“Anyhow, Bro,” Danny motioned his head toward the closed bedroom door, “you hit the jackpot this time.”
“Yeah, I did,” Zach agreed with a grin.
“Listen, we’ll talk in the morning, okay? I’m beat.” Danny reached over and gave him a hug. “Yeech, that is taking brotherly love a step too far. Hugging a naked guy.”
Zach just realized then that he was still naked. He would have blushed if he were a blushing kind of guy.
“By the way, nice war wounds!”
“Huh?” As Zach reentered his bedroom and looked in the full-length mirror on the closet door, he saw a bite mark on his chin. A hickey on his neck. Scratch marks on his shoulders. A bruised elbow where Britta had clocked him in the shower. And his cock looked as if it had been through a battle.
War wounds, for sure.
Hoo-yah!
He wanted her to spend all day doing WHAT?…
Britta had dawdled long enough. Time to go down to Zachary’s great hall and face the object of her humiliation.
She had pretended to be asleep when he rose soon after dawn, even when he came back from bathing and dressed in his bedchamber. To say she was having morning-after regrets for her wanton behavior would be a monumental understatement.
Oh, ’twas not that she had not enjoyed herself. Far from it. Not even the things Zachary had taught her. Not even the fact that his brother had seen her nude body. Nay, what embarrassed her most was the wicked things she had initiated herself. Ne’er would she have guessed there were so many ways to tup. Ne’er would she have guessed that she would have such enthusiasm for the bedsport.
If Zachary dared laugh at her, she was going to clobber him over the head with the nearest heavy object.
She combed her still damp hair off her face and plaited it into one single braid. Her long hair was a hindrance in the military exercises of WEALS, and she was seriously considering having it all chopped off.
Then she pulled on pant-hees and the breast harness. After that the black braies, red shert, and red shoes, which were ridiculously open-toed and open-heeled. Mayhap there was a shortage of leather at the cobbler’s when these were made.
She heard voices as she went down the steps and headed toward the scullery. Delicious smells permeated the air, and she realized how hungry she was. They had left Madrene’s afore the meal was served last night, following Sammy’s near mishap.
Everyone stopped talking and turned to her when she entered the scullery…Zachary, his brother, and Sammy.
“Good morning, sweetheart,” Zachary said, rising from his chair and offering it to her. When she sat, he kissed her shoulder.
She made a hissing sound to indicate his behavior was inappropriate in front of others. And besides, all he had to do was touch her, and the sap began to rise in her traitorous body.
He just ignored her hiss and pulled out an empty chair for himself.
“This is my brother, Danny.” Zachary waved a hand to the grinning rogue across the table.
“We’ve met,” Danny said, winking at her.
Danny was as different from Zachary as night from day. He had brown hair and brown eyes, compared to Zachary’s blond hair and blue eyes. And whilst of the same height and build, Danny could not be described as pretty by anyone’s definition.
Zachary shot his brother a warning glower for the wink, which daunted him not a whit.
“And you already know Sammy.”
“Are you gonna tell me ’nother Viking story?”
She nodded. “Later.” Good gods, I hope I am gone by then. “Take me back to the base,” she told Zachary. “Now that your brother is here, there is no excuse—”
He patted her thigh. “Now, now. Eat some breakfast first.” He was piling food on a plate in front of her: ham, sausage, eggs, some kind of round cake with syrup on it, and buttered bread that had been toasted. Then he poured an orange substance into a clear glass and the black, bitter beverage known as coffee into a cup.
“Who cooked all this?” she asked, already having taken three mouthfuls of the delicious food.
“Danny started it, and I helped when I came down,” Zachary said.
“Me, too,” Sammy interjected.
“Sammy, too,” Zachary agreed, rumpling his son’s hair, which caused his son to frown fiercely at his father.
“What’s that mark on yer shoulder?” Sammy asked Britta around a mouthful of food.
“Don’t speak with food in your mouth,” Zachary advised.
Sammy stuck out his tongue, covered with half-chewed food.
“It looks like ya got bit by a bear,” Sammy observed, back to the mark on her shoulder.
Britta glanced sideways to her shoulder, saw Danny look, too, then turn to his brother, Zachary, and pump one arm in the air.
“Yep, a big bad ol’ bear,” Danny told Sammy.
The conversation veered then toward a discussion of WEALS, Sammy’s tutor lessons, which would start on Thorsday, Zachary’s father having hired guards, and the lovely sunny weather outside.
The whole time Danny was watching her and Zachary closely, as if trying to puzzle something out. “I’m taking Sammy for the day,” he announced of a sudden. “An uncle’s prerogative,” he added, seeing that Zachary was about to protest. “You need a day to yourself, Bro.” He patted Zachary on the arm.
“That’s nice of you to offer, but—”
“We’re going to Disneyland,” Sammy announced. Then, addressing Britta, he said, “Wanna come with us?”
“Oh, nay, I do not think I could go to Dizzy Land today. I…I…”
“Your dad and Britta are gonna spend the day together,” Danny explained to Sammy.
“The whole day? What’re they gonna do for a whole day?”
She looked at Zachary, saw the hot regard in his eyes, realized he was not about to return her to the base any time soon, then turned back to the others.
“I would love to go to Dizzy Land.”
Chapter 11
Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho, it’s off to Disneyland they did go…
“I can’t believe I’m wasting a day off going to a glorified kiddie park.”
“’Tis not my fault.”
“Oh, yes, it is, sweetheart. Danny gave us the perfect opportunity to stay home, alone.”
“Nay, ’tis your fault. You are the one who gave me a hot look.”
“Hot looks are bad?”
“They are when they make me do lustsome things.”
Zach glanced over at Britta in the front seat and smiled.
Danny was sitting in the backseat with Sammy, enthroned in his car seat, playing a game of I Spy. The roar of the motor and traffic noises through the open windows made their front seat conversation relatively private. They were halfway to L.A. and a blasted day at Disneyland. At least they had VIP passes, thanks to his dad, which would move them around some of the time-sink lines.
“You were incredible last night, Britta.”
“Oh, do not speak of that again.” She put her hands to her cheeks, which were nicely flushed. “I was a wanton.”
“God bless wantons.”
“That is profane.”
“Ya think? Why would God create great sex if he didn’t want men and women to enjoy it?”
“This is not a conversation we should be having in front of a child. Or your brother.”
“They can’t hear us back there. I had our whole day planned out.”
“I wager you did! How much of it would have been spent with me on my back on your mattress?”
“Actually, I have a checklist of all the ways and places we were gonna have sex, and only a few of them took place with you on your back.” He grinned at her.
“A checklist? Where is it?”
He tapped his head. “In here, baby. Wanna know what’s on my list?”
“Nay.”
“You on my lap in the vibrating La-Z-Boy. Me nailing you against the mirror on my closet door. On the kitchen table. You straddling a bench. On the deck. In the bathtu
b. At the top of the cargo net, back on the grinder. Here in the car. With your legs over my shoulders. With me bending over you, doggie style. Hanging from the chandelier.”
“Enough!” she said.
“Hey, I was just getting started.”
“You make my woman’s fleece get damp when you talk like that,” she hissed at him in an undertone.
Her words hit him right between the legs. Slam dunk! Erection. “Britta, you are priceless.”
“You should have taken me back to the base. I must needs prepare myself for this upcoming week. Even you have said it will be brutal.”
“Tomorrow’s gonna come soon enough, baby. And, yeah, last week was a piece of cake compared to what’s coming up.”
She groaned.
“The whole point is to weed out the weak ones. If a trainee, man or woman, can’t make it during these evolutions, they’ll never make it out in the field. I for sure wouldn’t want someone covering my back who’s gonna bail at the first sign of disaster.”
She nodded her understanding.
“I have been told all this afore. I am not going to drop out, Zachary. Where else would I go? And, nay, do not offer me a position as nursemaid for your son again. ’Tis not what I am trained to do.”
“Duly noted. Well, maybe I can give you some tips on surviving then. Number one, don’t call attention to yourself. Number two, take each step one at a time. There’s a famous Navy SEAL motto: ‘The only easy day was yesterday.’ It’s absolutely true, but you can’t allow yourself to think about what’s ahead, or you’ll give up. Number three, rest whenever you can. SEALs learn something called REM sleep, where they can sleep standing up, eyes open. Even if it’s only for five minutes at a time, it can energize you, get you over the next hump. Number four, make close friends with your buddies. The SEALs and WEALS are all about teamwork. You’re as strong as each one of you, but also as weak as any one of you. Number five, we’ve got to get you some private tutoring—reading, English, math, history—before someone discovers you’re not the missing Norse officer.”
Britta was grinning at him.
“What?”
“You make a good teacher.”
He grinned back. “Don’t you dare tell anyone that, or I’ll be stuck here on base forever.”
“You would rather be fighting?”
“Absolutely. There’s so much bad stuff happening in the world. The government needs every specially trained man to fight the good fight. The demand for SEALs far exceeds the supply.”
“Then why are you on the base?”
He motioned his head toward the backseat.
“Sammy?”
“Yep. I took him out of a foreign country illegally. His grandfather is a terrorist, and he wants him back. That’s why there will always be bodyguards around till this is resolved. It’s a world-class snafu.” He was glad she didn’t ask him what snafu meant, not sure she would appreciate situation normal all fucked up. He decided to lighten the subject. “Hey, you could be Sammy’s babysitter with an AK-47. Then I wouldn’t need any bodyguards, and you could utilize your fighting skills.”
“What is an achy-forty-seven?”
“A whoop-ass weapon.”
“Thank you for the offer, but nay.”
“There would be benefits.”
“As long as I am stuck in this strange land and this strange time, I will train to be with the WEALS, I will survive whatever torture is thrown my way, and then I will go off and kill bad people. And that is that.”
“We’ll see,” Zach said and took her hand in his, lacing their fingers.
She glanced down at their intertwined fingers, then up at him.
“Why didn’t you want to be alone with me today?” He hadn’t realized that he was going to blurt that out. How pathetic did that make him sound? She didn’t answer at first. So of course he blundered on like a needy teenager. “I thought you liked being with me last night.”
She made a snorting sound. “Pfff! I liked it too much.”
That made him feel a little better. “And?”
“I wanted to know how to have an orgasm, not how to set a record for swiving till my eyeballs rolled back in my head.”
Unfortunately, he’d just pulled to a stop at a red light and her voice carried to the backseat.
Zach heard his brother choke in the middle of telling Sammy, “I spy something—cough, cough—red.”
“My father’s face,” Sammy answered.
The snot!
“Didja know my father has a magazine with naked wimmen in it? He hides it under his mattress.”
The sneaky snot!
It was Zach’s turn to choke now. Looking in the rearview mirror, he saw a smirk on Sammy’s face that was pure one hundred proof Dennis the Menace.
“There was this one picture where a lady was bending over and ya could see—”
“That’ll be enough, Sammy,” Zach said. He would have to be even more careful with what he had in the house. “Besides, I think it belongs to Uncle Dan.”
“Yeah, right!” Danny was smirking, too.
“A tattoo,” Zach lied. “On her thigh. That’s probably what Sammy saw.”
“No, I saw—” Sammy started to say, but Danny clapped a hand over his mouth and said, “Haven’t you ever heard that children are to be seen and not heard, short stuff?”
“Who said that?” Sammy demanded to know. “Musta been a grown-up.”
“I am thinking of getting a tattoo,” Britta said.
Oh, boy! He turned to look at her. “Where?”
“On my buttock.”
Friggin’ A! “My name?” he suggested.
“Why would I do such a thing? Nay, I am contemplating either a longship or my favorite sword.”
“What’s the name of your favorite sword? Ballbuster?”
“Ha, ha, ha! My best pattern-welded sword was called Head Lopper.”
“That’s just peachy.”
“’Twas a jest, lackwit. My sword is named Wound Maker.”
“Oh, that’s better. If I had a sword, I would name it Whoop-Ass.”
“Must you always be so vulgar?”
“Listenin’ to you two is more fun than sex,” Danny observed. “Almost. And to think I was feelin’ sorry for you, all alone here, celibate, practically a prisoner. What a laugh!”
“We’re almost there,” Zach said. Thank God!
Glancing over at Britta, he did a double take. Her mouth was parted, her eyes wide, and she let loose with a long sigh. It was the kind of glazed expression a guy fantasized about seeing on a woman’s face the first time he dropped his drawers. But that was not the case here.
“’Tis the most beautiful castle I have ever seen.” She was staring at the gaudy pink Cinderella castle in the distance. “What kingdom is this?”
He grinned. “The Magic Kingdom, baby.”
Her belief, reiterated over and over in the next fifteen minutes, that they must have entered a totally new and enchanted land was reinforced when he read the entrance sign to her:
HERE YOU LEAVE TODAY
AND ENTER THE WORLD
OF YESTERDAY, TOMORROW,
AND FANTASY
Splash this!…
The first clue Britta had that a Splash Mountain adventure was perchance not a good idea was when they made her sit down in a hollowed-out log that immediately wet her bottom.
She had been shamed into going on the ride, not by Zachary but by his son, the taunting little devil. People scared themselves nigh to death for entertainment in this country, as she’d soon learned on entering this Magic Kingdom. The more they screamed, the greater the fun, apparently. Rolling coast rides that turned a body upside down and inside out. Animals walking about hither and yon, though they were not really animals but people dressed as animals, which was even stranger. And the animals had names, too. Mickey the Mouse. Donald the Duck. Goofy Dog.
In the midst of all this confusion, the little boyling, aptly dubbed Sammy the Snot, whom she had
mistakenly considered angelic in the past, had been jeering at her, “Scaredy cat! Scaredy cat!”
How could a Viking not react to such a challenge?
The log was big and long, situated in a trough of low water. It held six bench seats, one behind the other, for a single person each. Danny sat down in front, followed by Sammy, two rowdy boylings of about ten winters, her, and finally Zachary.
Zachary had explained earlier that this ride would show the adventures of a mischievous animal called Brrrr Rabbit as he left his home in the briar patch to search for the laughing place. That sounded barmy but harmless, she had thought. But, wait a minute. “Why are they strapping us in?” she turned and asked Zachary.
“So we don’t fall out.”
“How could we…oh, do not tell me they intend to turn us upside down?”
“Nope. But they are gonna drop us off a mountain that’s, oh, let’s say, five stories high.” He flashed her one of his rascal grins.
“Whaaaat?” she shrieked, but the log had already started moving, and she was busy staring straight ahead, holding on, white-fisted, to the bar in front of her.
Almost immediately, music starting blasting out of the scenery that they passed, weird songs about “Zip-it-he-do-dah,” all sung by animal creatures. She soon got the flow of a saga being told about Brrrr Rabbit and Brrrr Fox and Brrrr Bear and a briar patch. There was even a “laughing place,” and those in the log were told that everyone had a laughing place. Hah! If anyone dared try to find a laughing place on her, they would be minus a hand, she vowed silently. Mayhap it was the same as the funny bone Zachary had said she hit on him in his showering stall yestereve.
Nothing frightening was happening yet…just peculiar creatures singing barmy songs about it being a small world, and, of course the zip-it-he-do-dah. And some mild dips of the log, accompanied by mists of water. And the clackety-clack of the log rolling along the track.
Zachary, taking advantage of the lull, leaned forward, lifted her braid, and kissed the back of her neck.
“Do not distract me,” she grumbled. “I must concentrate on what is ahead.”
“Too bad I didn’t have you sit on my lap.” He was licking her ear now.
The lout! She would have slapped him away, but she was afraid to take her hands off the bar.