Twenty Times Tempted: A Sexy Contemporary Romance Collection

by Petrova, Em

  “Please, Caroline, sit down. Please don’t leave. Please.”

  That was, in fact, what Caroline was about to do: leave. But she heard something in his last please, something that changed her mind. She frowned and sat down. The waitress brought a bottle of wine to the table that Niklas apparently had ordered before she came. The waitress opened her mouth to speak, but after taking a look at their faces, she disappeared again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He kept his voice calm, but she could hear impatience and frustration lurking behind it. “It happens. Not a lot, but it happens.”

  “And I don’t suppose you said, ‘I’m here with someone,’ or else she wouldn’t have left her number.” Caroline could hear her own voice rising, but she didn’t care.

  Niklas closed his eyes and shook his head. “You’re right, I didn’t.”

  “So you took her number, like a back-up plan for tonight?”

  His face darkened, and his eyes blazed at her in anger.

  “What are you saying?” he growled. “You think I would do that to you? I didn’t tell her about you out of respect for you. Then you would be right there in the spotlight, too.”

  Caroline let out a deep breath, trying to think rationally. Actually, she believed him. She didn’t really think that he would encourage another woman’s attention in the middle of their evening together. It wasn’t even that she was jealous, not really. But something inside revolted at the thought of being a part of this kind of circus.

  Niklas was no longer trying to hide his frustration.

  “Listen, I thought this part of playing hockey would be better back here in Sweden, but it’s not; it’s just different. My public life is a mess, and I don’t want you to have to get tangled up in it unless you’re sure you want to be. These kinds of things get twisted and then—”

  He broke off his sentence and ran his hand through his hair. Caroline could feel the flush rise on her face. She tried to think of something to say, but nothing came.

  “Look, Caroline, I can understand if you don’t want anything to do with this,” he said. His face had softened, and he reached across the small table for her hand, which was still balled up next to her plate. “I love hockey, but playing means my life isn’t always my own. That’s the trade-off.” He paused and then added, “This is why I didn’t want to go out tonight.”

  She swallowed hard and said, “So we just stay away from your public life? It’s that simple?”

  Caroline could hear her words were far from conciliatory, that she wasn’t offering understanding, but she couldn’t stop herself.

  Niklas’s voice was full of emotion when he spoke again. “I don’t know where this is going or even what this is between us. I don’t even know how long you’re staying in Stockholm. I’m trying to figure it all out. I just don’t want to hurt you.”

  He let out a deep breath, and when he continued, his voice was softer. “My idea was that we could spend some time together, time alone, before we have to face this.” He gestured to the scrap of paper that still lay, face up, on the table.

  “I’m finishing up a few things this week, but then I’ll be free. Maybe we can rent a boat and drive out onto the archipelago, find a cabin somewhere and spend some time together, just the two of us. Everything just feels so… so right when it’s just us. We can come back for the games you need to cover and then go back out.”

  For the first time since they had stepped into the restaurant, his face relaxed, and he met her eyes with a smile that should have filled her with happiness. Instead, it sank, heavy, inside her.

  “Niklas,” she said quietly, unable to meet his eyes any longer. “I have something to tell you, something I should have told you before now.”

  The smile slowly left his face.

  “I—I took a job covering a soccer tournament in Spain. It starts in a few days.”

  He was silent, and she could feel Niklas’s gaze weighing on her, but she kept her eyes on the plate in front of her.

  “And today Veronica told me that Tommy and Annika need their apartment back on Sunday.”

  More silence. Caroline took a deep breath and looked up at Niklas. He opened his mouth, started to say something, but then closed it again. He remained silent, and when she glanced up at him, he was looking at her with eyes too sad and dark to meet.

  “I had to leave sometime,” she whispered. It hurt just to say these words, and she now could see that this was why she had kept the news from him. Selfish and true.

  The waitress, who had been hovering in the corner, seized the apparent break in conversation to approach them. She said something in Swedish, and Niklas answered.

  “Are you ready to order?” he asked.

  Caroline hadn’t even looked at the menu, and food was the last thing on her mind. She glanced down at the paper in front of her and skimmed the foreign text: Italian and Swedish, she guessed, and even her Spanish wasn’t helping much.

  “Is this pasta with seafood?” she whispered to Niklas, pointing at the menu.

  The waitress looked at her in surprise and then attempted to switch over to English.

  “Yes, pasta with… how do you call it? Shrimps and…” The waitress looked over at Niklas for help.

  “Shrimp and calamari,” he said.

  “Yes. That one, please,” she said to the waitress.

  Niklas spoke to the waitress in Swedish, and she disappeared back into the kitchen.

  Now it was just the two of them. Silent. Caroline searched for something to say to make the situation better, but she came up with nothing. The silence nagged at her. What was going on inside his mind? Maybe he was sorry now that he had talked her into staying at the restaurant, she thought with a silent, humorless laugh. She knew there was little chance that he would yell in a public place like this, and yet she almost wanted him to. At least she would know what he was thinking. Finally, Caroline couldn’t stand it any longer. She opened up her mouth, sure that anything that came out would be better than not knowing.

  “I should have told you earlier,” she said. Then the words came tumbling out. “I got the offer a few days ago, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go, but I really need the money to travel. Yesterday, I still wasn’t sure, but Ludvig said he needed an answer, so I said yes.”

  “Ludvig with the flowers?” Niklas was watching her carefully now.

  She nodded slowly.

  “And you’re going to Spain with him?”

  Caroline searched Niklas’s voice for anger, but instead it was hard and even, as if he were simply trying to figure out a puzzle presented to him.

  “Yes,” she said, though her answer sounded more sure than she was. “His boss made me an offer I couldn’t afford to turn down.”

  Caroline waited for Niklas to say something else, but he didn’t. She saw only surprise and hurt on his face, neither of which he made any effort to hide. The pit in her stomach was growing, and she didn’t know what to do about it.

  “I’m really, really sorry, Niklas,” she said softly. “We barely know each other, but the truth is that I don’t want to leave you. I didn’t tell you because all of these things came so fast, and I didn’t want it to be like this. And I also know how long it took me to start this trip. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was in college, but it’s taken years for me to leave my life in Michigan and venture out on my own. How can I give it up so easily?”

  She looked at him, silently begging him to understand.

  She added, “I keep waiting for something to happen so that I don’t have to decide between the things I want.”

  “But you already did decide,” he said.

  His voice was soft and cool, almost as if he were just talking to himself. Caroline opened her mouth to disagree but closed it again. She viewed the job in Spain as a spontaneous opportunity that she had jumped on, not a choice that she had carefully weighed among the other possibilities. She had told herself that the job was just temporary, that all the other things she wanted mig
ht still be waiting for her when she returned.

  And yet Niklas was right. She made a decision. And with that decision came the risk that none of the other paths would be open when she returned. The job might lead to another, one that dangled even more possibilities in front of her, one that would make it even harder to break from the path she had started down.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I did decide. But that doesn’t make it a good decision. In fact, it feels like a really bad one right now.”

  He looked at her for a while, and then she saw something change in his face. Some of the coldness melted, and in its place, his eyes had a glint of what she had seen on the ice and then later, much closer up, though Caroline didn’t know what to call it—resolve? But the look disappeared before she could figure it out. Caroline was left with the sense that he had made up his mind about something, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that decision was.

  He reached across the table for her hand, once again balled up into a fist next to her silverware. He held her hand in his as he teased her fist loose into his large, warm palm. When he spoke, his voice was low and tender.

  “Okay, we’ll do this your way,” he said. “We’ll wait and see what happens.”

  They sat that way until the waitress reappeared, this time with their meal. The sight of food made her mouth water. Caroline was suddenly starving. Niklas let go of her hand, and the waitress set the steaming plates of pasta in front of them, triggering a loud growl from her stomach.

  Niklas chuckled and wrapped his legs gently around hers. Caroline picked up her fork and let the warmth of their tentative truce enclose her as she started to eat. By the time she looked up again, Niklas was finishing off the last of the formerly heaping bowl of pasta in front of him. He looked from his plate to hers and then back up at her with a hint of red in his cheeks.

  “Sorry. When it’s hockey season, I’m hungry all the time,” he said, glancing down at his now-empty plate. “If I’m going out, I usually have a meal before I leave just so that I can eat like a normal person. But tonight I was too… I didn’t feel like eating. And this is what I get.”

  He was finally smiling at her again, and she could hear the relief in her laugh.

  “If you don’t mind, I think I need another course,” he said, searching for the waitress.

  Caroline looked down at her meal, most of which was still there, and nodded.

  The waitress approached and then, after a few more exchanges in Swedish, she left.

  “I can’t believe how well you speak English,” said Caroline.

  “We start learning English in first grade here in Sweden,” he said, “but most of what I learned came from living in Detroit.”

  Caroline shook her head. “My Spanish is terrible, and I’ve been listening to it for my whole life. Something about it just doesn’t click for me. I can’t imagine learning a language I didn’t grow up with.”

  Niklas raised an eyebrow and said in a low, teasing voice, “Maybe you just need the right teacher.”

  “Is that so?” said Caroline and tried to match his look. She could think of plenty of things she’d love to learn from him, but none of them made for appropriate dinner conversation.

  “Was it hard to leave Sweden and move to the U.S.?” she asked.

  Niklas leaned back in his chair. “In a way I guess it was. Everything looked different, bigger—the roads, the yards, the supermarkets, even the cereal boxes. A little like I was Alice in Wonderland. People expected me to talk all the time—neighbors, people waiting in line at the post office, everywhere. At first I went out of my way to avoid them, but it didn’t work,” he said, chuckling. “I must have been the worst neighbor that area had ever seen. And I had to speak English all the time. My brain felt like it was going to explode. After being out for a few hours, I’d lock myself in my house to try to regain my sanity.

  “So, yes, the move was hard. But I didn’t think about it that way at the time. All I ever wanted was to play in the NHL since I was old enough to watch it on TV. All the difficulties of moving to another country were just minor inconveniences when I thought about the kind of hockey I got to play.”

  “What did your parents think?” she asked. He had never spoken of his family, she realized. And the one time she had asked, he had put her off.

  Niklas was silent for a moment before he said, “My parents divorced when I was 10. My father moved away with his new wife, and that was that—until I started playing in the top league here in Sweden. As you might imagine, he was thrilled. Suddenly, he was interested in having a son again.” Caroline stopped eating and looked at him carefully. His wry smile belied the sadness in his voice.

  “My mother was more ambivalent. On the one hand, she was just as invested in my hockey career as I was. I went through some rough years, got into some trouble for a while until hockey took over. I can’t imagine what I’d have gotten into if I hadn’t had somewhere to take out all my frustrations. The same thought probably crossed her mind, too. But she wasn’t sure that the NHL was the right place for me. She didn’t think I’d ever come back. Lucky for her, things didn’t turn out that way.”

  The same sadness was still in his voice.

  “And now you’re back playing for your old Swedish team?”

  “For a year, maybe more, while I figure out what I’m going to do after that. Something that keeps me out of trouble,” he laughed. “I can’t imagine my life without hockey. It’s hard knowing that I’m 30 years old, and my best years are already behind me.”

  The waitress approached the table with another dish, this one with chicken, polenta and some sort of tomato sauce. She set it down in front of Niklas.

  “I was made for Italian eating, the long meals with lots of courses,” he said smiling. After a few hungry bites, he asked, “And what about you? Why a trip around the world?”

  “I don’t know,” Caroline laughed. “Adventure. Freedom. A change from Michigan.”

  Niklas smiled. “True, but plenty of trips would be a change from Michigan. Where will you go after you finish the magazine job? With your ticket, you don’t even have to decide where you’re going yet, right?”

  He really wanted to know about her, she thought. His eyes were fixed on her, gentle, waiting, as if he were trying to unravel the mystery of her, just as she had been trying to do with him.

  “The truth is that I don’t know what will happen after this summer. I guess it’s not so different from what you were just talking about,” she said slowly. “My life back in Michigan felt over, just a long stretch of hazy sameness in front of me. All compromises, nothing I truly wanted. Though now I seem to have the opposite problem: too many things I want.”

  She hadn’t actually put all of this into words before, and she wasn’t sure she herself even understood all the wants and fears that had driven her here.

  “My father has a good life. He has a good job and a nice house, and he and my mother love each other so much. I can see they still do, even after almost 30 years together. But there’s a part of him that is still in Mexico, a part of him that he’s missing.

  “One night when I was in high school, I came home to find him dozing off on the couch with a beer can in one hand, listening to ranchero music. He never did that kind of thing. He waited up for me, but not drinking. So I sat down next to him, and he woke up looking startled, as if he wasn’t quite sure where he was.”

  Caroline glanced up to see if Niklas’s eyes were glazing over with boredom, but instead she found him gazing even more intently at her. She took a deep breath and continued.

  “‘Papa,’ I said to him. ‘Are you sorry you left Mexico?’ He shook his head and gestured with his hands, forgetting about the beer can. It spilled on the couch, but he didn’t seem to care.

  “‘No, no, mi amor,’ he said. He always called me that, my love. ‘I couldn’t stay when there was so much more out there in the world. I felt like that ever since I was little. My brothers weren’t the same, and
for a long time I thought there was something wrong with me. No, I couldn’t stay in Mexico. But it’s still my home, and my family still lives there. That part will never get easier.’”

  Caroline gave Niklas a half smile.

  “I guess I got that same gene from my father,” she said, “I wanted to be a part of the rest of the world, but I didn’t want to leave and have that same sadness follow me, just like it followed him. When I saw the magazine job, I applied for it, knowing I was sacrificing my relationship with Brad, but I did it anyway. It seemed like the perfect solution. I could take a year off, see the world, and come back to where I started, never having to say goodbye forever like my father did. All the adventure, none of the risk. Though—”

  She stopped, hesitant to finish.

  “Though what?” he asked softly.

  Caroline swallowed.

  “Though the ‘no risk’ part isn’t working out the way I thought it would.”

  His eyes flickered again with a hint of hope she didn’t want to consider. He nodded at her and then took the last bite of his second course. Caroline leaned back in her chair and took a drink of her wine. Niklas’s legs were still wrapped around hers, reminding her of the nearness of his body.

  Caroline watched a man in a well-cut pinstriped suit approach the table, his eyes fixed on Niklas. He cleared their plates and nodded at Caroline. Then he began talking to Niklas in Swedish. Though the conversation was lost on her, Caroline watched Niklas’s face change. She could see his mouth tighten as he silently took in whatever the man was saying to him. But that look didn’t last. He took a breath and unclenched his teeth, and Caroline instead saw the person she had seen at the press conference emerge: Niklas in front of a crowd. He was taking control of the conversation, asking the man something and nodding in response. Then, after a few quick exchanges, the man left.

  As soon as the man’s back was turned, Niklas’s mouth tightened into a frown. His legs had pulled away from hers, and he was sitting rigid in his chair. She stared at him, waiting for some clarification, but he said nothing.