Vengeance Hammer (Viking Vengeance) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Heart hammering like a battering ram, she ripped off her chemise and winced when the fabric rented and the threadbare gown split at the top.
    Xára dug under the covers and pulled the soft material up to her nose. Though a fire blazed and snapped in the stone hearth, the heat had not permeated the bed linens and when her bare back hit the cool sheets, she shivered and her teeth edged.
    The sound of booted feet thundered to her ears, she held her breath and searched for Dráddør. The straw dipped and all at once he was above her. His face was so close to Xára’s, her eyes crossed when she tried to focus on his nose.
    “Look to me, Xára. You and I are the only ones in this chamber.”
    She glanced to the right. Two Vikings stood on either side of the doorway. Olaf, Earl Tighe, Egron and Ghazi and a few other warriors had entered the room and now formed a circle around the bed.
    “Look to me,” he commanded in a tone that brokered no quarter. “Close your—nay wait. Can you hear me without seeing me speak?”
    The frantic concern puckering his forehead made her lips curve. He looked nonplussed and panicky.
    She nodded.
    His relieved sigh tickled her cheek and she smelled the cinnamon from the sweet apple pudding served to end the meal. “I will make this quick. First we will kiss. Then I will stroke your…your woman parts to prepare them for my…my shaft. After that I will thrust inside of you. There will be pain when I breech your maidenhead. I know not how much, but immediately I will withdraw. Then I will have them take the sheets to be hanged and order everyone out.”
    The lord almighty had interceded on her behalf. Relief loosened her bunched shoulder and neck muscles. She had not realized the tension holding her limbs in paralysis until that very moment. The reassurance and confidence he radiated seeped under her skin, warmed her icy nose, fingers, and toes, and sucked away her rigidity. She smiled and traced the strong line of his jaw marveling at the slight scratchiness of the stubble.
    “Close your eyes for me now, mit sváss . Do not open them until I tell you.”
    She did not understand the Norse words he’d spoken, but he said them like an endearment, and Xára guessed them the equivalent of dearling or sweetling. For some peculiar reason, the notion soothed her, and she nodded.
    He brushed lips to her brow and, when she obeyed his order, to her lids.
    The brief grazing caress left her skin sizzling. His mouth, hot and wet skipped over one cheekbone. She gasped when he lowered his hips to hers and nudged her legs apart.
    A languor, compelling and bewitching, stole across her limbs. She now understood how men seduced maids into abandoning their virtue, the feel of searing skin on searing skin more enthralling and delicious than anything she’d experienced afore.
    He lowered onto her and his legs, the thigh muscles hard as steel, forced her knees wide. His groin, heated and forged with sharp planes and angles, settled on her, hipbone grazing hipbone.
    The long, turgid length of his organ shifted on her belly when he caged her in an embrace so intimate all she heard, felt, and smelled was him. Blazing heat, a heady spice, and a sinewy strength she was cert had been carved in a blacksmith’s glowing furnace covered her in his embrace.
    Her breasts became the center of the world when his chest scraped her nipples. She ached all over and the need to touch him surged through her.
    All restraint vanished in a flash when he sucked on her lower lip.
    She set her palms to his neck, slid them down to his collarbone, trailed them down over the dip between his shoulders and ribs, and rubbed them back and forth, delving her fingers into the surprising softness of the downy hair dusting his flesh.
    He shifted and his shaft abraded her tender woman parts. The secret nub she had explored during the long, lonely nights at the abbey throbbed and burned. His mouth claimed hers and she was lost.
    Lost in the marvel of her