The Captive by Joanne Rock Page B

meal was finished and his had been consumed long ago. If she had not known the brutish acts men were capable of, she might have been swayed by Wulf’s harsh masculine appeal. The firelight played over his bare upper arms, glinting off the silver arm torque and exaggerating the dark shadows in the hollows beneath his muscles.
    And, as he stood to make room for his bedroll in the small space, she remembered how large he was. He’d sprawled beside her pallet for much of the evening, his size masked by the lounging.
    Besides that, he did not use his size to frighten her. She understood this well after being wed to a man who did just that. Wulf would have dwarfed her husband, and yet he did not lord his strength over her.
    “Gwendolyn.” He knelt on his bedroll now, his tunic loosened but not off. “You did not mention your mother. Did she not tell you how it should be between a man and a woman?”
    There it was again—that warm glow deep in the pit of her belly, a sensation different from anything she’d felt before save with her captor. Neither fear nor pleasure, the tingling awareness felt more like anticipation or perhaps wariness.
    “My parents died on the road to Rome the summer I turned thirteen.” She had not been such a restless soul before their deaths, but afterward, she found herself wondering about the lives they’d led and adventures they’d had. “They were well-read and well traveled. They invited scholars to our home to read my father’s books and study with him. My mother was more inclined to speak to me about the culture of the Greeks than my future marriage. Of course, I was still a girl when she left.”
    As Gwendolyn laid her head upon a pile of fresh straw, it occurred to her that her mother would have never spent a moment of her time stitching rose petals on bridal garb. The thought made her smile as she remembered how she’d been all but imprisoned with the other widows this morn. Despite her fears and discomforts today, at least she was not stuck indoors, ducking verbal barbs from women who did not like or understand her.
    “If your mother had lived until your wedding day, she would have told you that coupling should never be painful.” Wulf’s voice traveled the short distance between them, bridging a few hands’ span so that it sounded like he rested right beside her. His words were so intimate and so unseemly that she closed her eyes tight to shutout the awkwardness of hearing such a thing from the barbarian leader who’d stolen her.
    “If she had told me that, I would have only learned the truth soon afterward.” And wouldn’t that have been all the more wretched? To think mating would bring pleasure only to find out it was fraught with pain?
    Weariness overtook her as the firelight died and fresh night air blew through the shelter. She breathed deep, liking the clean smells that were so different from the ancient, musty dampness of her overlord’s keep.
    “One day, you will know otherwise,” Wulf continued, though he seemed content not to argue for now. “One day, you will discover that the pleasure of a kiss is only the beginning.”
    The smoky promise in his voice called to mind the way she’d felt when he brushed a hand along her cheek or thumbed a crumb from her sensitive lower lip. The kiss he’d given her had awakened feelings she’d not thought possible. But where could it lead? Only to more hurt.
    She had to think coupling with a man of Wulf’s size would harm far more than it had with her husband.
    “Gwendolyn.” He had a habit of speaking her name as if he enjoyed the sound of it. “When the day comes where you are ready for more, you will see that the pleasure of a kiss is but a small thing compared to the knee-buckling bliss of what I can give you.”
    Before he’d made that outrageous claim, she had been tired and ready for sleep. But with the puzzle of knee-buckling bliss to unwind, she found sleep didn’t come for many hours and even then, her rest was