Death Blow Read Free Page A

amplified the sound into a wallop. The third ratcheted around and around. The fourth blared into a continuous thunder.
    “Show me.”
    She didn’t register his words or meaning for long moments. Beads of sweat coated and cooled the skin above her upper lip.
    The ripped tunic revealed the tightly wrapped cloths binding her breasts. She tried to swallow but humiliation had lodged thick and hard in her throat. Jutting her jaw just so, and though her beating heart and shaking hands blared her cowardice, she lifted her hands and began to unbind the coarse wool.
    Concentrating on a crescent-shaped swath of black-green moss staining the wall to the left, Nyssa peeled away each layer and repressed a shiver when the cool air in the cavern slithered over her bared breasts.
    “Lady Nyssa.”
    She had not noticed the rich deep gruffness of his voice afore, but refused to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging her abject mortification and kept her focus on the black spindly spider traversing the smoky fungus carpet. He flicked a finger across her cheek.
    His touch made her jump and when she noticed what he did, she could not draw a single breath.
    She clamped her palms over her breasts.
    “Why do you disrobe?” Her squeak akin to that of a pig fleeing slaughter.
    “I have ruined your garments, such as they were. You cannot travel to Castle Caerleah with bared bosom.” He threaded his tunic over her head. “Lift your arms, lady.”
    Lady? No longer girl or woman? Had he accepted her as the Lady Nyssa?
    She complied with his request in silence, keeping her eyes averted from his, preferring his wrath and shouting to this quiet, gentle care of her. Nyssa inserted her arms into the sleeves of the fine linen, tugged the soft cloth over her head, and smoothed the fabric over her hips.
    Heat threaded through the cavern, pulsating from his tanned flesh.
    Fisting her hands behind her back, she jammed her shoulders into the cave’s rough wall in a futile hope of preventing her knees from buckling. Ne’er had she seen such masculine beauty, nigh too painful for unveiled eyes.
    He had a massive chest, unmarked by scars and heavy with muscle and sinew. Swarms of bees buzzed her insides blazing warmth to every pore. Drawn taught as a fishing line about to pop, she could not pry her stare from his dusky, flat nipple. Her mouth watered. She yearned to run her tongue over the tight peak. What madness this? She had ne’er lusted after a man afore. And since the curse, the notion of e’en a man’s caress coated her tongue with a foul bitterness.
    Yet though the cave closed in on her, no bile gushed up her throat, and she could not swallow away the urge to touch him. A raw need to escape his fierce scrutiny over powered her rising, panicky terror.
    “Your weapons and trunk and the other possessions of yours we salvaged are at the back of the cave behind the large rock shaped like an arrow.” She offered a prayer the babbled words had been said in Norse.
    When he uttered nary a response, but nodded and stalked into the shadows, she rested her head on the uneven wall and wished her stepmother still lived. Mama, for she had never laid eyes on the goddess who birthed her, had always known the right choice for any situation.
    “What do I now, Mama? I cannot regain Caerleah without taking him husband and once we are wed, he will know all my secrets.”
    The cat loped through the cavern’s entrance. Her fervent whisper had reached Mús’s extraordinary hearing. He ambled over to her and rubbed his massive head on her thigh.
    “Now you come? Did you not hear the Viking ripping my tunic?”
    In answer, Mús reared onto his haunches and raised a brow. His tawny eyes gleamed with the emerald halo of the forest from which he had just emerged. For long moments they stared at each other. She knew Mús welcomed the arrival of the Viking, for the old healer and magik woman of Castle Caerleah, Elsa, had predicted the warrior known as Death Blow would