Falling

by Simona Ahrnstedt

  Don’t kid yourself, Alex. You want to sleep with her, that’s all.

  “The truth is that the money Medpax receives has a direct correlation to life and death. Our hospital in Chad needs everything. Staff, equipment, medicine. The patients’ needs are, as you already mentioned, practically inexhaustible. We’re a small organization, we have low administrative costs. Most of our staff are volunteers.”

  “And you? Do you get a wage? Sorry to ask.”

  “It’s okay. No, I’m not paid.”

  “What do you earn with Doctors Without Borders?” The woman could hardly exist on nothing.

  “Around eleven thousand. It’s meant to cover expenses only.”

  “But that’s not enough to live on.”

  “That’s why I do temp work at the private health clinic. People with that kind of health insurance can afford to pay me a lot.”

  If he hadn’t been studying her closely, he would have missed it. But now he saw it. The conflict inside her. Christ. It couldn’t be easy being Isobel Sørensen.

  “I’d like to apologize for being so rude before,” she said. Her voice was as warm as a Caribbean breeze. When she spoke like that, he wanted to just skip all the aid talk and throw her down onto the rug instead. Peel those shapeless, utilitarian clothes off her, uncover skin and her secrets, kiss her, drink in her sultry laugh.

  “What do you mean? Specifically, that is,” he asked. He had to clear his throat to regain control of his voice. It was clear that Isobel had adopted a new strategy since they’d last met. It was quite thrilling. He was looking forward to seeing how far she was willing to go for his money. Not very nice, perhaps, but then he wasn’t an aid organization hero.

  “When we met . . .”

  “In Skåne, last summer,” he suggested helpfully.

  She fell silent and furrowed her brow. “Yeah, then too. But I mean . . .”

  “On the airplane from New York? Or at the airport maybe?”

  She looked embarrassed. “I suppose so. I didn’t realize I’d been so rude so many times. What I meant was when we met the other day, at your foundation. I was impolite, and I’m really sorry about that. I’m glad you’re giving me a second chance.”

  He looked at her earnest face and decided that he wasn’t going to fall for this little performance at all. All the flirting and the twirling of her hair around her little finger affected him, that went without saying—she was, after all, an enormously attractive woman—but he wasn’t quite as easily duped as Isobel seemed to think.

  “What?” she asked, smiling, her voice all but a purr.

  It was time to raise the stakes. “I thought we could continue this discussion. Over dinner and drinks?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I’m happy to continue here and now.” The purr was gone.

  “I don’t have time. I have to go get my nails polished,” he said with a straight face. Judging by Isobel’s expression, she didn’t have too high an opinion of men who got manicures. “And I have an appointment with my color coordinator. Don’t want to end up wearing the wrong tie,” he added.

  “You’re kidding.”

  Of course he was. “A date. You could tell me more about Medpax and why we should give you money.”

  Money he knew they desperately needed. Leila hadn’t said anything concrete about the organization’s financial situation, of course, but Alexander was neither stupid nor without his contacts. He could guess how things looked for them. Columns of red, donors who had jumped ship. It wasn’t a pretty picture. He stretched out his legs, showing off the superb tailoring of his suit. He was wearing his signet ring today, bearing the family crest, glittering faintly.

  Isobel’s eyes narrowed even farther.

  “So that’s it for Medpax unless I go out with you?”

  Oh, she really did want to have her low opinion of him confirmed. But Alexander didn’t plan on giving her the satisfaction, had no intention of making her think worse of him than she already did.

  “Isobel,” he said, “that really wasn’t meant as some kind of provocation. I’d like to get to know you better, understand how Medpax works. And call me conceited, but I’d also like the chance to convince you to like me.”

  “But I do like you,” she replied, a tad too quickly.

  That might have been the most dishonest thing Alexander had ever heard. “Right, sure,” he said dryly.

  “But the fact remains—you want a date in exchange for us getting our money.”

  “No, I’ve already authorized it,” he said. “I did it before I came. The money only stopped because of an administrative error. They made the decision without consulting me.” That sounded slightly better than admitting he hadn’t signed any Swedish papers for the past six months because he’d been too drunk. “The money should start up again soon. And it’s retroactive, too. Someone from the bank is probably on the phone to Leila, telling her the good news now. So if you say no to a date with me, it won’t make any difference.”

  Her face relaxed. “Okay, I’ll say no then,” she said, sounding relieved. “And thanks, your money will make a huge difference.”

  “But I’d be willing to give you much more if I could take you out on a real date.”

  She fell silent. Was motionless.

  “Would lunch do?” she asked finally, sounding hopeful. “I’m really busy. . . .”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, it’s dinner that’s on the table.”

  She bit her lip. Seeing how much she wanted to say no, he had to hide a smile. He didn’t normally have to pay women to go out with him. Romeo would have died laughing. But Alexander had found Isobel’s weak spot. She was passionate about her little organization.

  She shook her head. “I can’t date a donor.”

  It was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. “Of course you can.”

  “No.”

  And with that, he saw it, utterly crystal clear. Isobel enjoyed being better than everyone else, being untouchable. Now there was no chance in hell he would give in. What would it take to get her to abandon one of her absurd principles?

  He leaned back in the chair. “You don’t even know how much you’re saying no to,” he said slowly.

  “Makes no difference.”

  “Come on, aren’t you curious?”

  “Is it just dinner and drinks we’re talking about?”

  “Of course.”

  Unless you want more, that is. He could easily imagine her naked beneath him. Eyes dark with passion, that husky laugh. Christ, the thought alone turned him on. He shifted in his chair.

  “How much?” she asked, her chin in the air. “Purely theoretically. How much would you give Medpax for one single date?”

  He hid the feeling of triumph that surged through him. Isobel Sørensen was sitting there, thinking about selling him a piece of her spotless soul.

  He loved it.

  “Give me a figure,” he said nonchalantly.

  She studied him. He waited. He was a professional card player. And he had been a paratrooper during his military service. Had lain in pits, behind rocks, alert. If he had to, he could wait for hours, days.

  “One hundred thousand,” she said calmly.

  Alexander didn’t bat an eyelid. He had burned more than that on some of his wildest nights. A bit immoral, perhaps, but then he had never aspired to be the conscience of the world.

  “Okay,” he said. He had the great pleasure of watching Isobel Sørensen lose a bit of her cool doctor’s composure.

  “You’re crazy.”

  He laughed. “Tell me something I haven’t heard before.”

  She squirmed in her chair. “Merde, I should’ve asked for more.”

  “Don’t push it,” he said as he thought that he probably would have agreed to double that amount.

  She chuckled, and the throaty sound sent a wave of lust coursing through him.

  Maybe he had gone crazy after all.

  But Isobel was both beautiful and intelligent. That in itself wo
uld have been enough to catch his eye. She disliked him, and that was another irresistible challenge. But there was something else about her. Something he caught a glimmer of every now and then, something secret and incomprehensible and maybe even a little chaotic, as though Doctor Sørensen had some kind of power she didn’t quite have full control over.

  “It’s a date, then,” she said.

  He met her gaze. Her storm-gray eyes sent a thrill through him. It was the same feeling he’d had as a child, when he hadn’t learned how to swim but had been nearing deep water where he couldn’t touch the bottom. Isobel was a serious woman, one who commanded respect, who held responsibility. In other words, not his usual type at all.

  He smiled. “It’s a date,” he agreed.

  This should be fun.

  Chapter 8

  As Peter De la Grip looked back at the past year, he often reflected upon the fact that (1) he had lost everything he had once taken for granted: his job, his wife, his possessions. And (2) it was entirely his own fault.

  Eight months ago, he had been faced with an impossible choice. To achieve all he had ever worked toward or to atone for a terrible crime he’d once committed. He had chosen the latter, and it had felt damn good.

  Until it didn’t anymore.

  So much had changed since then that he no longer knew who he really was. A life crisis, that was what the therapist he saw over the winter had called it. She was right, of course. But when she started to talk about his childhood and the bullying and his destructive relationship with his father, Peter had left and never gone back.

  Maybe that had been stupid. Somewhere deep within, Peter knew that his lack of appetite, his trouble sleeping, and the leaden sensation in his chest were all signs of depression. That it wasn’t normal to need all his energy just getting up, shaving, and getting dressed in the morning. Going to work.

  He looked up from his e-mail. The workday was practically over, and the office was almost empty; most of his coworkers had gone home without saying good-bye to him. He had never been a particularly popular person, and since he’d lost his elevated position in the world of finance he had been disappearing into the background, becoming an anonymous part of the gray masses. His current job with one of the capital’s financial institutions was way beneath his formal qualifications, but Peter was relieved by the low demands it placed on him. His peers enjoyed glittering careers, but he, someone who should have become the board chairman at Investum, the finest company in the nation, was here doing the same job as men ten years his junior. Not that he was complaining; he didn’t care. He did his job, assessed credit reliability, approved or rejected loans without making a fuss. The rest of the time, he did very little. Most people he knew, his family included, treated him like a pariah. The exception was, perhaps, his half sister, Natalia. But that relationship was so complicated on so many levels, and he didn’t really have any energy left to sort it out.

  In the early days, right after The Scandal and his separation from his wife, Louise, his friends had invited him on weekend trips and to dinner, but those invitations had gradually petered out. Maybe they invited Louise now instead of him. What did he know? Or care. The last he’d heard of his ex-wife, she had already found a new man; the two of them were probably better company than the gloomy, brooding, wasted remainder of Peter De la Grip.

  Every evening, he found himself sitting in his car, thinking that he should be headed to the gym. But instead he went home to his new, sparsely furnished flat and ended up in front of the TV or the computer. If he was lucky, he would sleep a couple of hours before insomnia caught up with him in the hour of the wolf.

  His cell phone buzzed to life on his desk. Peter stared at the display. Alexander. His first impulse was to reject the call from his brother. They almost never spoke, and Peter doubted it was good news on the other end of the line. But his sense of duty won out.

  “Hello?” he said guardedly.

  “Are you at work? Can I come over?”

  They hadn’t seen one another since the christening. Not that they had spoken there, just acknowledged one another with a nod. Peter had felt as though he was in a bubble at the ceremony, had felt Alexander’s eyes on him the entire time, seen the way people looked at him and then quickly averted their eyes again.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’ll be there in ten,” was all Alexander said before he hung up.

  He wouldn’t have thought Alexander knew where he worked. Goddamn it, he didn’t want to see him. He looked out the window and wondered what would happen if he simply got up, left, and never came back to this place again.

  * * *

  Exactly ten minutes later, Alexander was opposite him in the visitor’s chair. Alexander was like that, always on time when it mattered. Somehow, it annoyed Peter.

  “I need your signature on these, apparently,” Alexander said, and held up a plastic folder full of documents.

  It was usually the other way around, and Peter had to chase Alexander to sign papers. It was crazy really, that two people who disliked one another so intensely could still be so tightly linked from a financial point of view. Although control of Investum had left the De la Grip family hands when David Hammar took over, they still jointly owned a number of other companies and foundations, which in turn were operated by other foundations. The structures were old, intended to protect an even older family fortune. Not even Alexander, with his lack of interest in everything to do with the family, could quite break free.

  “What are they?” Peter asked as he began to leaf through the papers.

  Alexander shrugged. “All kinds of stuff. Read for yourself.”

  Both he and Alexander had people to help them with their finances, who managed their money and dealt with the administrative side of things. But he and his little brother were, perhaps, more alike than one would think. Neither of them relinquished control. Ninety percent of the time, Alexander acted like a self-indulgent playboy, but Peter had seen flashes of brilliance from him, and he had always suspected that Alexander’s nonchalance was partly an act for the world around him. Maybe a way to irritate their father. God knew, if that was the case, it had worked. Peter hadn’t heard the man say a good word about his youngest son in years.

  He glanced at his brother, sitting with one foot crossed over his knee and a bored look on his face. He was dressed in one of his perfectly tailored suits. And Peter knew, since he had once asked, that it cost a thousand dollars every other week to maintain that seemingly ruffled and slightly-too-long haircut. Alexander had always been extravagant. The apartment on the Upper West Side, the castle in Skåne, the over-the-top jet-set partying. Peter himself was wealthy by most people’s standards, but it was a Swedish fortune, mostly inherited, managed by one of the traditional law firms. It meant a modest position in the lists of the country’s wealthiest, occasional trips to the West Indies, a suitable apartment on Östermalm, a couple of cars, and a wardrobe full of quality suits. But Alexander associated with the richest people in the world. Where did that kind of money come from?

  “What did you do with your Investum shares?” Peter asked as he searched his desk for a good pen.

  “Sold them. I hated that company. You?”

  Peter shrugged. “I was meant to take over, so I didn’t hate it. But I sold most of them too.”

  Alexander bared his teeth in what passed for a smile. “It was a good deal.”

  “Yeah,” Peter agreed. He was on the verge of smiling back. He wondered whether their father had kept his shares. Not that it mattered. The De la Grip family had been irrevocably removed from Investum, and his father would never speak to him again.

  “How long do you plan to stay in Sweden this time?” he asked as he signed the document he had just read.

  The fleeting warmth on Alexander’s face disappeared. He gave Peter a frosty look. “Why?”

  Peter was immediately on the defensive. “Just wondering.”

  “I’m actually looking at apartments on S
trandvägen. So you won’t be getting rid of me, if that was what you meant. We’ll just have to stay out of each another’s way. Shouldn’t be too hard. If you avoid anything fun, I’ll try to avoid all the tight-ass places.”

  Peter looked down. Did he want Alexander in Stockholm? Did he really need yet another sibling to remind him of just how unsuccessful he was? Wasn’t it enough with Natalia, her perfect little family, and her fantastic career?

  “Do you have a real estate agent?” he eventually asked.

  Alexander gestured to the papers. “Could you just sign them so I can leave? I don’t know why I came. I should have sent one of the people from the bank.”

  Peter studied the broad-shouldered man opposite him. It was like looking at a stranger. Alexander had been so slim and shy when he was younger. A sensitive soul who had cared for all living beings. He wanted to know how Alexander viewed their childhood. The questions the therapist had posed to him had woken so many thoughts about what shaped a person, what had made him who he was. Alexander had been beaten so often by their father when he was little. Peter too. Their father was a tyrant, and their childhoods weren’t utterly different. And yet they had become different in so many respects. How had that happened? Which decisions had he himself made that had turned him into the person he was today? Alexander was a social genius, liked by everyone, while Peter felt increasingly lost. He couldn’t just blame it on his environment. Maybe he had simply been born bad? A genuinely defective person. One of those people you read about sometimes, lacking empathy, disturbed. Evil. He glanced at Alexander. He was bobbing his handmade calfskin shoe up and down as he looked around without any real interest.

  “Do you really like it here?” Alexander asked.

  “It’s okay.”

  “But isn’t this place really goddamn depressing?”

  “It’s a job, Alexander. You might have heard of them. Even though you’ve never had one of your own.”

  Peter hadn’t planned to sound quite so superior, but he couldn’t help thinking that Alexander, with his gifts, should start doing something more meaningful. None of them really had to work, not from a financial point of view, but Peter had always thought that you needed to do something, and Alexander was so damned smart. After his military service, he had gone to the Stockholm School of Economics, a university Peter himself had never managed to get into. His little brother had proved himself to be financially brilliant, of course. At least before he’d gotten tired of it and headed to London to party instead. Peter, on the other hand, had been forced to fight for every single university credit he’d ever taken.