by Dani Collins
The shower abruptly cut off and she shouted, “Brock!”
He ran to the door, coming up against it, one hand on the knob, wanting to burst through. “Do you want me to come in?”
“Contrac—”
“Contraction. Got it.” He was holding his phone. With his forehead pressed to the hollow door, he listened to her pant, timing it.
“Yes,” she said as it tapered off.
“Yes, what?”
“Come in. I need help.”
He opened the door and found her wet and naked, one foot in the tub, the other out. One hand grasped the edge of the sink, the other had hold of the towel rack.
“Are you okay?”
She shook her head. “Trying not to push.”
“What?!”
“It hit me in the shower and—” She sucked in another breath as a contraction arrived.
He threw a towel over her wet back and eased her to sit on the closed lid of the toilet. “I’m calling an ambulance.”
She nodded, breathing through clenched teeth, eyes tightly closed. She rocked in deep concentration.
He didn’t know the address to give to the dispatcher.
“Tell her not to push,” the male voice in his ear said as Brock waited for the contraction to pass so she could give him her street address.
“I’m really scared,” Pandora said, opening wet eyes. “It really hurts.”
“I know, sweetheart. But I’m staying with you the whole time.” Thank you birth article for telling him reassurance was priority one. “Now let’s give them your address so the ambulance knows where to come.”
She managed to get it out before the next contraction hit. Brock relayed it, then he put the call on speakerphone so he could finish blotting her dry.
“Don’t look at me,” she whimpered when she could speak. “I’m fat.”
“You’re cute as hell.” She was all curvy and ripe. Her pale belly had a light brown line from her navel to her bush that he didn’t remember and her nipples had grown bigger and darker. Lowering his voice so the dispatcher wouldn’t hear, he leaned close and said, “I’ve been staring at your chest since the tavern. You’re spectacular.”
“You’re an idiot.” She made as if to press him away, but caught his jaw and dragged him close. She planted a single, brief kiss on his mouth. “Thank you for staying. Thank you for Christmas.”
“Think we can we get you to the bedroom and dressed before the next one?” He put a hand under her elbow.
“No.” She grabbed his hand and squeezed. And squeezed. A keening cry emanated from her, growing louder as the contraction held her in its long grip.
He bit back protesting, but it really freaking hurt.
Finally, she nodded and relaxed, but her breathing stayed labored, as though she was recovering from exertion.
He grabbed his phone and shuffled her to the bedroom where he got her seated on the bed in time for another contraction. She was huddled in the towel, moaning with suffering, face contorted with agony.
“Why are they coming so fast?” she cried when the contraction leveled off. She opened her eyes, but only looked helpless and terrified. “I’m not going to make it. I have to push, Brock. I have to.”
“Okay, okay.” He held their eye contact, trying to transmit a calm he didn’t feel. “I’m going to get some towels and unlock the door. I’ll be right back.”
“She shouldn’t be pushing,” the dispatcher told him.
“I invite you to tell her that,” he bit out. He had never experienced this exact level of trepidation in his life. Protectiveness was dueling with helplessness inside him. A part of him was screaming, I don’t want to deal with this.
But she had no one else.
“How long until the ambulance gets here?” he asked the dispatcher.
“At least twenty minutes. It’s snowing bad out there.”
The word Brock spat out then may or may not have been the verb that had caused this crisis. Either way, it didn’t help one bit.
*
“Oh.” Glory spun to leave after barely setting foot in their office.
Her voice was like a shot of obstbrand after a hard day on the slopes, piercing his bloodstream with heat and sharp sweetness.
Rolf leaned back in his chair. “Stay.”
“I’ve been tied up with Devon all morning or I would have moved my stuff already.” She had a coffee mug in one hand, her phone in the other, quite the sight for bleary, jet-lagged eyes.
Unlike the tailored and coiffed women who occupied the corporate tower in Berlin, she wore her hair in a loose, fat ponytail at her nape with a soft blue T-shirt over peg-legged jeans. He admired the way the T-shirt hugged her torso, accentuating the delicacy of her limbs and narrow shoulders and the gentle mounds of her breasts.
Her nipples had been sweet, rose-tasting pastilles against his tongue. Her hips had filled his palms and she’d taken everything he had to give without restraint. The blind rage that had gripped him from the moment Trigg had woken him was finally falling away, allowing him to remember how intense that night had been before the world blew up.
He hadn’t let himself sink into memories of their passionate clash. It had been a distraction he couldn’t afford, and deep within it lurked an acknowledgment of something bigger than he was comfortable examining.
He had focused on the crisis, on doing what he had done every time a bad fall had threatened his career. He had recovered and pushed himself to the top again, letting no obstacle get in his way, certainly not a bunch of crusty old executives who lacked faith in his depth of determination.
“So, do I do that now or come back later?” Glory asked, gaze scanning the top of his desk rather than meet his.
He was staring, he realized. Gulping her in like he was coming out of the desert and she was a cool, blue oasis. He searched her face, waited until her gaze finally met his—and immediately caught an edge. Whatever win he’d been chasing was suddenly a debris field of gear all over the slope while he came up star-fished against a snow fence, rash-covered and bruised from head to toe.
That was the look, the one he hated. The one that looked through him, rather than at him.
“You’re angry.” Should he have anticipated this? A pang of culpability hit him as he realized she might have expected a call or a text. “You know it’s been a shitty week.”
“I’m fine,” she assured him. “I’ll come back later.” She pivoted to leave.
“Glory.” This woman and her tantrums. “It was a shitty week.”
“I’m aware.”
“Then why are you acting like this?”
“I’m not acting like anything.” The defensiveness in her expression, aimed over her shoulder and barely landing on him, held irritation. She looked up and down the hall as if checking they weren’t being overheard. “I’m sorry your new office burned down. Text me when you go to the base. I’ll come back and clear out.”
“That’s not necessary. We can share.”
“I’m fine.”
“Is this really what we’re doing?” Fuck. This was why he hadn’t wanted to sleep with her. He had known that if—“No. Fuck it.” He stood, freshly infuriated and with something sharp digging into his gut. His chair rolled backward to hit the cabinet behind him.
She shot him a look like he was the one throwing a hissy fit.
“It was a shitty week. If you expected a goddamned love note—”
Her eyes went so wide they were dots of horrified blue-green in a sea of white. She stepped in and slammed the door. “Shut up! I don’t want people to know,” she hissed.
It was his turn to be taken aback.
“Are you serious right now? You’re embarrassed?” Ashamed? The prickling coil chewing up the pit of his gut turned cold and sour.
“I don’t need people speculating when it was a one-off thing, all right? A notch on your bed post is a scarlet A on my reputation.”
Had she really just said that to him?
&nb
sp; He became aware his jaw was aching from a hard clench of his teeth. He folded his arms, stood taller. Tried to figure out why he could feel steam coming out his ears. How did she get to him like this? He’d kept himself to a few jabs of sarcasm while talking millions of dollars and arson, insurance claims, and his brother’s occasional lapses of judgment.
Yet he was one heartbeat from fully losing his shit right now, two words ricocheting like bullets in his head. One. Off.
No. He didn’t know why that was such an intolerable suggestion, but he wasn’t standing for it.
While she grew redder and redder, like she was holding her breath in some kind of pointless sulk.
“If you wanted me to call, say that you’re mad I didn’t call. But it was a shitty week—”
“I know it was a shitty week,” she burst out. “No, I was not waiting for any fucking poetry from you. All I really needed to hear was that you weren’t walking away from this place, leaving us with a dead white elephant rotting out our net worth. Bless your brother and what passes for a conscience in him because he pulled his head out of his ass long enough to tell me yesterday that you had straightened things away in Berlin three days ago. Only because Devon was packing up to leave, though, quite sure I wasn’t going to be able to pay her. But whatever. It’s not like my mother’s hard-earned income and my father’s future were on the line. Whatever shitty week you were having is far bigger and more important than any pesky little worries of mine.”
“Done?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t do that. Don’t make out like I’m overreacting. It may not be a big deal to you, compared to what you’ve invested, but this lodge is everything we have.”
“Are you angry that I didn’t reassure you? Or that I didn’t make a point of going out of my way to reassure you?”
The flush on her cheeks deepened. “I don’t expect special treatment, if that’s what you’re asking. Just common courtesy for a business associate.”
“Is that what we are?”
“Well, I’m not a fucking mint on your pillow that can be picked up or discarded depending on your mood.”
“And there it is.” He leaned on the edge of his desk. “That was my pillow, by the way. You came to me.”
She flinched, then spoke with quiet dignity. “And you haven’t come looking for me. Complete radio silence, so, message received. And that’s fine,” she insisted. “You were right. It’s stupid to fuck someone you have to see every day. We’ll pretend it never happened and get on with our lives.” She reached for the door latch.
“Glory.” With his heart leaping out his throat, he shot over to shut the door before she’d pulled it open more than a centimeter.
She jerked back from him, spilling coffee on the floor between them, coming up against the filing cabinet and catching a hand against it to keep her balance.
Fuck. He stood there with his hand over the crack of the door, sealing her in here, facing that he’d fucked up again. Big time. No one set him on his back foot the way she did.
“Point taken, all right?” he muttered. “To my mind, I owed explanations to shareholders, not you.”
“Fine. I’m over it.”
“You’re really not.”
“I really am.”
“I don’t play these sorts of games. Understand me?” he bit out.
“Great. Me, neither.”
His hands itched to strangle her. “What are you expecting from me, then?”
“Nothing.” She turned her face away, toward the slant of sunshine creeping down the mountainside beyond the window. “Literally nothing. Which is why we should forget it happened.”
That wasn’t possible. He might have tried to sublimate their night for a week, but the memory had been simmering in his subconscious. Driving him to some extent, if he was honest. Hurry. Get the hell back here.
He ran his hand down his face, ending with a scratch into the beard he hadn’t cleaned up in two days.
She wasn’t going to bend. If he knew one thing about this woman, it was that if she was hurt, she damned well pulled up the drawbridge and started pouring boiling oil.
He had warned her, though. He wasn’t a sensitive man.
In the past, however, if a woman wanted to cut things off because she didn’t like his level of self-interest and wanted him to change, he let her go.
That wasn’t something he was prepared to do with Glory, which scared the hell out of him.
“Would you—”
A knock on the door interrupted him, extra irritating because he was so focused on fixing this. “Busy,” he barked.
“Rolf?” It was Marvin. “You have a visitor.”
Rolf scowled, drawing a tense breath, figuring it would be an insurance adjuster or something. He started to say something about telling them to wait with a coffee in the dining room, but another voice came through the door, a female one he recognized.
“And where does this one go? Oh, that’s the kitchen. Hello.”
“Oh, fuck.” He managed to keep it under his breath, but jerked the door inward.
Marvin was all flushed with male captivation and magnanimity. “Rolf! Your mother is here.” Like this was a delightful surprise, not a giant kick in die hoden.
“Step,” he corrected in a mutter, leaving his teeth showing in an approximation of a smile. “Vivien. I thought you were traveling.”
“There’s my bärchen.” Trigg’s mother flowed toward him in a wave of perfume, his father’s money, and unsolicited affection. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
*
Not a single, white-blonde hair was out of place on the middle-aged woman’s head. Her makeup was flawless, her figure like that of a sexpot in her twenties. Perhaps some of it was owed to the spectacular tailoring in her white jacket over a low-cut cami and dark blue, silk pants, but she was also naturally built really, really well. Tall, like a model, with great skin and natural grace.
That had to be genuine designer wear made by a designer for her. Her diamond earrings and necklace were just modest enough to be real, just ostentatious enough to be a statement of abundant wealth. She looked like something out of an old Dynasty rerun.
Glory was reluctantly fascinated, partly by her glamour, partly by the way her features were the beautiful, feminine version of Trigg’s, and mostly by the way she cupped Rolf’s head and forced him to bend so she could kiss him on both cheeks.
He looked deeply pained, like Murphy did when Aiden crawled all over him. His fur was ruffled, his ears inside out, but he endured it without so much as a disgruntled curl of his lip.
Maybe that’s all he’d been doing when she had loved him up.
Glory derailed that train of thought with a sharp mental twist. She’d passed from piqued, to offended, to outright abandoned days ago. By the time she had bumped into him today, she had swept the whole thing into her ‘dumb ideas’ folder and hit delete.
She was still angry about his not keeping her informed about the hill, though, and had a right to be. The fact he hadn’t given one iota of thought to how the arson had affected the lodge told her everything about how much regard he had for her and what she had thought might be the beginning of a relationship. A friendship, anyway.
She was truly, thoroughly, over him. No longer interested.
This time she meant it.
“I had to come see for myself how things were coming along,” Vivien was saying. “Trigg kept saying it’s too rustic, that the roads were dreadful and covered in snow, but this little chalet is going to be charming.” Her nose twitched as she glanced at the bare floor of the office and the cheap blinds that had been installed for the days when the sun put too sharp a glare on the computer monitor. “Ilke was kind enough to do all the driving. We had no trouble finding it.”
That’s when Glory tore her attention from Vivien and saw another woman closer to her own age, one who had been studying her while hanging back in the hall.
“Guten tag,” Ilke said with a cool smile.
; Glory tallied the woman’s assets and hated her on sight. She was perfect in a far more threatening way than Vivien could ever be. Ilke was athletic and blonde with perfect teeth and, worst of all, confidence. She knew she was gorgeous and wore it as easily as she wore her dove-gray cashmere wrap sweater, the knit so delicate her lace demi-cup showed through. Her narrow skirt had a slit cut to mid-thigh, showing off a peek of tanned skin above her beautifully crafted, lace-up, knee-high boots.
Glory hated her for nothing else than her ability to pull off stripper boots clearly priced in the thousands of dollars and make them look classy.
Ilke met Rolf’s gaze without flinching, in a way that was faintly amused.
Rolf looked at her like, Oh, shit. Like he knew her biblically.
Glory’s neck muscles strained to hold back a cry of agony. She was trapped here in the office by the crowd of bodies by the door, forced to keep a pleasant smile pinned on her face while she died a thousand deaths.
“Danke schön,” Rolf said flatly. “You were in Queenstown?”
“Training, yes. And visiting my mother. She lives there now.”
“She invited me to a little cocktail party. Ilke and I got to chatting. I told her about your new venture here.”
“I’d heard rumors. I was curious. Couldn’t wait to see it,” Ilke said, keeping that distantly amused smile on her face.
“Not much to see. In fact, we just had a fire—”
“Marvin told us!” Vivien gave Glory’s father’s arm a little squeeze, then did it again with a flirtier look, as if she was impressed with what she had found.
Glory’s father blushed.
I’m out.
“I’ll let you all catch up,” Glory announced. “I’ll move the lodge computer back to my old office later this afternoon,” she added in Rolf’s direction, skimming her gaze past everyone without making direct eye contact with anyone. “Excuse me. I have an appointment.”
She barreled through the bodies in a five-pin strike.
“My daughter, Glory,” Marvin said as a belated introduction behind her. “If you need anything at all, find one of us. Can I bring you coffee? Why don’t you go into the lounge where it’s more comfortable?”