Free Insolent: The Moray Druids #1 (Highland Historical) by Kerrigan Byrne

We all have a specific strength that sets us apart from the others. Mine is speed and endurance.”
    “Luckily for me.” Morgana beamed up at him with her most charming smile.
    He didn’t answer.
    Sighing, Morgana burrowed a little deeper into the warmth of his chest. She thought she felt a tightening of his hold around her legs and ribs, but wondered if she only imagined it. He was too surly a man to be the cuddling kind.
    “For what it’s worth, I wanted to thank you for taking me home,” she offered, hoping to warm the ever-present chill of his company.
    “I didn’t have much of a choice,” he mumbled.
    “I suppose not,” she conceded. “But it’s important that you know I appreciate it, all the same.”
    He didn’t look down at her, keeping his eyes affixed on some distant point in the darkness that only he could see, but she had the sense that she’d surprised him. No. Astonished him was more like it.
    What a curious creature he was, to say nothing of the gentle, deadly beast that lived inside him. He was her lover. Her mate. And yet Morgana realized she knew nothing about him.
    “What is your name, warrior?”
    “Bael. Bael Bloodborn.”
    “Bloodborn,” she echoed. “A…Berserker family name?”
    He shook his head, leaping over a fallen tree and jarring her a bit with the landing. “Nie,” he answered. “I am the Bastard of Sigard Fjordson and his Persian slave. At the temple of Freya, we bastards have to earn our names through our deeds.”
    “Bloodborn,” she whispered again, the name holding a more sinister meaning now. “I like the name Bael. It’s strong and bold. It suits you.”
    “It’d be my name whether it suited me or not,” he said gruffly, but a small prick of awareness skittered along the fine hairs of her skin, telling her she’d alternately pleased and discomfited him.
    “I think I like the name Bloodborn better than Fjordson,” she continued, enjoying the bit of warmth flowing between them. “It’s more, um, evocative, surely. And, er, I’m certain well-deserved. Also, there’s something to be said about being the first of your name, isn’t there? For example, you can forge your own legacy, that is, if you wanted to live long enough to do such a thing.” Morgana furrowed her brow, she’d taken a conversational turn there she hadn’t meant to.
    “Bastards don’t leave legacies.”
    “I don’t know about that,” she gently argued. “There’s a rather dangerous one bearing down on England as we speak.” She, of course, referred to William the Bastard, of Normandy.
    He grunted, and Morgana decided to take that as a concession of her point. She was studying his jaw again, the way it connected to the sinew of his neck, tightening beneath her weight, but not straining.
    A Persian mother? She could see it now. The dominance of his sharp nose in his otherwise aquiline features. The dangerous angle of his jaw where his Northman blood would want it to be square. The fullness of his lips. The blue cast when the moonlight glinted off his ebony hair. He wasn’t dark enough to be exotic, but neither was he cast from the same grey skies and long winters of the people of the north and west. His ancestors were kissed by the sun, and the burnished bronze of his skin likely retained that kiss year-round.
    She’d certainly like to find out.
    “Where are your mother and father now?” she queried, trying to imagine them waiting at home for him to return from raiding the Saxons.
    “Dead.”
    “Oh, I’m sorry.”  It sounded insufficient, even to her.
    “Don’t be,” he droned tonelessly. “I’m not.”
    That saddened her. She’d loved her parents dearly. Their loss was a constant ache, most especially since they were taken from her too soon by Macbeth.
    More indirectly, by the Wyrd sisters.
    “What about siblings?” she asked.
    “What about them?”
    “Do you have any?” He was being obtuse on purpose. Likely because he wanted her to be quiet. Well, it had