Page 53 of Her Viking Guardian

I lifted my face from the bowl. A drop of broth had apparently made its way onto my chin. I could feel it cooling there.

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Better. Continue.”

I obeyed. By the time I had licked the last of the water from the bowl, the first edge of my hunger had softened into something more human. I sat back on my heels automatically. Giovanna noticed.

“Better posture,” she said.

The approval, mild as it was, did something embarrassingly direct to the center of my chest.

Then a subtle change moved through the room. Not silence, exactly, but a kind of recalibration. Heads turned. Men who had been eating looked up. A pair of women at a nearby table straightened almost imperceptibly.

I knew somehow before I looked, and part of me understood that the knowledge came from the same place as my strange vǫlva’s visions. My heart thrilled at that idea, as well as at what I had just discovered thanks to these senses I was learning to trust.

My Herra had entered the refectory.

CHAPTER 27

Ilsa

Herra Henrik wore the clothes of a wealthy executive. I blinked as I looked at him, advancing toward us, because although my new senses told me exactly who I saw, the contrast with the way he looked in the leo’s robe, and even more with the way he looked naked, almost gave me a kind of double vision.

A moment later the whole of my master fell into place, though. His charcoal jacket sat over his broad shoulders with almost irritating perfection. His pale shirt lay open at the throat. He moved through the hall with the same calm certainty with which he had moved through the cell, and the fact that he belonged equally in both places—in ritual stone, naked beneath a red robe, and here among polished tables and discreet wealth—struck me hard.

My body reacted before any thoughts properly formed. I felt my spine lengthen. My thighs pressed together a little despite the ache. Heat climbed from my cheeks to my scalp.

He found us almost immediately, his gray eyes taking in the little section for new columbae, the bowls, my posture on the mat, Giovanna with the leash in hand. Something unreadable but very warm flickered in his expression.

Giovanna turned her head toward him with a smile of greeting on her lips.

“She is behaving herself,” she said.

Henrik’s gaze moved to me. “Are you, lille en?”

I lowered my eyes at once.

“Yes, Herra,” I said very softly.

He came closer, and the smells of the refectory seemed to rearrange themselves around the scent of him. He looked down at the bowls on the floor, then at Giovanna.

“In the mead hall,” he said, in that measured voice that could somehow make barbarism sound like policy, “a man does not leave his girl to feed like a forgotten dog. Not when she has served well.” His mouth shifted, almost into a smile. “We feed a favored creature like this one from the hand. It reminds her who provides.”

Giovanna arched one dark brow. “How touching. The North discovers tenderness.”

“It isn’t merely tenderness,” Henrik said. “It’s also, and more important, ownership.”

My face burned hotter.

He crouched. The expensive fabric of his trousers tightened over his thighs, and I had the distracting, humiliating thought that I knew exactly what those thighs felt like against my body. He took up the bowl with the torn bread and olives. His fingers selected a piece of bread first, dipped it into the oil so that it grew golden and flecked with herbs, and he held it to my mouth.

“Open, lille en.”

I opened.

The bread touched my lips. I took it carefully from his fingers, trying not to brush them with my mouth and then feeling heat rush through me because of course I wanted to suckle on those long, strong digits. I chewed. The bread tasted impossibly good. Somehow it seemed as if thousands of years of skill had gone into balancing the sea salt with the yeast. The olive oil lit up my mouth.

He fed me an olive next, pressing it just lightly enough to my lower lip that I had to take it from him with unmistakable submission. Then another piece of bread. Then a segment of orange, whose sharp sweetness burst over my tongue and made me almost dizzy.