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

“But I only—”

Three words. That was as far as she got. By then Grid had drawn her free hand across her barrel chest. Smack. The back of Grid’s hand caught Brit hard on her right cheek. Brit went spinning. She landed on her face in the dirt.

“Get up,” growled Grid. “And don’t speak again unless you are first spoken to.”

The whole right side of Brit’s face felt numb. Lovely. Brit brought her hands up to push herself to her knees. Her right hand brushed against a few hard little balls—M&Ms, fallen from her pocket as she dropped. She managed to drag them along with the back of her glove and to grab them in her fist before she scrambled upright. Neither of the women seemed to notice. Good. She really needed them. Nothing like a peanut M&M when a girl was under stress….

Eric checked his traps in the woods east of the village, finding one angry white fox. He released it, chiding himself for a too-soft heart.

Then, hoping the rage of his reluctant bride would have cooled somewhat by then, he returned to his aunt’s longhouse. The women were there, clustered near the fire, busy with their sewing, the children playing quietly around them. There was one woman missing.

The most important one.

The others looked up from their stitching and saw him. A small silence followed, one brimming with expectation.

Asta broke the silence. “Why, where’s Brit?”

“Bwit,” said little Mist, who was sitting on the floor near Eric’s sleeping bench. “Gone, gone, gone.”

Eric frowned. “She was here when I left.”

The women shared quick glances. Sif said, “And we assumed she was with you.”

He looked at the pegs by the door. Her big blue jacket wasn’t there. Her boots should have been waiting on the floor beneath the missing jacket. They weren’t there, either.

The women were shaking their heads.

Mist had gotten to her plump little feet beside his sleeping bench. She reached for something among the furs and then held up a silver chain. His marriage medallion turned at the end of it. “Ohh, pwetty, pwetty.”

Eric approached the child and knelt before her. “Mist. That is mine.”

Mist frowned, but then, with a long sigh, she offered the chain. “Ewic take.”

He plucked the dangling medallion from the air, winking at the winsome child as he rose. He slipped the chain over his neck and tucked the silver disk beneath his leather shirt. When Brit wanted it back, it would be waiting, warm from his body, charged with all the energy his strong heart could give it.

Right now, though, he had to find where the irksome woman had gotten herself off to.

Asta and his cousins’ wives were watching him.

“Asta,” he said. “Stay with the children. Sif. Sigrid. Come and help me find my runaway bride.”

Eric and his cousins’ wives searched the village, knocking on every door, looking through the bathhouse and the washhouse, the various small barns and other outbuildings. When they’d checked everywhere to no avail, he and the women returned to his aunt’s house, where they found the older children playing outside near the front step.

Asta signaled him inside—alone. “Word has come.”

Mist was sitting under the long deal table, cradling her yarn-haired doll. “Dawk Waiduh,” she said, with a happy little laugh.

Asta said, “In the woods just north of the back pasture you’ll find a pair of renegades. They are bound hand and foot—and they have quite a tale to tell.”

The two women had horses. They rode bareback. Brit, her hands tied before her, rode double with the one named Rinda. Grid took the lead.

There had been little explanation. They were taking her to their camp, they said. The news of Brit’s arrival over a week ago had spread through the Vildelund. The two women had been sent to the village in search of her.

It didn’t take a Mensa candidate to figure out what they were. Anyone who knew anything of Gullandria had heard the tales of the kvina soldars—the nomadic warrior women who lived in the Vildelund, who fought with great skill and lived free, never binding their lives to any man. As a child at her mother’s knee, Brit had loved to hear the tales of the kvina soldars. In her soft bed in her mother’s house in Sacramento, she used to dream of someday coming to her father’s land, of traveling to the wild north country, of meeting a kvina soldar face-to-face.

Well. Be careful what you dream of, as they say.

Brit had the front position on the sturdy mare, her “cousin’s” slim body pressed close at her back. They’d been on the trail, moving mostly northeast and climbing, for over an hour.

Brit was following Grid’s orders and staying quiet. She concentrated on the easy rhythm of the horse beneath her. Riding came natural as breathing to her, always had. Her legs did the work, so even with her hands tied, she had little trouble keeping her seat. For balance, she wrapped her fingers in the mare’s braided mane. She listened to the sound of the wind in the tall trees, felt the warmth of the woman who might be a lost cousin at her back—and she tried not to worry.

Strangely, it wasn’t so hard not to worry about herself. She’d looked into the eyes of both Rinda and Grid and seen no cruelty there. They were tough women, women who lived by their wits, their strength and their fighting skills. Her instinctive assessment of their basic decency had been bolstered by the way they ended up dealing with the two renegade boys.

To the kvina soldars, from what Brit had learned as she sought to understand the different peoples of her father’s land, rape was a crime punishable by death. And not only that. After killing a rapist, the warrior women frequently mutilated the man’s body, cutting off both his head and his offending male parts.

By their lights, Grid and Rinda had every right to kill the renegade pair. But they hadn’t. They’d decided to leave them to the mercy of chance. Whoever—or whatever—found them, would get to deal with them. To Brit this seemed more than reasonable, given the circumstances.

It was less reasonable of the women to carry Brit off. After all, she’d done nothing but come to the aid of one of them. They might have been a little grateful and let her head back to Asta’s place in peace.

But no. Their “leader” wished to speak with her. And their job was to make that happen. What Brit wanted counted for nothing with them.

From overhead came the cry of a hunting bird. Brit glanced up to see a hawk soaring in the clear blue, and she thought of that other hawk in Drakveden Fjord the day this big adventure had begun.

She thought of Eric’s face that first time she’d seen him in person, of the worry in his eyes as he’d looked down at her—injured, fading fast, on the rocky, cold ground. Now she was the one worrying. For him. Because Eric was going to blame himself when he found out she was missing.

Their disagreement back at the longhouse seemed of no importance now. So what if he thought they were getting married? It didn’t matter, let him think it. What mattered was that Eric Greyfell was the kind of man who took his responsibilities seriously. He would consider it his duty to keep her safe and he would torture himself for failing in his duty.

He was an exasperating man. But still, she didn’t want him torturing himself.

He would come after her, of course—at least, he would if he could figure out where to look. She was doing what she could to help him with that, though she doubted her little attempt to lead him along would work. But it seemed only right to at least give it a try.

She was thinking of it as the “Hansel and Gretel” technique. Instead of a trail of bread crumbs or pebbles to show the way, she was dropping peanut M&Ms. So far she’d dropped three. One in the clearing just as they were leaving. One about twenty minutes later. And one several minutes after that.

Okay, it was kind of pitiful if she gave it too much thought. What were three little M&Ms in an hour’s worth of traveling? Not a lot. But hey, she was doing the best she could with what she had.

And as of now, her hands were empty.

For the first time since Grid backhanded her for talking, she dared to speak. “Ahem. Sorry, but I really have to have a moment in the bushes.”

Neither Grid nor Rinda responded. The horses labored upward on the trail. Perhaps five minutes passed. Brit was debating how soon she dared to ask again, when Grid pulled to a stop. “Right there.” Grid pointed at a clump of bushes beside the trail. “Relieve yourself. Make no sudden movements. We will be watching.”

Terrific. Should she ask to have her hands untied? Uh-uh. If they did free her hands for the moment, they would only tie them again before she got back on the horse. And then they would be too likely to spot her trick.

Brit went into the bushes. It was quite the fun adventure, getting her pants down with her hands tied and the wool gloves making her fingers all fat and awkward. Lots of wiggling and squirming involved.

Which actually worked out fine. All the jerking around provided cover for that split second after she had her pants back up and zipped, when she shoved both hands in her jacket pocket and got what she needed.

Two minutes later she was back on the horse. She waited several minutes more before she let the next M&M roll from her fisted hand.