He lowered his arms carefully and pulled the bed fur more closely over them both. The fire had died down, and the bedchamber was cool. Then he let his arms envelop her. Just to keep her warm. It was not an embrace. It wasn’t. It wasn’t. The most incredible sense of peace came over him. Had he ever felt peaceful before in his entire pitiful life? He didn’t think so. This was almost . . . heavenly.
He smiled at what Michael would have to say about that.
When a dim dawn light came streaming through the arrow-slit window, he awakened to a loud screeching noise and someone pummeling his arms and chest. “Idiot, idiot, idiot!” Andrea was yelling at him.
He did not care. For the first time in centuries, he had slept like a baby. So he just smiled up at her and said, “Was that as good for you as it was for me?”
As she knelt on the bed in a thin chemise she must have borrowed, her blonde hair rose in tufts of bed-mussed disarray about her face, which was red with fury. Her jaw dropped at his words. “Are you serious?”
She didn’t know whether they had made love or not. Hah! She would know if they had, or Cnut was not a Viking whose sex skills were inborn. But he wasn’t about to tell her that. Let her squirm.
“You didn’t?” she sputtered at him. “Did you?”
Me? Why does she assume I did something? He eased off the bed and stood, bare-arsed naked, with a morning erection that should be embarrassing, but wasn’t, and stretched, deliberately displaying himself, before saying, “I didn’t. You did.” Let her interpret that as she would!
Her jaw dropped and she just stared at him. It was always good to turn a woman speechless. You could say he’d learned that in Viking 101.
A voice in his head said, It’s a sin to tell a lie.
“But not as big a sin as I could have committed,” he countered.
Oh, you of little faith!
“I have faith. I have plenty of faith,” he protested. “If I didn’t have faith that there was some method to this latest antic of yours, I would just succumb to madness.”
He didn’t realize he’d been speaking his thoughts aloud until Andrea remarked, “There’s a method to your madness, all right, and when I discover what it is, I’m going to squash you like a bug. No, not a bug. A big, old, flat-as-a-pancake Peppermint Pattie.”
“Good. At least I’ll be food to stave off someone’s hunger.” He paused. “Will you eat me?”
He really didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Really.
But she didn’t know that. “You are an idiot.”
Chapter 11
FAMINE FARE FOR THE NON-STARVING
Beef-flavored turnip soup with rivels
Thin-sliced pork roast
Stewed turnips
Skyr cheese
Manchet bread
Cabbage soup with turnips and rivels
Shredded pork turnip hash
Manchet bread
Mashed turnips
Lutefisk
Manchet bread
Rivels in turnip butter
Salt herring
Turnip fricassee
FAMINE FARE FOR THE STARVING
Acorn flour bread
Possum pottage
Leftover smoked horsemeat
Nettle soup
Pickled wild onions, endive, and various roots
Women’s work . . . it never changes . . .
Andrea was dressing in her same clothes when a maid and a young boy came in, one carrying an earthenware pitcher of water and the other an armful of firewood. She shrieked at them for entering without knocking and held her T-shirt in front of her bra. They deliberately avoided looking at her.
The boy made quick work of dumping the wood on the burning embers, causing sparks to fly.
“Lackwit!” the woman said, thwapping the boy aside the head with her palm. “Get the chamber pot and empty it in the garderobe. Then go wash it out and bring it back here. Do you hear me, Kugge?”
“They heard ye in the village,” Kugge whined, rubbing his sore head. The boy couldn’t be more than seven or eight.
“What did you say?” The woman put her hands on her hips and glared at the boy.
“Nothing, móðir,” Kugge said, kneeling to draw the lidded pot out from under the bed and carrying it, precariously, through the still open door.
The woman looked at Andrea and grimaced. “My son. Needs a bit of prodding now and then, he does.” There was obvious pride in her voice. “My name is Dyna. Master says I am to take care of you.”
“Oh, did he? And where is the . . . um, master now?”
“Off with the hunters.”
“When will they return?”
Dyna shrugged. “Mayhap tonight. Mayhap on the morrow.” She shrugged again. “They will come when they have meat for the larder, gods willing.”
That is just great. Stuck in this Outlander time warp or whatever it is until the lord and master—in other words, the idiot—comes back. At least Jamie Fraser didn’t have fangs. Cnut is probably afraid to face me again. He should be. I’m developing a real mean streak.