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By the time the day of the meeting arrived, Leif was well and truly stir-crazy. The first day, when he’d awakened and been visited by Amelia…and realized the depth of Ragnar’s emotions concerning him…he’d gone along with both their insistence that he stay in bed, eat easily digestible foods, and try to get some more sleep.

But the next morning, he was ready to get up.

The following forty-eight hours had been dominated by either Ragnar or Amelia, or sometimes both of them, standing guard at the door in an attempt to limit him to pacing the length of his room. He could have physically moved her aside, and could have ordered Ragnar to stand down with an alpha command…but he did neither. Fussed, insisted he was fine, ravenously ate every plate of food brought to him…and tried not to show how badly he was hurting as he limped up and back across the floorboards, counting away the time by the progression of sunlight along the dusty rug.

The morning of the third day, his bandages came off, and his wounds were inspected by a pale, dour-faced young man with a bad haircut named Colum, who appeared neither impressed nor intimidated by Leif, nor by Ragnar, who had taken up pacing in his stead, shooting threatening looks Colum’s way and insisting he be careful with the bandages.

An unnecessary insistence, it turned out. The flesh had knitted, all his wounds closed, though pink and puckered scar tissue remained that might or might not smooth and lighten with time. Once he’d flexed all his joints, and proved he could take a deep breath – he tamped down a wince when his ribs protested the movement – he was pronounced “well enough” to leave his room.

The same nervous boy who’d brought the food the first day appeared with a bundle of cloth in his arms. “C-clothes, my lord. My – my prince,” he stammered, and Leif took the garments from the boy before he blushed any harder. When he turned from the door, he found Ragnar lounging across the foot of the bed, his grin sharp.

Leif sighed. “Tell me you haven’t despoiled that boy.”

Ragnar chuckled. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Ordinarily, Leif would have sighed, and rolled his eyes, and gone about his business. But now, after all that had transpired in the past week, he stood firm, and caught his cousin’s gaze, and said, sternly, “Ragnar, he’s just a boy.”

Ragnar’s smile dropped off his face as though wiped away. He rolled his eyes, and pushed up so he was sitting, feet on the floor. “I know. Do you take me for a villain?” When Leif only continued to stare, he amended: “Thatsort of villain? I like a good match in the sack: give me a good, strong girl, or a fighting man, not a child.” Then he grinned. “What’s the matter? Jealous?”

“No,” Leif said, too firmly, and walked to the far side of the bed to unfold the clothes.

They were…not great.

Someone – probably Amelia – had taken care to at least attempt to mimic his Northern style of dress. There were trousers of dark wool, a white, laced shirt, yellowed from many washings, and a leather, thigh-length tunic to wear over it. The belt was of simple, woven cord, with silver edging at the ends, and nothing like his thick, tooled leather belt set with a wolf buckle.

Ragnar drew up beside him. “Save your boots, all of your things were shredded to bits.”

“Even the belt?”

“Cut clean in two by something. I had the saddler look at it, but he said there was nothing to be done for it.”

“Hm.”

“Not very princely, is it?” Ragnar said, with an air of complaint.

“They’ll do. It’s only clothes; it doesn’t matter.”

But what did matter, it turned out, was stripping off his borrowed dressing gown and standing bare in the room’s cool spring sunlight with Ragnar within easy reach beside him.

They’d been naked in front of one another. In the baths at Aeres, and on the road, bathing in frigid creeks. Then, more intimately, in the brothels, flushed, and aroused, sharing a woman together. Ragnar taking his cock into his mouth. All far more scandalous and scintillating than this moment, as he wobbled on his feet and contemplated the lent, Southern clothes that awaited him.

Things were different. He knew it, and of course Ragnar knew it too. As his own pulse quickened, he heard the echo in Ragnar’s breast; heard the way his breath hitched, and smelled the prickling awareness that shivered over both their skins.

There was a different between lust and love, and yet somehow the combination of both had the power to transform a person completely. Leif could admit to the first, done lying to himself about those brothel tumbles, and the way Ragnar’s presence, his goading, his looks, his touch, had been every bit as, if not more rousing than the girls they’d shared. His mind shied fromlove, though. That was the only word that could apply to waking to find Ragnar draped over his unconscious form; Ragnar’s screams, Ragnar’s tears. But he couldn’t say it.Carefelt like a big step.

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him, unclothed and covered in gooseflesh and scars, felt like another.

Leif started to look at him – and then held back. He wasn’t sure what might happen if he did, and so he reached for the trousers, and stepped into them.

When he was dressed, the cord belt so stretched it nearly wouldn’t tie, Ragnar let out an ugly snort of laughter.

“Ha! You look like a sausage in a casing!”

Even without a mirror, Leif could tell that. He frowned, and tugged at the laces of the tunic, feeling the sleeves squeeze his biceps in a vice-like grip. “I’m well aware.”

Ragnar reached down to pinch his trousers where they hugged his hip, pinched skin in the process, and Leif batted him away. “Gods. Do they not make men in normal sizes here in the South? Are they all such willowy, underdeveloped creatures?”