However long she straddled him, arms looped over his shoulders and face pressed to his neck while their breathing slowed, it wasn’t long enough.
“Splash over, Doc.” His hands framed her face. “Think that qualified as a hit?”
She groaned. She had no words, no thoughts, no plans. He could take charge.
He slipped to the other side of the pool. Water puddled everywhere, the aftermath a wet mess. Like her. Too sated to move, too awed at what they’d shared, she couldn’t do more than watch as he opened a teak box and extracted shampoo.
The plastic bottle with its orange flip-top, so mundane, made her freeze. They’d forgotten one particular boring, dull, crucial, vital thing. Shit. “You’ve thought of...almost everything.” The sarcasm didn’t carry a sting, but she wanted to bawl, Shampoo but not condoms?
“So.” She’d start normally before she opened that chat. “This is an amazing place. How often are you here?” Okay, this is awkward. She might as well have asked about the weather.
He glanced over his shoulder, almost as if he were equally uncertain about what to say or do. “Once or twice a year,” he said, and then he returned to gathering soap and towels.
“All this—” she gestured around the room, “—for once a year?” Inside her head, she heard her mother say, Enough questions, sweetie, or you’ll end up single like Aunt Mary. She shut up.
The shampoo cap snapped decisively. “It’s been a lot of years.”
“How many?” She watched his hands rub together until they were covered in bubbles, as ephemeral as this bond between them. If she pushed, would he shut her out even now? With the scent of oranges surrounding her, he massaged circles into her scalp, creating sensations so good she almost let her question drop. Almost. “I’ve noticed a pattern. You make a mysterious pronouncement, then when I ask you to explain, you distract me.”
“I like distracting you.” After he sluiced water on her hair without letting it drip into her eyes, his fingers followed the bubbles over her shoulder and across the swell of her breast.
Her body wanted to go all mushy a third time, but her brain issued a squelch command. She tugged his hand off her breast and frowned. “Not going to work.”
He looked set to jump at the challenge she’d unintentionally issued, until he read her expression. Wise man.
“Rinse.” He retreated to the other end of the stone ledge. “Then we’ll talk.”
She did as he said and pushed wet hair away from her face. “So, you never said how many years you’ve been coming here.” This answer had become important out of all proportion.
Pulling his eyes off her chest, he looked at the ceiling, perhaps counting.
One question—how long he’d owned this secret room—wouldn’t tell her what she needed to understand, but she couldn’t move on without knowing.
When he met her eyes, a single raised eyebrow defied her. “Six hundred years.”
Her heart seized with the same chest-tightening confusion she’d felt struggling in the mountains to reach Nazdana’s village. She couldn’t have heard him correctly.
“I’m immortal.”
Chapter Seventeen
Theresa’s dark eyes were the sole color on her chalky face.
“At least I’m not a vampire.” Wulf tried to smile. “I wouldn’t know as many great restaurants.” His joke bombed.
“What do you mean by...immortal?” Her voice revealed nothing of her thoughts.
“I can’t die. I can’t be killed.” Sharing his secret directly was a step he’d never risked even with Deavers. “You’ve seen my injuries heal. They always do. And I don’t age.”
She studied him, her face as immobile as a Byzantine mosaic.
Seconds lengthened into a minute while he wondered for the ten-thousandth time what went on in a woman’s mind. Although she relied on science, maybe she was one of the rare people who could believe and accept his story.
“I still don’t understand. Are you...” Her inflections were choppy, with pauses where words ought to flow. “Like that movie. Highlander?”
“Not exactly.” His jaw clenched at the comparison. Two deployments ago a new guy had thought it would make an entertaining movie night. After the captain snapped the DVD in half, he’d transferred the guy to a desk at Headquarters Company. It took a month of Judy Garland and Julie Andrews to expunge the swords, beheadings and stupid motto. “Fifteen hundred years ago I was a regular man. You would’ve called me a Viking. Then—” he forced himself to open his fists, “—I became this.”
“How?”
No nonsense Captain Chiesa, the straight-lipped woman who’d accosted his team in the gym, had returned. He couldn’t complain, because he’d wanted someone who’d listen and believe and maybe even care. When she leaned forward to speak, her breasts jiggled, which sent tiny waves lapping over to his side of the pool with an invitation. Then she raised a hand, and water drops followed veins down the pale inside of her wrist. If he bent forward, he could—
“Stop it.” She snapped her fingers. “You were finally talking. Keep talking. Tell me how you became immortal.”
“Right.” He chose a comb from the box by the pool’s edge. It felt insubstantial, so he swapped it for the weightier shampoo. “Have you read Beowulf?”
“The English epic? With the monster?” Her eyebrows drew together, and she brushed his hands aside. “You’ve done my hair. Give me that bottle before you crush it.”
Orders from her were a sign that his world might be intact, so he leaned back to let her touch him while he continued talking. “The Beowulf saga is true.” When Galan had recorded their history in writing, he’d left out most of the men’s names to protect them, but he’d included the songs and stories and even Hrothgar’s queen’s flirtation with Beowulf, all the parts that Wulf himself forgot whenever he remembered the monster.
She pressed on top of his head, circled and released. Her fingers must have deactivated most of his muscle groups, because his limbs flopped. “Are you saying you’re Beowulf?”
“No, he was our liege lord.”
“Our?”
“My brother and I.” Ivar would knock out his teeth for talking openly, but he couldn’t live in his brother’s form of isolation. “We joined Beowulf’s quest, looking for a bit of adventure, a bigger slice of reward. And of course we had our honor to prove. Common story. Ask any grunt today.” They’d been desperate, the belly hunger of their childhood replaced by a thirst to restore their family name, but their father had gambled away their sea gear. Beowulf had gifted Ivar with a seal-fur cloak and outfitted Wulf with a boar’s head helmet. From that moment they’d become more faithful than his hounds, willing to die for him.
Instead they’d been sentenced to live.
“Go on,” she murmured.
“The first night at Heorot, we lost Handscio.” Her doctor fingers moved to the nerves at the base of his skull and forced his eyes to shut. Never had the telling of this tale, nor even the thinking of it, come so easily, but with her hands digging into his muscles, he could recall the monster without shuddering. A half dozen arms had sprung from its body, enough arms to pin a man and claw him open and fight off other men all at once. When their swords hadn’t cut the monster’s hide, he and Ivar had been as helpless as newborns thrown in a fjord. All of them had been, except their leader.