Christine Rimmer - Dark, Devastating & Delicious! - The Marriage Medallion / Between Duty and Desire / Driven to Distraction

“Let me change that.” His voice was so soft, the verbal equivalent of a caress.

They gazed at each other. It was another of those edgy, what-is-really-happening-here? moments. She blinked and started to tell him no.

But the bandage had to be changed. Asta was asleep. Brit would probably make a mess of it if she tried to do it herself—and, hey, at least her thermal shirt had a zipper front. She should be able to get it out of his way and still keep the crucial parts covered.

“All right, I’d appreciate it—just hold on a minute.” She turned for her pack beneath her bed. In a side pocket she had three precious bags of peanut M&Ms. She took one out, opened it and got herself a nice, fat blue one. She held out the bag to Eric. Looking puzzled, he shook his head. She put it away.

When she approached the table again, he asked, “What is that?”

She held up the blue candy. “M&M. Peanut. I love them.”

For that she got a lifted eyebrow. “And you must have one… now?”

“I find them soothing—and don’t worry. It’s not drugs or anything. Just sugar and chocolate and a peanut at the center.” He still had that I-don’t-get-it look. So all right, she was nervous, okay? There was something way too intimate about him tending her wound. “Could we just… do this?” She stuck the candy in her mouth.

“As you wish.” He gestured for her to sit at the table. Then he turned toward the sink area—presumably to get fresh bandages and tape.

Brit seized the moment, perching with her back to him at the end of one of the two long benches, and swiftly unzipping her shirt. She heard the slight creak of the sink pump. He must be washing his hands. She pulled the shirt down her left arm—too roughly, hurt like a mother—and got into trouble trying to reinsert the slide into the stopper thingy.

He was finished at the sink. She heard him approach behind her, moving quietly, halting at her back.

“Just a minute,” she muttered, already chewing her only half-sucked M&M, hunched over the zipper, feeling exposed and ridiculous and still battling to get the damn thing to hook.

“No hurry.”

She felt her face flaming as she continued to struggle, the pain an extra irritant as her injured shoulder complained at the tension. At last she got it in. With a sigh of embarrassed relief, she zipped until she had her breasts covered, the left arm of the shirt hanging beneath her own arm.

She turned to him, certain she would find him smirking or quelling a smarmy chuckle. He wasn’t, on either count. He was, however, staring at her chest. He shifted his gaze up to meet her eyes—and she understood.

He’d been looking at her medallion.

She might so easily have lifted it on its chain and mentioned that his father had given it to her. But she didn’t. Somehow, the idea of drawing attention to it seemed unwise, even dangerous. “Okay. Do it.”

He set his equipment on the table: a roll of gauze, tape, scissors and a tube of ointment. Then he returned to the sink, where he grabbed a cloth from a shelf and filled a wooden bowl halfway with water. At the stove he took the steaming kettle and poured hot water to mix with the cold in the bowl. He returned to her, setting the bowl down, dropping the cloth into it.

He went to work. Once again, with him so near, she became way too aware of the fresh, outdoorsy smell of him. His hands were gentle—quick and skilled. She found herself wondering how many wounds he’d bandaged.

“It’s just as well you got it wet,” he whispered. “It’s not sticking.”

She averted her eyes through most of the process, but when he had the soggy bandage off, she looked down at the damage. It wasn’t pretty—ragged and red, still draining a little. There was going to be a scar, for sure. “I guess I won’t be going strapless to the ball.”

He gently cleaned the wound with the warm, damp cloth. “Wear your scars proudly. They speak of what you have faced—and what you have survived.”

She looked at him then. Straight on. There were perhaps four inches between his mouth and hers. And his mouth was… so soft looking. Four inches. No distance at all. The slightest forward movement on her part and she would be kissing him.

Oh, now, why did she have to go and think of kisses? She pointedly shifted her gaze to a spot beyond his shoulder.

He went on with his work, finished swabbing the wound with the warm cloth, applied the ointment, which soothed the soreness and gave off a faint scent of cloves.

Finally, he taped on the fresh bandage. “There,” he said, stepping back.

Her stomach growled. Loudly.

That mouth she’d almost found herself kissing curved up at the corners. “Oatmeal?”

“Please.”

The heavy earthenware bowls waited in plain sight on open shelves. She set the table, doing her best to keep clatter to a minimum as he, equally quietly, fixed the food. They even had milk, which he removed from a small cellar under the floor. There was honey for sweetening. And a lovely tea that tasted of cinnamon—a tea almost good enough to make up for the lack of her usual four cups of morning coffee, strong and black.

She was tired again by the time the meal was over. She helped him clear off, and then he took the single-barreled shotgun from the rack above the door and a pack from under his sleeping bench and left.

Miraculously, Asta hadn’t stirred through the changing of the bandage or the meal preparations. Brit plodded to her own furs and stretched out. She was clean and her stomach was full. Life, at the moment, was good.

She was asleep within minutes.

Brit woke again in the afternoon. Asta was up, surrounded by her grandchildren, her daughters-in-law sitting with her near the fire. For a while Brit lay there, feeling cozy and comfortable, listening to the children laugh and whisper to each other—to the women talk. Sigrid was the quiet one, very controlled, it seemed to Brit. Sif, on the other hand, chuckled and chattered and spoke of the neighbors, of what she had heard about this one or that one. Sif was the one who saw that Brit was awake. She looked over and smiled.

Brit smiled back. Then she rose, put on her boots, got a bra from her pack beneath the sleeping bench and excused herself to visit the lean-to. When she returned she washed her hands at the sink, enjoyed a big drink of water and turned to gesture at the two forlorn-looking piles of feathers lying on the table. “What have we here?”

“Eric brought them,” said Asta, confirming what Brit had already guessed. “A pair of fine partridges. Aren’t they beautiful?”

“They certainly are.” She couldn’t keep herself from asking, “He’s been back again since morning, then? Eric, I mean.”

Sif and Sigrid shared what could only have been called a sly, knowing look. Asta nodded. “He’ll return for the evening meal.”

Brit set her cup on the counter—firmly. Enough about Eric. “So how ’bout I make myself useful and pluck those birds for you?”

Asta tried to talk her out of it. It wasn’t necessary, she said. She’d do it herself in a little while.

But Brit insisted. In the end, when she had sworn she could handle it, she was allowed to do the plucking. Eric had already gutted them in the field, which, her uncle Cam always said, was the best time to do it. The birds cooled faster that way; less chance the meat would sour.

“I’m guessing you have some sort of game shed,” Brit said when the task was done.

Asta, still near the stove with her daughters-in-law, sent her an approving look. “We do. Out in the back.”

Brit took them out and hung them in the wire cage behind the longhouse, where they’d be safe from scavengers until the meat had aged properly. When she returned, Sif was preparing to take Asta’s laundry to the community washhouse.