Mathis, Jolie by The Sea King Read Free Book Online Page A

sure he had saved her life. That was all.
    "You dare champion him?" her brother roared.
    Forsooth, the Dane had been a stranger, but somehow she knew—
    A sudden weight tilted the mattress. Berthilde cried out. Hands closed on her ankles. Linen bunched at her thighs as Ranulf dragged her from the bed and forced her to kneel before him.
    Did he not understand? She wanted only to be still, to mend. Tears scalded her cheeks. Futilely her mindsearched for an explanation for her missed courses, the persistent sickness—but there were no answers.
    Yea, the Norseman had come, and he had gone, and now, inexplicably, she found herself with child, but she remained steadfast in her belief he was blameless.
    Ranulf's voice broke as he pronounced, " 'Twas no immaculate conception."
    Isabel stared upward, stricken by the amalgam of emotion in his eyes. Fury, tenderness—and disappointment. "I would never presume to say it was so."
    Tears glazed his eyes, tears she had never before seen in this warrior king who showed no weakness. "And you, naive child. You set him free."
    In a blink, Berthilde appeared along the watery edge of Isabel's vision.
    "Sire, please," she whispered in a supplicant's voice, her hands pressed together as if in prayer to her king. "She hath been punished enough."
    Ranulf paled. He sank to his knees in front of Isabel. Her half brother, the pride of their father, of their long and valiant noble line. Sunlight, waned by the approaching eve, stole through the window to shine off his golden hair.
    "This is not what I had intended for you, sister. This is not—" He lifted a hand to touch her cheek.
    Isabel could not look at him. Instead she stood and crawled to the center of the bed, where she turned from him and lay down, her arms at her sides. The linens still gave off the faintest bit of warmth.
    "Isabel." Against the mattress he grasped her hand.
    But another man's words, not Ranulf's, echoed through her mind. "God be with you, Isabel."
    With each moment, her memories of her blue-eyed savior grew more faint, more altered. Desperate to remember, desperate to believe, she slid her other hand beneath the pillow. There her fist curled around the relic.
    A bloodstained fragment of cloth, snatched from the fire when Berthilde had not been watching. Her only remnant of him.

    "I bid you, cease looking at me thusly." The Dane spoke quietly, over his shoulder. He placed another shard of kindling on the fire.
    On the far corner of the bed Isabel remained conjoined with the bed pillar, where she had scrambled after he'd deposited her moments before. She watched his every move, his every breath, her muscles tensed for flight. Would he lunge at her and tear her clothing, or would he take pleasure in a slow assault?
    He pivoted and sat back upon the low stone hearth, his elbows propped upon his knees.
    "As if I were some sort of monster." With a tilt of his head he peered toward her. His voice rumbled up from his throat like an elusive, first thunder before a storm. "My name is Kol. Son of Thorlek."
    At her continued silence he frowned. "I thought, mayhap, you would wish to know."
    Kol. How long had she wondered?
    But she did not wish to give him a name. Monsters did not have names.
    Silence screamed between them. Shadows blackened the chamber, save for the fire's meager light.
    Somehow the man who sat before her did not concur with the stark, shocking images of a slavering fiend her mind repeatedly produced. Forsooth, his long, dark lashes contradicted everything hard in him. Surely he had been carefully crafted by Satan to beguile unwary women into opening their hearts.
    Just as she had done, once before.
    From beneath those lashes, he glanced about the room.
    Shadows darkened the skin beneath his eyes. He lifted a hand to rub the bridge of his nose.
    "These are your chambers, are they not?" He flashed a smile. Isabel glimpsed his white, even teeth. "They smell like you. That is how I know."
    Isabel did not so much as blink in