“Do they have to agree? You are chief.”
“There is a council. Do you have such a thing, in your world?”
“Ja, surely. But the jarl hears grievances and passes judgment. Here, you are like the jarl, ja?”
“Everyone has a say.”
“Ja, everyone has a say. But the jarl overrules them.”
Not quite.
He looked her in the eye. “For this agreement to hold, for any of it to hold, I would have to trust you.”
“Ja. Ja, you will. As we will have to trust you, that if we take refuge where you afford it to us, we will not be set upon in the night and slain.”
She had taken none of her ale. Now she set the cup aside and reached out one hand for him. Laid her fingers across his wrist where it rested upon his knee. No more than that.
Everything within him leaped to attention. Each muscle and sinew. As swiftly as that, his blood caught fire.
“You can trust me, Quarrie MacMurtray.”
Cursed if he did not believe her.
Chapter Thirty
Asong playedin Hulda’s head, one from which she could not seem to free herself. It had followed her from that place—MacMurtray’s hall—all the way back down to the rocks of the shore. A tune she did not know, yet somehow recognized.
Just like Quarrie himself. She did not know him. Only she did.
She marveled over it even as she rejoined Garik, who looked immeasurably relieved to see her. He stood surrounded by hostile clansmen, all of them armed. None had moved against him, but danger filled the air.
Could it work, this thing she suggested to Quarrie MacMurtray?
He had walked her down, she carrying her helm under one arm, the feel of his wrist, his skin still seeming burned into her fingers. Warm. Strong, inexpressibly pleasurable.
A pleasure he was to gaze upon, she thought as she turned to look at him. Even more so to touch.
He had what she would consider a perfect body. Tall, lean, yet well-muscled. Broad in the shoulders and narrow at the hips, with a pattern of red-brown hair on his broad chest. She wanted to feel him. Wanted it with an intensity that shocked her.
How long had it been since she’d had a man? Haakon had been the last, and naught about Haakon had felt like this. How long since she’d let herself feel like a woman?
He made her feel so, from the bones outward. Yet gazing at him now, on this stretch of his shore, she saw uncertainty in his eyes.
“I will need to talk this over with members o’ my council,” he repeated.
“Ja, good. we will wait where we did before, the inlet of that island. If you need me, you have only to row across. Or”—one corner of her mouth quirked up—“if you choose, you may swim.”
*
That mouth. Ithad once been fastened to Quarrie’s. Hot. Hard, yet soft.
He wanted it there again. He wanted more, much more.
This was madness, every bit of it.
And yet…and yet there was reassurance in knowing she would be where he could reach her. If, as she said, he chose.
Her men fairly hung from the longboat not far off in the water. Indeed, one of them clung to the neck of the beast that formed the prow, watching to make sure she returned to them safely.
