Captured (2 of 3 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Captured by Helen Kirkman. Copyright 2007 by Helen Kirkman.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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CHAPTER ONE (CONT'D)

No one got in the way of the Viking Jarl Guthrum's will. She glanced round the moving army. Earl Guthrum had killed half a score of innocent people to secure this escape. He was breaking not just the truce with the king of Wessex, but his word of honour, and honour was the only thing that kept the world human. She could still scarcely believe he had done it. The flames inside rose. The Viking earl had hanged the West Saxon hostages given into his hands. All those deaths, and now one more.

Perhaps.

She knelt on the frozen ground. The cold struck through her decorated skirts. Jarl Guthrum's men streamed past. Of course, there was nothing she could do to stop an army. And there was Merriwen to think of . . . .

She saw the chained man's face.

Her gaze fastened on a perfect profile made out of fire and shadow. Dreams. Such creatures as him did not exist on middle earth. He had fallen out of the heavens and come to grief in the firelit dark.

Somewhere in the blackness someone was speaking. She could not make out the words. She did not bother. Her attention was fixed on the sight of the shadowy creature before her, all of her mind, like someone possessed. Thick wavy hair spread out from his head across the frozen ground. The loose strands trailing the crushed earth showed deep copper in the torchlight. Rich. So fascinatingly bright and luxuriant she wanted to bury her achingly cold hands in its light and its deep black shadows. Now. Because it was full of fire. She touched it.

" . . . will pay for such madness . . . " said the voice above her head.

The hair felt like the threads of silk that traders brought from Byzantium, so smooth, almost heavy with that impossible smoothness against her naked skin. It was cold. Small shivers passed through her. Her gaze travelled over a light-gilded cheekbone, a straight nose, the solid thickness of a square jaw . . . the skin was dusted with a dark stubble already dense enough to blur the strongly carved perfection of that outline. Living flesh, male. If he belonged to the realm of dreams, it was the world of night dreams that were heated, erotic.

She snatched her hand back.

"Of course, you know where he comes from," said the voice at the edge of her perception.

She was mad to touch him. There was a quality of toughness about him that was stunning, at violent odds with the deeply compelling attractiveness. Or perhaps part of it.

She moved back. She was proof against the flaunted charms of any man on earth. She had been taught only too well that commerce between the sexes was no more than that, a matter of bargaining in which women generally had the weaker position. Women needed their wits.

Rosamund watched the brilliant motionless body chained on the ground before her.

She touched him. Just to see whether the man was truly still alive. Nothing more. Her hand settled. He did not react.

The brilliant flesh was so cold, even to her chilled fingers--cold as death. Her heart slammed against her ribs. The sharpness of the reaction stunned her senses, choking her breath. Then the rush of dizziness cleared on the realisation that the man she touched still lived, despite the coldness of his flesh, the coldness in the air around them that cut the lungs like ice shards.

"Alive." Her artistically reddened lips stumbled over a word that was totally inadequate to describe the strength that poured from the stranger, forcing its way through the thin skin of her fingers with the steady movement of his breath. So powerful. But it was human strength. The cold would kill him. She had already moved, when the voice out of the dark began again. She heard a snort that expressed pure contempt and then a word.

"Mercia."

Her head turned. Mercia. That was where the chained man came from, the wide rolling country north of Wessex which now belonged to the Vikings. It was where she had been born.

It meant nothing. It was not a bond.

She had every reason to hate her fellow Mercians. They had sold her to the Viking army which had conquered them and then turned its attention to invading Wessex.

The voice said, "He should not have interfered with an execution."

The hostages. The prisoner must have done something that concerned the hostages.

It could mean nothing to her.

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