brenna’s loss was than his own. She simply squeezed the hard heft of his forearm, and when he moved past her and sat at his wife’s bedside, she gathered up the old wound dressings and left him and his beloved alone.

~oOo~

When Olga came down the back stairs late that evening, after settling Brenna for the night, Leif emerged from the shadows and met her at the foot of the narrow stone steps. He wrapped his hand around her upper arm and pulled her close.

“I have missed you today.”

Except when Vali asked for solitude, Olga spent almost all the day with Brenna. She didn’t want her friend to wake alone, and when Vali was there, her presence seemed to give him comfort, too. But at night, when he was ready to strip and take to the bed at Brenna’s side, Olga left them.

She was tired and sad, but Leif’s touch made a charge in her blood, and she felt it rise and color her cheeks. “I think she might be healing. Her breath makes a softer sound tonight.”

He stepped forward, pushing her gently to the wall. “That is good. The loss of her as well—it would be too great.”

For more than Vali, that would be true. The two lovers had unified the castle in some way, like a great story they all shared.

When Leif bent his head toward hers, Olga put her hands on his chest and pushed. “Leif, I think…”