Page 43 of To Tame a Viking Warlord

THURSO WAS THEIR LAST overnight stop before Orkney. It sat at the mouth of a river on the Caithness shore, a straggle of turf-roofed houses and one hall of timber larger than the rest. Across the firth, low and dark against the evening, lay the hills of Hoy.

The hall belonged to a man named Hrafn who held the land for Jarl Thorfinn and owed Torstein a debt. Hrafn gave the crew his hall floor and his ale, and he gave Torstein and his wife the small chamber behind the hall wall, with a door of solid planks and a bed built into the timber.

A real bed. Clean straw ticking, wool blankets, a fleece on top. Samira stood in the doorway and looked at it for some time.

They had washed by the river that night and changed into dry clean clothes. Samira was able to wash her long hair with scented jasmine oil and sat by the open fire drying it while using her ivory comb to tame the curls.

Torstein moved to sit on the bed. It creaked under his weight. She stayed where she was, oblivious to the fact that he watched her every movement with a mix of hunger and adoration.

When she turned to face him, he said, "I have never seen it down."

She crossed the floor and sat down beside him. He put out his hand and drew a length of her hair through his fingers from the crown of her head to the ends.

"Samira."

"Yes."

He did not say anything else. He took her face in both hands and kissed her, and it was nothing like the kiss in the storm. This was slow. He kissed her as though he had been thinking about it for three hundred leagues and meant to take his time about it now.

She put her hands flat against his chest and felt his heart beating rapidly beneath them.

They lay back together in the bed with the lamp burning low. His hands learned the line of her ribs through her shift, the curve of her waist, the small of her back. Hers learned the scars across his shoulders, one by one, and when she asked about them he told her, in a voice gone rough and low, where each had come from.

Then he rolled her beneath him and kissed her until she was breathless.

When his hand found the hem of her shift, it stopped there.

Samira stilled. He was braced above her on one arm, breathing hard, and his face in the lamplight was a struggle she could read plainly for once.

"Do you not want to?"

"Not here," he said.

"Torstein?"

"Not in another man's chamber with my crew snoring through that wall." He pressed his forehead against hers. "Two more days, Samira. You will have my own hall and my own bed, and a home I built with my own hands. I want that to be where I make you mine completely. I want it done right."

She put her palm against his cheek and felt his jaw clench under it.

"Then I want that also."

He lay down beside her and drew her back against his chest, and his arm came round her waist and stayed there. "Sleep, wife. We will be home soon."

Samira relaxed into his arms yet felt a burning physical need within her that needed to be satisfied. She lay listening to his breathing slow and the wind working at the thatch, and she thought that she had never been so content and so discontented at the same time in all her life.

***

SAMIRA WOKE BEFORE dawn, as she always did, and slipped out from under Torstein's arm without waking him.

The hall was dark and full of snoring men. She stepped between them and let herself out into the gray morning. The tide was far out. The snekkja lay drawn up on the shingle below the hall with two men asleep beside the fire pit and a third, Olvir, sitting awake with a spear across his knees. He raised a hand to her. She raised one back.

She went down to the river mouth where the fresh water met the sea, to wash before she prayed. She had her sleeves pushed up and her hands in the cold water when she heard the shingle shift behind her.

There were five of them.

They came out of the dune grass quietly, spreading as they came, and the nearest was already close enough that she could smell the ale on him. Norse, by their clothes. One of them had a sack in his hands.

She rose slowly and let her right hand drop to her belt. The koummya was where it always was.