Nena by Ann Boelter (red white royal blue txt) 📗

to have learned the most about Jarl. It was easier in the beginning when she thought of him as an ignorant cruel barbarian, with no code, no honor. A savage grunting man-beast, as all Northmen were known to be. But now she knew none of those things were accurate in describing him. From all accounts he was fearless in battle. And while she had witnessed him to be strict with discipline, he was fair in his dealings with the men. Those were traits to be respected, not despised or feared. Those were Teclan values. That he shared those characteristics with the Teclan surprised and disturbed her.

In other ways he was as opposite of a Teclan as he possibly could be. Nena had never seen anyone even remotely like him. Every emotion manifested itself clearly on his face and body. When he was amused, the fine lines in the corners of his eyes crinkled, and unusual sharp depressions formed in his cheeks a short distance on either side of his mouth, even before he smiled. And his eyes. They were a unique blend of colors—shades of browns and greens with flecks of yellows and even dark blues, like the gods could not decide which color to make them, so had given him all instead. Even stranger still was that they changed color with his mood. Nena had no idea eyes could portray so much depth, so much feeling. Though he usually held his actions in check, Jarl’s feelings were never secret. It was something Teclan were schooled against from the time they could walk—to show your feelings was weak. But Jarl could never be called that. Somehow, it just made him more alive.

Something else Nena soon came to easily recognize was his arousal. It wasn’t so much a single defined thing that she could see. It was more the way he carried himself as he moved around the tent, the air around him charged with a tense masculine energy. Some nights he consumed large quantities of wine and sat staring at her, brooding. These nights he would go to his furs alone. Other nights he would look at her longingly, then call for Altene. But these nights were becoming less and less frequent.

That fact pleased her, and not because it had anything to do with them. On the nights Altene shared Jarl’s furs, what Nena learned about herself was even more difficult to accept. She had never thought of her body as being anything other than an obedient tool to her mind. It wielded her knife to skin a kill, or her spear to kill an enemy. It vaulted effortlessly onto Nightwing’s back. It did anything she required. Sometimes it might fail her by being too slow or too weak, but it was never independent. Other than thirst and hunger, it had no demands or desires that her mind did not give it, and with training even those could be ignored.

But thirst and hunger were the closest things Nena could come up with to describe how her body responded to him. While her mind still formulated ways to kill him, her body reacted to him of its own accord. It tingled when his eyes caressed it from a distance. And when Jarl called Altene to his furs, it was filled with a deep aching hunger she had never experienced before. Her body disgraced her.

Nena had known before what happened between men and women in the furs. Teclan women were not shy about their intimacies, especially the older ones. It was something they did not discuss in mixed company, but many an experience had been shared in private. Even with all their talk, Nena was not expecting this. She knew, in general, how the act was performed and that it would be pleasurable—how pleasurable seemed to depend on the individual man. But no one had ever described anything close to what she saw Altene and Jarl experiencing. For all of Altene’s falseness, she’d apparently been honest in this. Her ecstasy was unmistakable, as was his.

Nena still used her warrior tactic to take her consciousness away, but when the increased tempo and intensity of their sounds intruded on her peaceful scene—their soft gasps, the moist sounds of their lips and then intimate places meeting, her stomach clenched involuntarily. Though her eyes remained averted, Nena could clearly see the taut muscles of his straining back, his muscular buttocks thrusting and thrusting, from other times when she had stolen a look.

She had looked more than once, truth be told. At first she told herself it was to identify any weakness in him, an old injury perhaps that she could later use to her advantage. And maybe it had been initially—though he was not shy around her; she could have seen everything she needed to see in that regard, one of the many times he moved around the tent naked—and she had. Now, after all this time, she knew every detail of his lean body. Every detail down to how the hair on his chest and abdomen swept in from both sides, meeting in the middle of his rippled stomach before angling downwards. How each individual muscle in his upper arms bulged, smooth and well-defined. How his battle scars were fewer than she expected from his reputation, and none seemed to hinder him. She knew all of those things, so there was certainly no reason to look now, yet she still did. Her lack of discipline in this regard disgraced her even more than her body’s responses.

The time Nena spent away from Jarl when the women took her to the baths was no less disconcerting. Increasingly confident around her that she was not going to escape and get them punished or killed, the women’s tongues were loosened. They were from many different villages, but their stories were shockingly the same.

Nena knew them to be true, but had never once considered life from the perspective of the vanquished. The Teclan were never raided; their families were never