Lord of Raven's Peak - Catherine Coulter [104]
“There is but one man who would do that.”
“Aye. But we must be certain, very certain.”
She kissed him again, unable to stop herself, and that kiss led to another and yet another and her hands were soon wild on him, stroking her palms over his chest, downward to his belly and into the thick hair at his groin. When she touched him, she breathed in and said into his mouth, “The way you feel, Merrik, ’tis nothing I could have ever imagined.”
“Nor I,” he said. “Nor I.”
19
DEGLIN GULPED DOWN his ale and wiped his hand across his mouth. “It’s hot out here,” he said as he poured himself another cup from the barrel beside him. He frowned as he looked up to see three women washing clothing in the big wooden tub set on wooden planks beneath a full-branched oak tree. “Aye, it’s as hot as she is, the cold bitch.”
“As who is?” Oleg asked, looking toward the women.
“That bitch, Laren. I tell you, Oleg, she is nothing, nothing at all.” He drank down more of the ale. “She bewitched Merrik, then whored for him. Aye, she pretended she was hot for him, as hot as that damned sun baking my flesh.”
Oleg merely nodded, keeping his head down, sipping only at his cup of ale. He didn’t want Deglin to see his growing rage. He wanted him to keep talking. Deglin had already drunk a good half dozen cups of the strong ale. At least now he was speaking of Laren. Oleg kept his features carefully blank. He waited. He suddenly had a clear memory of Laren lying over Merrik’s thighs while his friend cleaned the blood from the welts on her back. He wondered if Merrik could have possibly imagined that this thin pathetic girl would become his wife. He listened to Deglin speak of the worthlessness of both Laren and Taby, how they’d taken over, how they’d turned Merrik against him, how they deserved retribution, aye, and he would see that there was punishment for the bitch. The summer sun was warm on Oleg’s head, the breeze soft and sweet, filled with the scents of the ripening barley just beyond. He didn’t think it was too hot. He felt his skin warming and flexed his shoulders. He looked at Deglin then and drew back at the stark anger he saw on the man’s face, aye, and there was more. There was misery, deep pain that Oleg refused to see, misery he didn’t want to acknowledge or to understand. No, he wanted to take Deglin’s skinny neck between his two hands and squeeze the wretched life from him, but he didn’t. He sat there and listened and nodded and tried to look thoughtful from drink, a silly look, he knew.
Deglin, restless, his fingers fisting then relaxing, continued, his voice as bitter as the frigid winds of the winter solstice, “Aye, she’s a bitch and she should die. Look what she did to Erik and all have absolved her and just because she claims she is Rollo’s niece! By all the gods, it is madness to believe her, naught but a slave she is, and Merrik found her in Kiev. A slave, and that little brother of hers is probably her own child, a bastard and a slave.”
“You don’t believe she’s Rollo’s niece?”
Deglin spat on a pile of bones then kicked them. “She is a liar, and now she has won. Merrik has proven himself a weakling, easily led and gullible, not the man I believed him to be, not that he ever showed he was as brave as his poor brother, aye, he failed all of us, taking that viper to wed. I will leave. I should have gone with Thoragasson. He begged me to go with him, but I said I had to remain with Merrik, that I owed my loyalty to his family.”
Oleg wanted to tell him that all knew Thoragasson had decided he didn’t want him. If he couldn’t have Laren, he didn’t want to settle for Deglin. Thoragasson had said, his voice as cold as the Vestfold winter, “The man’s lowness offends me. I have to suffer