Joan Pickart - Royal Weddings

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 the distant, empty time to come, he would look down into her face when they mated and think of the woman standing in the doorway now.

Her Highness said, ‘‘You can get comfortable. I’m going to bed.’’

Hauk pulled off his boots and his stockings and went down to his blankets to wait out the endless night.

Chapter Nine

Somehow, though she never expected she would, Elli did go to sleep. If she dreamed, she didn’t recall those dreams when she woke. Her eyes popped open at a few minutes after seven on Thursday morning and her first thought, as she stared at her silent bedside clock, was that she’d forgotten to turn on her alarm.

Her second thought was of Hauk.

Hauk. A warmth spread through her. A longing.

She ordered that longing to get lost. Today, they were leaving. By tonight, she’d be in Gullandria. He’d made it clear that once he delivered her to her father, they might never see each other again. And if they did, it would only be in passing. A quick glimpse, from a distance, in some echoing palace room. That, at most. Nothing more.

She sat up. And found him sitting in the straight chair opposite the end of her bed. He had his boots on and his face was just-shaved smooth.

Elli raked her tangled hair back off her forehead. ‘‘Imagine running into you here.’’

‘‘It is Thursday morning.’’

Irritation sizzled through her at his preemptive tone. ‘‘No kidding.’’

‘‘Rise. Dress and gather your things. The time to go has come.’’

She folded her hands on top of the blankets and looked down at them. She was thinking that she ought to just do as he said.

Too bad when she raised her head what came out was, ‘‘Think again.’’

As usual, he sat absolutely still. ‘‘Why do you insist on playing these endless mind games?’’ His eyes were like a pair of lasers, slicing through her, cutting deep.

‘‘This is no game. It’s only seven. It will be Thursday morning for five more hours.’’

His expression showed very little. Yet somehow he seemed to seethe where he sat. There was a long, heated moment during which they glared at each other.

Then he stood. ‘‘Five hours then. At noon, you will be ready. At 12:00 p.m., exactly, we will walk out your door.’’

She yanked her shoulders back and shot him her most defiant scowl. ‘‘And if I’m not ready?’’

‘‘Then I’ll bind you hand and foot, stuff a kerchief in your mouth to still your cries and carry you out.’’ He turned on his heel and left.

Elli gripped the blankets and told herself she would not, under any circumstances, jump from the bed and chase him down the hall screaming obscenities at the top of her lungs.

Hauk stood in the hall, composing himself. He wanted to march back in there, wrap his fingers around her smooth neck and squeeze the defiance right out of her. But if he touched her, he knew it wouldn’t be strangling she’d get at his hands.