“I know a way to warm you quick.” He glanced pointedly at the unmade bed.
“Not a chance!” But she was tempted.
“I don’t understand why you’re so angry, Andrea.” The coaxing tone of his voice was belied by the firm hold he had on her buttocks.
“Reynilda.” That one word said it all, or should. She tried to shove his hands away, but they just landed on other forbidden spots. Her breasts. And traitorous critters that they were, they rose and purled like needy kittens up for a petting.
“What about her?”
At first, she wasn’t sure what he was talking about, so distracted was she by the massaging of his hands. Then she shoved his hands off her and held them away from her body, staring at him with disbelief. “A fiancée? You failed to mention that you were engaged.”
“Past tense,” he emphasized. “’Twas of no importance.”
Not important! How like a man! But I can’t let him think it matters. Instead, she homed in on something else. “’Twas? ’Twas? You’re turning into a bloody Viking.”
“I was always a bloody Viking, sweetling.”
Don’t I know it? Don’t I love it? No, I don’t. Vikings are vain and arrogant and vicious and, damn, he’s playing the sweetling card. He knows it makes me tingle. “Aaarrgh!”
“You’re jealous,” he said, and grinned.
“Idiot!” She smacked him.
“I love when you call me an idiot. ’Tis like an endearment.”
She didn’t smile.
“Listen, my love, Reynilda has a selective memory. She fails to recall the details of our short betrothal. It wasn’t her father who rejected me. She herself did. In fact, she’d called me a ‘fat toad,’ and swore she would share her bed furs with me when pond scum turned to gold.”
“I agree. You are a toad,” she said huffily, though her lips twitched with humor. “How does she get to be a princess?”
“Her father, Agmundr of Lade, was a minor king here in the Norselands. Truth to tell, any chieftain, or jarl of some standing, can call himself king in these times. Technically, she was no longer a princess once she married Jarl Esgar of Storm’s Lair, which is west of Hoggstead, but many miles north of Lade. But I for one don’t intend to challenge her right to do so. It matters not to me if she wants to name herself Queen of the North.”
Andrea felt a little better knowing Reynilda’s background. In other words, she was a pretentious, self-serving bitch.
“Reynilda is up to something and it isn’t my superior appearance that draws her here in the middle of winter,” Cnut continued.
“At least you’re smart enough to realize that,” Andrea said, then added immediately, “not that your appearance isn’t enough to make a saint drop her drawers.”
“You do have a way with words,” Cnut said, not for the first time. “The only drawers I’m interested in seeing are yours.” He pinched her butt for emphasis.
“So you say!” she said with a sniff, but she was pleased.
“We have to be careful, though,” Cnut warned. “Reynilda brought a pigload of food and supplies with her. Enough that our worries over Hoggstead’s immediate woes may very well be ended now that our larder is nearly full. We . . . I . . . owe her.”
Uh-oh! “Ah, but what is her price?”
“Precisely. And more important, why does she smell like a rank lemon?”
“She does?” That was the characteristic of a really evil person, according to what Cnut had told her previously. Good Lord, I’m starting to believe all this stuff.
He nodded. “And so do the half dozen men and women in the entourage she brought with her.”
“You need to talk with Farle. Find out what he saw or heard at Storm’s Lair.”
“I will, but there are more important things we need to do first.”
“Such as?” If he suggests that I go make breakfast for the woman, he has another think coming.
“Wouldst care to explore yon pond with me, m’lady?” he asked, making a motion with his head toward the bed. “Methinks it needs some scum.”
“You being the toad, I presume.”
“Ribbit, ribbit.”
She laughed.
“I give good wart,” he promised.
And he did.
There was a whole lot of tingling going on in the pond for the next half hour until there was a pounding on the door with a harried Finn calling out, “You must come quickly, master. Girda and Princess Reynilda are going at each other like cats in heat.”
Chapter 19
A YULETIDE FEAST
3 wild boars, 2 spit roasted, 1 ember-baked