Free The Enchantment by Betina Krahn

use of his powerful arms and chest. After two more crashing blows, she understood exactly how to counter him.
    She began to divert his powerful blows like a roof did rain, shrugging them off, letting them slide down her blade again and again. Over and over she allowed him to strike, playing her game, giving him the edge and then snatching his goal from him at the last moment. Frustrated by her increasing resistance, he began hurling insults.
    â€œYour father was but a thrall man . . . your mother, a blackened troll!” he snarled. “Your blade does not sing, troll’s daughter—it whines for mercy.”
    With each foam-flecked slur, her shoulders tightened and her grip on her blade grew more sure. Slowly, she pared away sensations—the shaking fists, the shouts of the warriors, the taunts of her opponent—until sight and sound became mere light and vibration. All she saw was her opponent’s face, the contorting angles of his body, and the flashing arcs of his blade as it cut the air around her. In her racing mind, made fleet by battle-fever, his movements seemed to slow and lengthen, became exaggerated and predictable.
    Jorund stood rooted to the hard-packed floor, watching the maid battle one of the most renowned bladesmen in his father’s band of warriors. He silently cursed Old Borger for his pride and wretched thirst for the dew of wounds. It was sure slaughter, sending a young woman, even a battle-maiden, against a hardened veteran of twelve Viking seasons. But he could not tear his gaze from it, could not keep his shoulders from twitching defensively with every movement of hers.
    Then, before their eyes, she roared to life as she had the previous night. Springing up with her blade braced, she gave Thorkel an upward rip that just missed opening him from groin to chin. As he lurched back, she pressed the attack, using both hands and wielding her blade with such quickness that all heard—or imagined hearing—it sing upon the air.
    She moved with fierce, animal-like grace, in a swirl of hip-length hair that shone whenever they surged into the dusty shafts of sunlight pouring through the roof. She was both woman and warrior, a living flame bent on engulfing her opponent. Her features were carved by concentration into a taut mask that radiated sensual heat, and her eyes glowed like a tiger’s—hungry in a way that stirred his loins and ignited his blood. He was riveted to the sight of her long, willowy form, swaying and almost yielding, then suddenly snapping taut and driving forcefully.
    Again and again the sleek muscles of her legs braced, her buttocks tightened, and her shoulders whipped taut as she swung her blade. She was a raging storm, a nerve-searing bolt of fury trapped inside a sleek, steel-thewed frame. Every nerve in Jorund’s body was quivering. He began to feel the shock of the blows she received in his own muscles, as if they’d been dealt to him. His arms flexed, his weight shifted, and his gut tightened . . .
    Borger stood before his high seat watching not the fight but his eldest son’s reaction to it. Jorund’s eyes shimmered like liquid silver, molten with desire, and his face was bronzed and fierce with wanting. Borger read the clenched fists and involuntary movements of his son’s body as signs of arousal, and the old jarl’s countenance began to glow. Whether it was the battle or the woman that had inflamed Jorund so, he could not say. But it heartened him to see his son burning so fiercely over anything. For months now, he had been desperate to get his heir’s blood up and instill some proper “Viking” ferocity in him.
    He turned back to the fight to find Serrick’s daughter advancing on Thorkel and knew she would soon have him worn down. Admiration bloomed in him as his eyes slid over her magnificent body and drank in the power and grace of her movements. Such thighs! Odin’s Living Stones! A warrior could