soft. The wild grasses, still moist and green in early May, brushed at her ankles as she climbed.
She reached the crest of the levee. It stretched out, a wide path, in either direction. Below, by the light of the fading last-quarter moon, the river looked dark and oily, flowing easily along. There were dangers, beneath the surface. Swirling currents. Undertows.
But from here, it looked so serene and slow. Hauk stood beside her. As usual, he made no sound. She couldn’t even hear him breathing.
She turned in the opposite direction and started walking. He came along behind her, but several yards back, as if he wanted to give her as much space, as much leeway, as he could and still follow the orders he’d been given by his king.
She stopped. Looked at her watch. Ten o’clock.
Hauk came up beside her. She sent him a sad smile. ‘‘I know. It’s not your fault. None of this. You can’t be who you are and behave any differently.’’
He said nothing. He stared out over the smooth-moving water.
‘‘Come on,’’ she said. ‘‘We’ll go back now.’’
When they got to her apartment, the princess wanted a bath. She asked nicely for an hour to herself in the bathroom.
Hauk wanted to shout No. He wanted to order her to come with him. Now. Out of here, to the airport, to the jet that awaited her.
But he’d demanded that they leave so many times already. She always refused. And then there was nothing more he could do. He had no rights here. He was to wait and to watch. And then tomorrow, if she continued to balk, he was to use force to see that she went where she’d agreed to go.
In answer to her request for time alone in the bath, he gave her a grunt and a shrug. He wasn’t talking to her, hadn’t for hours now. Talking to her only led to trouble.
She was too good with that mouth of hers. Whenever he let himself engage in discourse with her, she always got him thinking things he knew he shouldn’t let himself think. She would lure him close to doubting the wisdom of his own king, to questioning the way things were and had always been.
And beyond the dangerous questions she had him asking himself, there was that other problem, the one that kept getting worse: the way she roused him, as a man. Whenever she spoke, he would watch her full lips moving and wonder what else she could do with that soft mouth and that clever tongue.
She went into her bathroom and he turned for the guest bath. He emptied his bladder, washed his hands and cleaned his teeth. He returned to her bedroom and rolled out his bedding. And then he stood, waiting, all too aware of the scented moistness of the air, constantly turning his mind from the light beneath the bathroom door, from images of her, naked. Wet. That wheat-colored hair curling and damp from the steam that rose upward off the warm water…
By Odin’s one eye, he was doing it again.
He ordered his mind off the thought of her, naked.
He pondered the morning, when her time for stalling, for lingering here, would run out. Would she force him to bind her and gag her again, to toss her over his shoulder and carry her out of here as he’d started to do two days and a lifetime ago?
And the larger question: Would he do it if she did?
That he even asked himself that question spoke volumes about what was happening to him. Something had shifted—inside him. Something had changed. Something in his very self, in who he was.
He’d earned, over time, an inner contentment. Born from high stock, but a bastard, he’d been cast down. Both his mother and his father had past kings in their lineage. Had his mother agreed to marry his father, as a child of two old and powerful families, he would have been high jarl. Had his parents been married, he could now look at Princess Elli eye-to-eye. Even should her father have plans to marry her to another, Hauk would still be her equal, he could still court her. He would have a chance at her hand.
But though his mother succumbed to her passion for his father, she would not marry. She was kvina soldar: a woman warrior. If she married, she would have been forced to give up her warrior status. For a wife to be a warrior was not done. And, as a result, she condemned her son to start from less than nothing.
A warrior’s training was brutal. But Hauk had been born with his father’s size and his mother’s natural physical skill. He’d fought his way forward to the front of the pack. In recent years, he’d thought that he could see his future and that it was good. He’d believed he brought honor to his bastard name.
He had eight more years in the king’s service, and then, when his commission was up, there would be money enough. He’d ask a good woman, one only slightly above him—legitimate and jarl, but low jarl, from an unimportant family, a family only a generation or two up from freeman—to marry him.
And his sons and daughters would have a better start, a better chance than he’d had. Thus, the error of one generation found correction in the next. It had all seemed fitting. Right. Good.
Until now.
Until he’d been sent to kidnap the king’s daughter.
And ended up trailing after her wherever she went, looking into those deep-blue eyes, listening to that warm, musical voice. Sitting beside her in a darkened theater, across from her at her own table—and in that restaurant tonight…
There had been a candle on the table tonight. In the warm light, her skin had glowed, soft as the petal of some rare pink rose. He had sat and stared and admired up close what such as he should never see except from a careful, formal distance.
It was all a mistake. A huge one, an error in judgment on the part of his king. His king had trusted him.
And no matter that Hauk had yet to touch the woman intimately—would never touch the woman intimately—he had betrayed that trust in his heart and his mind.
Betrayed his king. And thus, betrayed the man he had always believed himself to be.
The door to the bathroom opened. The princess emerged wearing the big pink shirt she liked to sleep in. A cloud of sweet steam came out with her. Her face had a clean, scrubbed shine to it. Her hair was slightly damp at the temples, little tendrils of it curling along her soft, moist cheeks.
Desire was a lance, turning in his flesh, twisting ever deeper.
If only she had never dared to speak of it—to talk of it so calmly, in her easy American way. Her words had seared themselves into his brain.
It’s an… attraction, that’s all. It happens between men and women. It’s natural. We don’t have to act on it. And if we did—which we won’t—it would be nobody’s business but yours and mine….
She had him thinking, oh yes, she did. Thinking that to have her would be worth everything—his commission, his pride. Possibly even his freedom and his life. Just one night, to touch her everywhere, to put his mouth on all her most secret places, to hear her call out his name.
What was his life, anyway? Who was he? Less than nothing. Fitz. Bastard. With his small hopes of an insignificant future.
The wife he hadn’t found yet was ruined for him now. In
