Page 19 of Highland Warlord
A pyramid of logs flared and leapt with light, throwing deep shadows against the Berserker’s dark eyes and painting the chiseled planes of his figure in stark relief.
Bemused, Morgana wandered toward the warmth of the flames blinking her surprise. “I had no idea you had fire magic,” she exclaimed, quite breathless. “What else can you do?”
“This is the extent of it.” he motioned to the stack of wood. “We can create and extinguish a moderate flame, but rarely can a Berserker wield fire.”
“What about water?” she asked, motioning to the loch, still a swath of darkness beyond the bank.
He shrugged. “I know a Berserker or two who can summon mists, or work curses. But our magicks are more for survival and combat than anything.”
“Fascinating!” Morgana exclaimed, lowering herself by the fire and resisting the temptation to take her hands from where they held her bodice together to hold out to the enticing warmth. “Tell me everything.”
He looked at her askance, which she was pretty certain he’d been avoiding since their little interlude by the other loch, both mile and hours past. His eyes skittered away from her, then back.
“My cousin, Kenna, can wield fire, but not ignite it,” she mused. “How incredibly useful a Berserker would be to her.”
She’d said the wrong thing. Again. She caught the distinct chill in his eyes before he turned away from her. “I’m going to get food,” he informed her.
“But, I can call fish from the loch,” she protested.
He was gone.
Berating herself, Morgana padded to the water’s edge and crouched down, meaning to pull some fish with her magic, just in the unlikely event that Bael’s hunt was unsuccessful. The glint of the firelight danced off the still loch, and the past called to Morgana like a wayward siren.
It seemed like an invasion of privacy, somehow, but as she cupped her hand in the water and held it up to the light, she knew that what she would see in this pool would give her the key to unlocking the Berserker’s heart.
A womanwith hair the color of a spring poppy wove a tapestry in a longhouse adorned with scroll work and animal furs. Shehummed to herself a lovely tune while motes of dust and wool glinted in the late-afternoon sun. Her tranquility never faltered even as a giant warrior, his tattoos glowing from skin the color of burnished copper, ducked inside and stalked to her, hauling her to stand and pressing her against him.
“Accept me, woman,” he crooned against the hollow of her neck, pausing to press a playful kiss on her rosebud mouth. “Or must I spend another night persuading the words from your lips on sighs and screams?”
“Bael,” the woman laughed, glancing surreptitiously around the longhouse, as though checking if they were alone. “What are you doing here in the middle of a training day?”
“What do you think I’m doing?” Bael’s shoulder flexed with a movement of his hand, and the woman’s bodice was untied. “I am seducing my mate.”
She pushed at him, ineffectually. “Won’t they miss you at the temple?”
Bael paused in his passionate exploration of her clavicle to pull back and look at her. “What do they have left to teach me at the temple? I’m their fastest warrior. One of their deadliest. They would rather I focus on claiming my mate. It makes me less of a liability.”
“About that.” She reached up and pulled her bodice together fingers stuttering as she worked to retie it. “I don’t think we should be together during the day like this, someone might see.”
Bael’s dark eyes lit with suspicion, and beneath that, fear. “My Berserker accepted you as his mate last night,” he said more seriously. “Once you accept me, you’ll live in my house, sleep in my bed, bear my children. Who cares if anyone sees us? Let them stare.”
She turned back to her weave, strumming lines of wool. “Our children,” she murmured. “Won’t they be dark, like you?”
Bael crossed thick arms over his chest. “Does that matter?”
“Of course it matters. Do you want your children to be laughed at? Do you want them to be outcasts—Persians— like you are?”
“I’m a bastard, not an outcast, Heida. And I’m only half Persian.”
She didn’t look at him as she said the words that distinguished the light in his eyes. “Do you think someone… like you should be having children? Should even be mated at all?”
Bael seized her arm, forcing her to meet his dead gaze. “Iammated. To you. Or don’t you remember begging me to pledge my life to yours last night as I fucked you into oblivion?”
“I wasn’t thinking,” Heida’s fingers blithely worked on her weaving, and she lost herself to the project, effectively shutting Bael out. “And truly, you should have known that a daughter of Jarl Thorsen would never be allowed to mate with a Bastard. Berserker or no Berserker.”
Bael’s eyes widened with panic and rage. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he grit out. “I’m bound to you. For the rest of your life. There can be no others for me. Only you, until you die, or I do. Do you understand what that means?”
“I understand that you can prolong my life exponentially,” Heida postulated.
