Free The Chief by Monica Mccarty Page A

he’d eaten too much at the feast.
    “Please,” she begged again, giving his arm a gentle squeeze.
    He stiffened, every muscle, every nerve ending reacting to her gentle touch. He’d felt the blade of a sword less intensely.
    As if just realizing what she was doing, she yanked her hand back and dropped her gaze to her toes.
    Clearly, she was embarrassed to have touched him so familiarly. In truth, he didn’t know what to make of it. He cleared his voice and said, “Your father can see to it that the man is punished for what he tried to do.”
    I would kill him
.
    “No, please.” He could hear the panic in her voice. “I just want to forget this happened. If you say something to my father it would only make him angry.” With her, she meant. And the notion clearly terrified her.
    His face darkened, guessing why. Did Fraser take his anger out on his daughters? Every instinct in his body recoiled at the idea. “Does he beat you?”
    “No,” she said quickly.
    Too quickly. He shouldn’t have asked. He erected the wall back in his mind.
Not your concern
. This girl was not for him. And he did not need to add to her troubles. “I’ll keep your secret, but only if you give me your word that you’ll not leave the castle again without attendants.”
    He almost reconsidered when he saw her expression. She was looking at him as if he’d just slain a dragon, her dark eyes shimmering with gratitude, her incredible mouth curved into a wide smile. The effect was striking. She wasn’t simply beautiful, she was radiant. But that look in her eye made him uneasy.
    “Do you mean it?” she said. “You won’t say anything?”
    “Not if you agree.”
    “Oh, I do, I do.” And without realizing what she was doing, she threw her arms around him in a childlike embrace, her soft cheek pressed against the plaid he wore around his shoulders. “Thank you. I swear I won’t do anything like this again.”
    Tor felt as if he’d just been pole-axed, the spontaneous gesture completely disarming him. A foreign feeling for a man who’d never been defeated in battle.
    He caught her to him, instinctively sliding his arm around her waist. He inhaled. Damn, she smelled good.
    He heard her sharp intake of breath, and when she gazed up into his eyes, he didn’t know who was more surprised.
    —
    Overcome with gratitude, not only for saving her from that horrible man but also for agreeing to keep her secret, Christina reacted unthinkingly, embracing him as she would have her sister.
    Except that very clearly he wasn’t her sister. For a moment she felt a tremor of fear.
    His body was big and hard and about as yielding as granite. It felt as if she’d raced headlong into another stone wall. A warm stone wall that smelled not of Beatrix’s rose water but of something dark, spicy, and definitively masculine.The warmth and heady scent engulfed her senses. She couldn’t breathe, lost in the depths of the most amazingly blue eyes she’d ever seen.
    The fear subsided as her body flooded with heat and awareness. Awareness of how small she felt in his arms and of how closely he was holding her. Awareness of how her breasts tingled against the hard plane of his chest. Awareness of the rocklike bulge of his arm muscles holding her and of the strength of his big hand on her waist. He could crush her without thought, yet he held her with surprising gentleness.
    He seemed just as stunned as she was, at first, but then his gaze sharpened—intensified—in a way that should have alarmed her. It felt as if he was burning a hole into her. She couldn’t tear her eyes away. The connection was so strong, it seemed as if she’d been caught in a current that was dragging her out to sea. A sea of deep cerulean blue, framed by dark lashes fringed with gold, set in a face far more handsome than she’d first realized.
    Brutally handsome, like some bronze Norse god of war—hard, forbidding, and built for destruction. Not just in his towering, muscular