by Susan Stoker
But there were more important things to worry about.
I took off the fur hat and handed it to Melinda before sitting back down.
Crossing my legs at the knee, my silk stockings whispered against each other.
“What were you going to ask?” I lifted my latte and took a sip, arching my eyebrows at him over the cup.
He, however was staring at me, mouth slightly agape, and I felt the blush I hated rising up along the bare skin of my neck revealed by the V-neck shirt.
“Your hair,” he said.
“What?” I asked, touching my hair, the intricate braids keeping all the long blonde flyaways in place.
The braids were a ridiculous throwback to my Viking heritage, but I’d been clinging to them. The people seemed to like it. I did too. It made me feel strong and powerful. Connected to the fiercest part of myself. It was a crown of sorts. One I’d made myself.
“You look good, Brenna,” he said.
“Don’t—” I bit off the word before I said anything else. And then got busy clipping on my seatbelt, smoothing down my skirt, finishing my latte. Ignoring him as best I could.
“Don’t what?”
“Lie.”
I looked out the window, away from him. Wishing he wasn’t watching me so carefully so I could press my cold hands to my hot face. How was I going to sit here for the next seven hours and not fall to pieces?
“You think I’m lying?”
“I think you’re made of lies, Gunnar.”
“That summer…?”
“I need to work,” I interrupted, completely uninterested in rehashing that summer, and pulled from my briefcase my own work. All I had to do was get him home, and then I would leave and Gunnar would go back to being a regret and slightly shameful hot memory that visited me in the darkest parts of the night.
The plane accelerated, lifting off into the night. Taking us both home.
“Do you think I was lying that summer?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I think we need to talk about it if we’re going to be working together.”
Still not looking up at him, I laughed and laughed. “You’re delusional if you think we’re going to be working together.”
“Brenna,” he said and when I didn’t respond, he unbuckled his seat belt and finally I looked up, startled, only to find him moving from across the aisle to the seat right in front of mine.
“What are you doing?” I asked, reeling back as his knees touched mine and I couldn’t avoid him. He was too tall. Too big. Too there.
“Trying to talk to you?”
“I don’t want to talk,” I said and picked up my report. The words I read were total gibberish.
And then he snatched the report out of my hand and tossed it on the chair he’d just vacated.
I scowled at him and his silver-gray eyes walked over me. All over me. And I felt myself blushing. I felt the touch of my clothes on my skin, the movement of air in the jet. All of it.
He made me so fucking aware. Usually I lived deep inside my body. Hidden, half in my brain. But he pulled me out like some kind of reluctant sex snail.
“As your king, I command it.”
“You’re not my king yet, Gunnar.”
“Formalities.” He leaned back in his chair, stretching his legs out alongside mine, the fabric of his pants ghosting over my skin and I flinched back so hard, I accidentally kicked my own chair.
“Is it so awful?” he asked, his face unreadable. And it was his cool and calm that made me feel so foolish. So out of control. “Being near me?”
You demolished me, I thought. You wrecked me and it’s taking all my strength just to pretend it didn’t happen.
“I don’t care about being near you,” I said and he shook his head at me.
“Now who is lying?” he asked in a quiet tone.
We hit a bump of turbulence and I grabbed my latte cup in time, but the plane shook and then banked slightly.
“We have nothing to talk about,” I said.
He reached out and grabbed my hand and it was electrifying. I actually gasped. Part horror. Part desire. He smiled at the sound I made and it was the smile he used to give me in my bed. In the cocoon we’d made. The smile that I’d foolishly thought for a few months meant something that it didn’t.
Meant he cared.
I tried to yank my hand away but he held on hard. My fingers crushed in his hand.
“You’re hurting me,” I breathed.
“Am I?” he asked, blandly, and he loosened his grip but didn’t let go of me. His fingers, instead of gripping mine, held mine. Slid between mine so we sat there with our hands clasped like lovers. “I never wanted to hurt you,” he said.
I didn’t struggle to get my hand free, because he was stronger than me and I didn’t know what he was after. So I left my hand limp in his. I would give him nothing. Not even my fight.
“Do you believe that?” he asked.
“No.”
“You think I kissed you that day in the library—”
“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.”
“It matters to me,” he said.
“Bullshit.” I shook my head at him. “You left. You can’t claim to care now.”
“I didn’t have a choice,” he said.
I told myself not to say it, to seal my lips against the word to make my heart indifferent to the questions I wanted to ask. But I couldn’t. In the end I’d spent three years asking the ether the exact same question, the only answer a silence that cracked pieces off me.
I drained my glass. Because if I was going to break something, I was really going to break it.
“Was it so repugnant?” I asked.
“The palace? It wasn’t great."
“The idea of being married. To me.”
His silence was a powerful magnet, and as hard as I tried I couldn’t resist looking at him, only to find him staring at me. His eyes burning through the distance. Through my clothes. Through the years.
And suddenly it was as if we were us again. The two of us on that bed. In the library. All alone. Building a future I believed in with all my heart.
I could not tell if it was me, holding his hand now. Or his holding mine.
“What story have you been telling yourself all these years, princess?” he asked in a voice that turned my heart to liquid.
“No story,” I said. “No story at all.”
“Shall I tell you the story I told myself?”
“I don’t care.”
“I told myself I dreamt you. I dreamt every minute of the time I spent in your bed.”
“Stop.”
Instead of answering me he lifted his hand and pressed the intercom. Melinda appeared in the doorway between the cabin and the kitchen. “Don’t come in here,” he said. “Close the door. We will call if we need anything.”
Melinda looked at me with wide eyes as if to ask for permission to follow his orders.
“I am your king,” Gunnar said.
“It’s fine,” I told Melinda, though I felt decidedly…threatened. “I’m fine.”
Melinda bowed her head and stepped backwards out the door. The door shut behind her with a click that was loud in the jet. Everything was suddenly very loud.
“You can’t just order people around,” I said, feeling my heart beat in my throat. “Your father did that and no one respected him. You’ll have to—”
“I left so you’d leave,” he said.
“What?”
“I choose not to marry you so you could leave. So you could go to NYC and be the person you should be.”
There were a thousand things I couldn’t make sense of. My brain was buzzing. My heart riding in my throat like fishing bobber.
“You…you don’t get to decide that,” I breathed. “Who I am. Or what I do.”
“Clearly,” he scoffed, the sound so familiar it actually hurt.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because the throne
of Vasgar would have limited you. It would have been a stone around your neck.”
“That’s…that’s why you told me I wasn’t meant for the throne?”
He nodded, his eyes, his face, everything about him earnest in a way I wanted so badly to believe. “It’s why I wouldn’t marry you.”
I tried to pull my hand away but again he wouldn’t let me.
“Do you believe me?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter if I believe you or not.”
“It matters to me.”
“No!” I cried. “You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to change everything three years later. You wrecked me, Gunnar. You destroyed me. I love—” I cut myself off ruthlessly.
“I loved you too,” he said and it was my limit.
I stood.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Leaving.”
He laughed, an exasperated gust. “Where are you going to go? We’re a mile above the ocean.”
“There’s a bedroom in back. I’ll go there.”
He stood up too, too much. Too close. My hand still in his, I put my other hand against his chest, as if to push him away. But at the touch of my hand against his body, he exhaled a long shaken breath. As if he’d been holding it.
And I did the same thing. The warmth of his body under my hand melted something and I wasn’t pushing him away. I didn’t have the strength to.
“I have thought of you every day,” he said. “Dreamt about you every night.”
I kissed him. I kissed him instead of listening to him say things I couldn’t believe.
For one breathless moment it was just my lips against his. We didn’t move. We didn’t breathe. The earth turned a mile beneath us. And then my better sense kicked in and I pulled back. Dropped my hand.
“Let me go,” I said.
“I can’t.”
“Gunnar.”
“I let you go once and it was the worst thing I’ve ever done. The biggest mistake I’ve ever made. I’ve spent years planning what I would do if I had you back in my arms.”
My body went slack. My brain, however, buzzed into overdrive.
Don’t. Don’t believe him. Don’t trust this. Don’t let him back in.
“Let me show you,” he breathed. Leaning forward. “I won’t hurt you."
“You can’t,” I said. A lie, really. I was building a fortress of lies to hide behind because my body was going to overrule my brain. My body always did when Gunnar was involved. “You can’t hurt me. For you to be able to hurt me I would have to care about you. And I don’t.”
His other hand came up to my hair, touching my braids. His thumb brushing the outer curve of my ear, making my nipple hard in a wild prickling rush.
“If you tell me to stop,” he breathed, the smell of his coffee washing over me in a way I used to love. “I’ll stop. I will. But you have to say it. You have to tell me you don’t want this.”
“I don’t.”
“Then tell me to stop.”
His fingers trailed down the side of my neck, gooseflesh rippling up from his touch. My brain shorted out and it was just my body standing here. Skin and bones and a heart beating too fast, lungs breathing too hard.
“You remember what it was like between us,” he breathed. “How we couldn’t get enough?”
“I…” My voice rattled off his fingers burrowing into my hair to grip the back of my neck. I knew what happened next. The way this whole story unfolded. I didn’t want to remember.
But it was impossible not to.
“Brenna?”
“I remember.”
His kiss was familiar. As familiar to me as breathing. He tasted of coffee and Akvavit and him. His tongue stroked mine and I let him in. I gasped and moaned and I curled at the edges. All my steel beams and guard walls crumbling under the familiarity of his touch.
I knew, in my heart of hearts, I missed it. That I craved it and longed for it.
For him.
But I had thought myself stronger than this.
“Yes or no, Brenna?” he breathed against me. His hand dropping mine to slide around my waist, pulling me into his body.
Yes and no, I thought. Yes, to this. To this feeling once more, and no to the rest of it. We had four more hours on this plane, and then we’d open the doors and he would be swept up into being king.
And I would sweep myself away.
Four hours.
“Yes,” I said.
He growled, low and dark, and my blood pumped harder and hotter through my body.
And I growled too, maybe. Pulling at his shirt, so I could slip my hands up beneath the cotton to feel the heat of his body, the smooth satin of his skin.
“Brenna,” he breathed. “Brenna, Brenna,” He pulled at my shell. The silk damp and wrinkled but I stopped him.
“What?” he asked, leaning back, his lips swollen with the force of our kissing.
With the force of us.
“Just… let’s go in back.”
He looked at me and then looked at the door. “I ordered them, remember? No one will come in.”
“You have a little more faith in your orders than I do,” I told him, my cheeks hot. I stepped out into the aisle, but he caught my hand.
“This isn’t what I think it is, is it?”
“You want to fuck or not?” I asked, being deliberately crude, because I remembered how he liked that and I wanted him distracted and agreeable to going into the back bedroom.
“Take off your shirt,” he said, his voice cold. His eyes hot. A combination that tied me in knots years ago.
“You know something, forget it. Forget this.”
I shifted to sit back down, reaching for my files with shaking hands, but he stopped me. His hands on my hips, his body crowding mine.
“I’ve said no.”
“No you haven’t,” he said. “You’ve said a lot of things, but none of them have been no. You’ve said you don’t like me and you don’t respect me. You’ve said I’m beneath you and that’s all very true. You are miles out of my reach, princess, you always were. But you have not said no.”
He stepped closer again until his body was flush with mine and I felt his erection against my belly and I tried, with little success, not to notice. But it was impossible. His desire was a bucket of kerosene over mine.
Was there anything more attractive than being desired by a person you desired? Even when it seemed unlikely, or born under false pretenses, I’d known he’d wanted me. I’d known against the odds he desired me.
“And now I think you’re telling me that you want to go hide in the dark where no one might see us.”
“Me,” I said. “Where no one can see me. You can flaunt yourself across Times Square if that’s what you want. I don’t.”
He tilted his head. “Do you know how long it took me to get you into my bed?” he asked.
“An afternoon,” I said with a laugh.
“Three years.”
“Gunnar,” I sighed. “Please, no lies.”
“This isn’t a lie.”
“The first Christmas you came home from school. I picked you up at the airport, remember?”
“Yes. We fought like dogs the whole ride.”
“You fought,” he said. “You fought. You got off the plane with your teeth bared.”
I blinked, remembering. I had picked the fights. After years of his teasing and cutting smiles, I’d learned to come out swinging first.
“Perhaps,” I said. “But it was after years of being chewed on by you.”
“You’re right. I was never fair to you. I could never say the right thing. And I have a lot to make up for, but you stepped off the plane in a red jacket, your eyes bright, your hair twisted in a bun around your head, and I realized what I had missed while you were gone.”
“A chew toy?”
“You. You humming in the halls of the castle. You pushing me to be better and if that didn’t work, just plain shaming me into doing better. I missed
the sound of your laughter and the way you got to the breakfast room first and took the parts of the newspaper you wanted before anyone else got there. I’d missed you, and when you got off that plane it was like I got a piece of myself back with you. I feel the same way right now.”
“Then come in the back,” I said, stepping again into the aisle, only this time I held his hand and pulled him along with me.
I didn’t know how to feel about what he said. About that winter years ago. About missing me like he missed a piece of himself. I didn’t know how to feel about any of it and I took huge comfort in the fact that I didn’t have to feel anything, really. Not at all.
Because I was leaving. Because this was four hours of goodbye.
“If this is about hiding,” he said, “I’m not interested in that.”
“It’s about privacy, Gunnar.”
“Your mother—”
I spun and stopped. “What about her?”
“She’s poisoned you.”
I laughed. “Probably. But what does she have to do with this?”
“Because you’re fucking gorgeous. You are the sexiest, most exciting woman I’ve ever seen in my life. Every time you let me touch you I know how fucking lucky I am, and you have never believed that.”
“I…I believed that you believed it.’
Now he wasn’t following me. He was stalking me. I stepped backwards and he followed. Raw-boned and big, elegant but wild beneath it all. My heart recognized him as someone like me, not just because we were from the same small place on the wildest edge of the world—but because we loved that place.
We fit that place.
His hand was suddenly at my lower back and he was still walking and I had no choice but to stay one step in front of him. Perhaps that was always my challenge with him. Staying one step in front of him. Planning just a little bit more. Wanting…just a little bit more.
My breath hitched and my heart pounded and all of a sudden the back of my legs hit the low banquet seating just before the door to the bedroom. I sat down with a whoosh.
“What?”
He pushed me back and then, to my utter fucking delight, he got to his knees in front of me. His body pushing my legs out wide, as far as my pencil skirt would allow.
My breath hitched, the memories burning me up from the inside.
“Remember this?” he asked, his eyes glinting like steel.