As the gavel came down and the penultimate auction item was led off the stage, Sophie shivered in fear and anticipation. She was next, and in the crowd she could already spot the men who had sampled her last night. How had it come to this?
Not a week ago, she had been happily lazing by the pool, trying to avoid bending back the spine of her romance novel and skipping a few pages ahead hoping to read something a little naughtier than a stolen kiss in the heat of battle. As the sun warmed her body she had let her imagination drift...if she had been writing the book, Inge the Viking heroine would have been in the thick of the battle, fearlessly leading her band of warriors deep into enemy territory. As the battle raged behind her she would have realised too late that she was surrounded and vastly outnumbered. It would have taken at least five men to subdue and capture her and she would have given no quarter, despite growing up around campfires alive with the legends about the ways in which Vikings' bodies became bargaining chips in the enemy camps.
Inge had always known that she wasn't the only Viking woman listening intently to those legends, perhaps not quite hearing them as the cautionary tale the elders had intended. But it wasn't until Helga, one of her closest friends, escaped and recounted in detail how she let herself be used and shared by the enemy fighters that Inge realised the intensity of her yearning to be forced into the same position.
And here she was, trussed and bound and being carried into camp by five lithe and muscled young men. She could smell their arousal. Damn, she could smell her own. The men wasted no time tying her to four stakes in the ground and hungrily cutting away her clothes to expose her without any care for her dignity.
As she waited to see what would be done with her, she recalled the conversation she had had with Helga the night Helga had returned to camp after escaping her captors. She still remembered the conversation as if it were yesterday. As Helga stumbled back into camp she was debriefed by the clan elders, telling of her capture and daring escape. But it was to Inge alone that she filled out the story with the details that Inge craved.
"I was coming to the end of my foraging expedition when I felt the tripwire, a heartbeat too late. Another heartbeat later I was hanging upside down four feet from the ground, caught in a snare.