Her Viking Wolf (19 page)

But even back then, as young as she was, Chloe knew she wouldn’t understand, would never understand how a mother could love a father so much she would abandon her child.

“No,” she said to her Viking at that moment. “I don’t want to lose myself in my fated mate either.”

“Then we are agreed,” he said. As if reading her thoughts, he moved their hands to lay on top of her now slightly-rounded belly and the life growing within. “We will be mates, but we will leave the insanities of eros to other wolves.”

“Agreed,” she said, meaning it with every inch of good sense she had. So then why did it feel like she had just told a bold-faced lie?

THE NEXT DAY WHEN FENRIS once again came to collect her after her Old Norse lesson, Chloe was somewhat surprised. He hadn’t come the day before, and she’d assumed there wouldn’t be any more dates now he’d achieved his objective of getting back his sex privileges. It had been a little disappointing but not surprising, given wolves weren’t naturally inclined toward wooing in the first place.

So when he showed up at her lesson that day, she not only got caught up in the pleasant surprise of seeing him here, but she also forgot herself and pulled him down for a kiss after saying hi.

He returned it lustily, pushing into her mind, “Mind the boldness of your tongue, beauty, or I shall take you to the bed closet as opposed to our appointment.”

A great cheer went up from the longhouse’s occupants, including his aunt, who patted her on the back and said something in Old Norse, which could be loosely translated as “Get it, girl!”

“I thought you commanded them not to catcall me anymore,” she said.

“The wolves in my family can only be commanded so far,” he answered, his voice as dry as a desert.

They exited the longhouse to much heckling, but as they did so, she could hear one of Fenris’s male cousins ask his aunt if he might have the words to the fated mates spell himself.

SINCE FIRST THEIR EYES DID MEET, Fenris had heard his fated mate squeak when she shot him with her tranquilizer gun, and screech when he tricked her into coming to his lands, and scream when they lay together. But never had he heard her squeal. Not until he escorted her into the weaver’s shop.

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” she said, jumping up and down. “I was hoping for the loom, but I didn’t want to ask you for it.”

“You mean you did stubbornly refuse to ask.”

“Potato, po-tah-to.”

“I do not comprehend the meaning of your words, but I would point out that you might have gotten what you wished for all the sooner if you had only but asked.”

“Whatever.” She let out another long squeal. “I’m too happy to argue with you about this.” She then sang out loud in her own tongue: “We’re going to make fabric! We’re going to make faaaa-bric!”

The weaver laughed. “I do like your foreign queen, my Fenris.”

“As do I,” he answered in Norse, trying to keep the smile off his own face and failing badly. To his mate who was now doing a dance that included pumping her fists back and forth in front of her chest and pressing her feet backwards in some manner of skipping step, he said. “Now may you sit. There is much fabric to be weaved these next few moons. A messenger did arrive by horse this morn to tell us our ships are due to return in less than three full moons. Remember I did say there would be a celebration then.”

She clasped her hands together and said out loud in tentative Norse: “We will be weaving fabric for my dress to wear to a celebration?”

Fenris and the weaver exchanged a look. “In a manner, yes.”

“Oh, can we make enough so the rest of the women can get new dresses, too?” she mind-asked him. “I’ll feel weird if I’m the only one wearing a new dress at this big party.”

“You shall not, beauty, I assure you,” he answered.

She crooked her head at him with an exasperated look on her face. “With all due respect, you might have been born in this time period, but you don’t know women like I know women. It’s not cool if only one person in the house gets to dress up for the big party.”

“I know not the meaning of ‘cool,’ but I assure you the other women in our household will not begrudge you this fabric.”

“Why? Because I’m the queen?”

He took rather smug pride in answering, “No, the reason be because this fabric you will be making over the next few moons will be for your wedding dress.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

FENRIS
did not realize how bad his mood had become until he nigh killed his fastest friend. Randulfr was recently returned with many white pelts from the most northern lands, and had requested to join him in his morning weapons exercises, wishing to engage a wolf after fighting the white bear for so many full moons.

Usually Fenris welcomed the challenge of sparring with a warrior near to his own skill level, but on this morn, every swing from Randulfr’s sword felt like an insult. And soon the fighting became more serious than intended with great clanging of their swords and much sweat on both their parts.

Finally, Randulfr backed away and said, “I would have an end to this play.”

“Nay,” Fenris said, “I would have you continue to fight.”

“I am not in prime spirits, having stepped off the boat only yesterday.”

“Lift your sword.”

Fenris advanced on him, attacking in the expectation Randulfr would defend himself as opposed to wasting his breath with further protest. But then he ended up using all his strength to stop the blade just short of his friend’s neck when Randulfr dropped his sword to the ground in the known sign of surrender.

Fenris lowered his own sword, having to resist the urge to punch his friend in the face for refusing to fight any further. “You disappoint me.”

“Nay,” Randulfr answered, with a knowing grin. “Your prick does make you fast to anger. Do I need to be the one to suggest you find your queen and set her to screaming?”

“She is otherwise engaged these moons. Big with our pup and making many preparations for our wedding.”

Randulfr picked up his sword and re-sheathed it at his waist. “Then if I were my Fenris, I would bid her pause. You are in need of a lay.”

“I am in need of a fight,” he all but growled back.

But Randulfr was already walking away, “Nay, a lay,” he called out almost like a song, without bothering to look back.

WHEN CHLOE HAD FIRST TRAVELED BACK IN TIME, it hadn’t occurred to her she’d have two skinny blonds washing her hair every Saturday, but apparently the servant women washing all the other women’s hair was a thing on Saturdays. She’d actually concocted a sort of conditioner out of eggs, honey, almond oil (thank goodness she had learned how to make it for a
Black Mountain Woman
show), and a yogurt-like food called skyr. And as it turned out, teaching them to finger comb it through her hair every wash day hadn’t been too hard.

The only problem was she was now having a hard time making a big enough batch of it every Saturday. Fenris’s young girl cousins had tried her conditioner a few months ago and had been shocked at how shiny and lustrous their locks turned out after air-drying. And soon all the other women in their household wanted to try it. Then because the males, contrary to the way Vikings were often depicted in the movies, were even vainer about their hair than the ladies, they’d demanded a weekly batch for themselves. Somehow word spread and folks started showing up at the door, offering all sorts of trades for conditioner. Which was how Chloe found herself spending most of her Saturday mornings overseeing the preparation of pots of conditioner and preparing for a wedding at the same time.

“It would seem you would have a trade in any time you did set foot,” Fenris teased her two Saturdays ago when she clumsily climbed over his body to get out of bed at the crack of dawn.

It was true. Over the last few weeks, Chloe had worked harder than she ever had in her life. Though she was a queen, nothing came easy in the Viking village. She had to make the fabric for her wedding dress, then sew it all by hand. She also had to plan the menu for the big wedding feast, which meant overseeing the roasting and spicing of boars, ducks, goats, and apparently a couple of sharks—which she hadn’t been able to convince her family not to serve, though at least she’d been able to draw the line at horse meat. She also had to pre-memorize her vows in Old Norse and learn to do a few traditional dances expected of the bride and groom. The last few weeks, she’d been rising at the crack of dawn every morning and falling into bed exhausted to her very bones every night.

And she loved it.

Unlike the wedding she would have been harangued into having with Rafe, which would have been catered by the most sought after chef in Colorado, and overseen by the most exclusive wedding planner Rafe’s mother could find, with a wedding dress provided by a designer everyone recognized by name; her wedding was everything she’d always dreamed it would be. And in many ways it felt like she had been planning her whole life for this.

The only thing she did mind, was she’d barely had a chance to do so much as mind-chat over dinner with Fenris, and even though they slept in the same bed closet, she found herself missing him.

“Is it your plan to wash Fenris’s hair at the hot springs then?” Aunt Bera asked when Chloe rushed out of the lake as soon as the servants were done rinsing the conditioner out of her loosened curls and started putting her wet hair back in its side braid while sitting on the bank. Whatever modesty she might have had about sitting around naked in front of a bunch of other women in Colorado had been killed after six months in no-privacy Viking Norway.

“No, after I braid my hair, I will return to the house to sew my wedding dress some more.”

“Let us put thread to your wedding dress this day,” his mother’s aunt said. “We would not have Fenris grow his beard again.”

She scrunched up her face. “I do not understand your words.”

One of her girl cousins came to stand by her mother. “Before you came to this place, we did call our king Fenris the Serious. Never smiling he, never one to let us feast in celebration, not even for a harvest.”

“Why think you I was so keen for him to avail himself of the fated mates spell?” Aunt Bera asked.

The cousin continued, “But now you have cut off his beard again, he is allowing feast, and we hope to have his ear for another at the winter to mark the yule-tide, and mayhap another one at the beginning of the resting sun.”

“Wait,” she said in English. Then she remembered herself and switched back to Old Norse. “What does his beard have to do with it?”

“When first he did return, we did tease him mightily about being without his beard. And on that first eve he said in your land the men do not care for beards and so do not the women, and that was why it was removed,” the cousin said.

Her mother chimed in then. “We all would be surprised, because no Northman would be without his beard in these lands, human or wolf. We realized our Fenris must hold you dear indeed, if he would allow you his beard. But then his beard did grow back and did he become both serious and quick to temper until you did start screaming every few moons. And at the next wash day his beard was once again disappeared.”

“But now it does grows back for a sennight or more,” Aunt Bera said, her tone growing dire. “We would not have his beard back. We would wish it good-ghost if it doth mean a less serious king.”

Chloe laughed and was about to deny any part in the state of Fenris’s mood, when he pushed into her mind. “We shall be met at the longhouse. I would have my grooming attended to.”

Chloe’s eyes narrowed at the women in the lake. Was there some kind of family version of wolf telepathy she didn’t know about? “Um … hi,” she mind-spoke back to Fenris. “Do you mind washing your own hair today? I’m at the lake and I still have to—“

“We shall be met at the house.”

So Chloe pulled on her prairie dress and walked back to the house, where she found him standing in the door in only his pants and his sword strapped across his back.

“Where be your woman’s dagger?” he asked as she walked up the longhouse. “We have spoken of this. What if you be met with some manner of animal while you pick herbs in the forest?”

“Then it would probably kill me,” she answered. “You saw what happened when you tried to take me on that field trip to the sheep farm and they slaughtered that poor little lamb. Me and up-close-and-personal animal killing don’t exactly go together.”

He gave her what she’d probably call a “much aggrieved” look, if she were speaking in Old Norse, and then walked past her, leaving it to her to follow.

“Are you angry with me?” she asked a little while later as they approached the hot springs in gloomy silence.

“Nay,” he answered between gritted teeth.

“Because if this is about me not washing your hair these last couple of weeks, you should know I’m super-busy with all the stuff that needs to get done for the wedding.”

“I do repeat, I am not angry with you.”

“Well, you snapped at me about the dagger, and you didn’t even laugh at my self-deprecating sheep farm comment—which was pretty funny.”

“Chloe, I hold no anger toward you.”

She twisted the side of her mouth, “But see, I think you do—”

She wasn’t able to finish, because he suddenly turned her around, placing her hands on the rowan tree beside the hot spring before whipping her the skirt of her dress up. And then he was inside her, his fingers clawing into her hips, as he pumped into her.

As she’d grown big with the baby, they’d developed different positions for different places, against the tree while at the hot spring, on hands and knees on the benches and floors, and reverse cowgirl—a position that had particularly blown Fenris’s Viking mind—for the bed closet. Usually Fenris took his time with her these days, careful with her and with the baby.

However, that day he slammed into her mercilessly, as if crazed and out of control. And her she-wolf loved it. Howled inside of her for more, even as he drove into her hard and rough. “Yes! Yes!” she said in English. “That feels so good, Fenris. More, more!”

It was all she could do to hold on to the tree as the orgasm washed over her, fierce and breathing like a beast coming alive within her. “Fenris,” she cried out. “Oh, Fenris.”