by Jagger, Kait
Having drunk two cups of coffee and checked out her usual news websites, Luna poured a cup for Stefan. If he was still sleeping, she reasoned, she would leave him be and go for a run.
But he was awake, just sitting up in bed as she opened the bedroom door and placed his jumper on the chair next to it, shrugging off her robe.
‘I brought you some—’ she began, stopping when she saw the look of horror on his face. ‘What?’ she asked in alarm.
‘Come here, flicka,’ he said, and Luna had to steel herself not to swoon at the use of his pet name for her. She came and sat on the bed, placing his mug of coffee on the bedside table. Stefan immediately reached for her, turning her to face him. Gingerly, he placed his hands on her shoulders, positioning his fingers over the livid bruises there, finding that the imprint matched. He looked down at her thighs, also bruised from where they’d been crushed against the vanity unit in James’s bathroom.
His expression full of remorse, Stefan ran his hands to her waist, lifting the sheer cotton vest Luna was wearing. ‘You are too thin,’ he observed, and when she frowned and tried to push his hands away, he insisted, ‘I can see your ribs, Luna!’ His hand moved to the haematoma that had blossomed on her jugular. ‘Did I do that?’ he asked, aghast.
‘No,’ Luna smiled slightly. ‘That was Kay.’
‘Ah.’ His fingers moved to her chest, covered in scratches, and he met her eyes questioningly.
‘That was me,’ Luna admitted. Then, because her answer only begged more questions, she explained reluctantly, ‘I’m allergic to lanolin, and I was wearing a wool jumper last night, and…’
Stefan shook his head. ‘So, you are here in Shetland, working on a… sheep project for my father, and you are allergic to wool?’ He smiled. ‘Only you, Luna.’
‘You mustn’t tell your dad,’ she said quickly, only for Stefan to grimace slightly.
‘Given that he has forbidden me from seeing you, I won’t be telling him anything for the time being.’ Luna raised her eyebrows and he said, ‘I wouldn’t have let that stop me,’ then shrugged slightly as if to say, leave my father to me.
He climbed out of the bed then, and pressed her back on the pillow.
‘You, go back to sleep,’ he said, arranging the covers over her. ‘I will make breakfast.’
He began to put on his clothes and Luna said doubtfully, ‘There’s not a lot of food down there.’
‘I will improvise.’
Privately, she thought it would take a whole lot of improvising to magic any kind of meal out of her bare cupboards, and she wasn’t surprised when, after a few minutes of him banging around the kitchen, she heard the front door open and close.
She couldn’t get back to sleep, so eventually she got dressed, sparing her poor chest for once and putting on her University of Manchester sweatshirt and leggings. The bruise on her neck she concealed by loosely winding a long grey scarf Nancy had given her around it.
When she came downstairs, Stefan was sitting at the table using her laptop, with his tablet alongside open to his diary. Luna blinked at him and he said hurriedly, ‘This isn’t what it looks like.’
There was a saucepan with porridge in it on the Rayburn, and Stefan rose to put two slices of organic gluten-free bread in the toaster. Bread Luna recognised. ‘I threw myself on the mercy of your Norwegian neighbour – Liv is it?’ Stefan confirmed. ‘She seems very nice, but I pushed my luck too far when I asked if she had any bacon.’
‘Mmm,’ Luna nodded. Liv was a card-carrying vegetarian.
‘Anyway,’ he said, stirring the porridge, ‘I have had a very helpful lecture on animal cruelty and the health risks of being a carnivore.’
He sat and watched as Luna ate, and she felt a silence growing in the kitchen. He had said he wanted to talk. But talking, about relationships, about her past, about anything that involved her feelings, was what Luna did worst. Of course, a large part of her conceded that just by being here, sitting across from her at that table, Stefan had won her back. She’d walked away from him once, and it had taken every bit of strength she had; she didn’t think she could do it again.
But there was a small, unyielding voice in the back of her head that insisted that no matter how much she loved him, if this conversation didn’t go well there was no real future for them. Too much stood between them right now.
When she’d finished eating, Stefan placed her dishes in the sink and positioned his chair so it was facing hers. Then he lifted her, chair and all, till she was facing him, and he sat down.
‘There are things I want to tell you,’ he said. ‘Not as excuses or explanations…’ he trailed off. ‘Or maybe, yes, maybe I want to explain myself to you. I didn’t do enough of that before, and it led to bad things.’
Considering his next words for a moment, he began: ‘When Augusta came to me last autumn to tell me that Florian would be unable to become the next Marquess, and that my father, in turn, had refused the opportunity… you remember this time, when I missed Kayla’s performance and flew home to Stockholm?’
Luna nodded. She remembered it only too well, a weekend’s worth of radio silence from Stefan, her thinking he’d dumped her.
‘I flew home,’ he said, ‘to beg my father to reconsider. What Augusta was asking, that I change the course of my life by taking on this enormous thing when I had plans for my business – and hopes for us too, although our relationship was new – it seemed too much.
‘But my father was adamant. And his partner Christian agreed; he didn’t want a life in England, tied to Arborage. So I spent the next few days thinking. You have to understand, Luna, that before Augusta spoke to me, there was no conceivable prospect that Arborage would come to the Swedish side of our family. Definitely not to me. Being “third in line” to inherit might as well have been five hundredth in line.
‘This even though the Swedish side of the family had done as much for Arborage as the English side. More, maybe. Did my grandfather not loan Augusta the money to save the estate from wrack and ruin, after John’s father died? And me, hadn’t I devoted a large part of the past two years to helping her get the place back on financial track?’ Stefan’s eyes narrowed and he said, almost to himself, ‘Did I not love Arborage as much as Augusta? Or John for that matter, who’d spent more than a decade avoiding it like the plague?
‘The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this thing, this thing I thought would never come to me, I wanted it. I wanted it very much.
‘So I came back to Arborage prepared to accept Augusta’s offer. Only to find you spitting mad at me, hopping on a flight to Miami to escape me.’ He smiled at the memory of it. ‘That blew me off course, and I realised that there was something else I wanted very much.’
He paused, studying his hands for a moment. Eventually, he said softly, ‘I knew the moment I tracked you down, standing in that club in Miami, that I loved you. So what I should have done, when we were sitting together on that beach in the Keys, was to tell you the truth about what you were getting into.
‘But I… I think I convinced myself that it would be too much to spring it on you then, especially since I didn’t know if you reciprocated my feelings.’
Luna stared at him incredulously and Stefan rolled his eyes. ‘All very well for you to look at me like that, but I didn’t know, Luna. You with your freezing cold Hallviken eyes and your “yes, I think two assignations per month will be sufficient, thank you very much.” I didn’t know. And I thought, well, maybe this will come as a pleasant surprise to Luna, when the time comes to tell her. You know the thing: “Luna, you are the love of my life, please bear my children, and by the way, what do you think of my ten-thousand-acre estate?”’
In spite of herself, Luna felt her lips twitch.
He sobered and continued, ‘When we got back to Arborage and I gave Augusta my decision, I should have refused her condition that I keep this a secret, particularly from you. You’ve asked me why I didn’t question this last thing, and I have thou
ght long and hard about that.’ His face darkened and he sat back in his chair.
‘Would you believe me,’ he said, ‘if I told you that I have felt just as betrayed as you by Augusta, in the weeks since you left me? She was my mentor, Luna. No, she was more than that. It was she who loaned me the money, her own money, to start my business when no one else would. When my own father thought I was mad.’ Adopting a contemptuous tone that Luna could only assume mimicked Sören’s, he quoted, ‘“No middle-aged businessman will take advice from a twenty-four-year-old.”
‘Augusta had faith in me,’ he concluded. ‘Where everyone else saw folly, she saw potential.
‘So, years later, when she tried to warn me away from you, telling me how vulnerable you were, how much your parents’ deaths continued to affect you, I had no reason to doubt her intentions. I swear – you will not believe this, but I swear Augusta herself thought she was saying these things to protect you.’
Luna gave him a hard look and Stefan raised his hands. ‘The point is, I believed her. I trusted her. And I give you my word, Luna, it never occurred to me that she could be lying about Florian.’
He looked her in the eye for a moment, as if gauging how well his account had gone down so far, then continued, ‘So, there I was, wanting many things. Wanting you. Wanting Arborage. And wanting most of all, I admit it, to protect my business. My baby. But Augusta insisted that I cancel my plans for expansion into East Germany in order to give Arborage more of my attention. And so it began. Me running between Berlin and Stockholm and Arborage. The subterfuge and secret discussions with Augusta and always her pressing me to cut my work commitments when that was the last thing I could do.’
He ran a hand through his hair and exhaled through his nose. ‘But these are not excuses. There are no excuses for the way I abandoned you. When Augusta temporarily handed control of Arborage to Florian after Christmas, I assumed she did it as a slap in the face to me. A little reminder that the family business wasn’t mine yet.
‘But why weren’t alarm bells ringing in my head when I learned she’d also asked you to… service him? I knew how much you detested him. I’d seen the way he looked at you. Why didn’t I question it?’
‘You didn’t know what was happening,’ Luna said, unwilling to allow him to shoulder all the blame. ‘I didn’t tell you.’
‘You shouldn’t have had to!’ he practically shouted. ‘It was my responsibility to protect you. I think of what that man put you through, how he almost…’
Luna placed her hand on his on the table and shook her head. ‘I don’t blame you for that. I blame Florian.’ Then added harshly, ‘And Augusta.’
His response was similarly blunt: ‘I blame myself.’ They sat not speaking for some time after that, until he broke the silence.
‘You told me in the garden that you needed to come first in my life, not third after Arborage and work. I…’ He stopped himself, as if dissatisfied with the direction he was taking. Appearing to visibly hit reset, he scooted his chair closer till his knees were resting on the outside of hers, taking her hand from the table and holding it in his own.
‘If you had asked me a year ago,’ he said in a lighter tone, ‘when I thought I would meet a woman and settle down, I would have said… well, if I was honest I would have said I hadn’t given the matter any thought. My entire adult life had been focused on my business, and women were for friends, or colleagues, or sex. Nothing more.
‘Oh, maybe,’ he conceded, ‘maybe if you had really pressed me, I’d have said I hoped to meet a nice Swedish girl when I was thirty-three or thirty-four. And she would be a… solid girl.’ He toyed with Luna’s fingers. ‘A pretty girl, of course,’ he smiled, ‘but maybe a slightly boring girl, who would understand how much my work meant to me and accept that my time for her was limited.’ His smile broadened.
‘And then you met me,’ Luna said.
‘Then I met you,’ he agreed. ‘And you were so unlike anything I had ever imagined for myself that for a while I kicked against what being with you demanded.’ Shaking his head, he clarified, ‘Not what you demanded, Luna, but what loving you, loving you properly, demanded.
‘I made bargains with myself,’ he said, removing his hand from hers and standing it up on its side on the table as if to indicate a line in the sand. ‘I said, “Okay, Stefan, you can be with Luna, but you cannot think about her at work.”’
He inched his hand forward on the table. ‘And then I found myself thinking about you at work.’
Eyes crinkling, he continued in his Stefan-talking-to-Stefan voice, ‘“Okay then, you can occasionally think about her at work, but you won’t change your schedule for her.”’ He slid his hand forward some more. ‘“Okay, you can occasionally think about her at work, and occasionally change your schedule for her, but under no circumstances will you discuss her with your work colleagues like some kind of lovesick schoolboy.”’ He rolled his eyes and said, ‘I think James honestly thought I had gone mad, the way I went on about you. Me, who never talked about women.’
He took his hand off the table and grasped both of Luna’s, leaning down in his chair till his chin was almost resting on them. ‘I don’t want to bargain with myself anymore. I want to change. I want to be a man you are proud to be with.’
‘I am proud of you!’ she protested. ‘I just thought we wanted different things.’
‘Well, now we want the same things,’ he said, lowering his mouth to her hand. ‘You come first, Luna,’ he said against it, his voice raw. ‘First and last and everything in between. And Arborage, my business… none of that matters a damn without you.’
He didn’t lift his head, as if he were afraid to look at her and discover his words hadn’t been sufficient. So Luna extricated a hand from his and placed it on his cheek, stroking his dark blond curls away from his face. He inclined into it, and she was reminded again of a big game cat. Only this time she was not his prey.
He sat up suddenly, reaching for his tablet. ‘I am starting already, you see,’ he said brightly, opening his diary for the coming month and gesturing for her to take a look. ‘See, I am clearing my Fridays for the foreseeable future, to spend with you.’
‘But, Stefan,’ Luna said, eyes worried. ‘My assignment for your father. I have to finish it.’
‘I know that,’ he said. ‘So I will come to you at weekends, or we will meet somewhere in between. We’ll decide as we go along. And from now on we are going to speak on the phone every day.’ Luna pursed her lips, trying not to smile at the inconceivability of this sea change from the man who never phoned and Stefan lifted a chiding finger. ‘No, no, we will speak at least once every day.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Maybe I can even arrange to sometimes work from here. Your broadband connection seems good.’
‘Can you really afford to do this?’ Luna asked. ‘Take all this time off?’
‘Luna,’ he assured her, ‘I do not intend falling in love ever again in my life. Other things can wait for a while.’
But when her face still didn’t lighten, he said, ‘Come, flicka, tell me what’s bothering you.’
‘You’re making all these changes, sacrifices, and you haven’t asked anything of me.’
‘I’m the one who needs to do the most changing.’
‘But I—’ It would be too much to say that Luna felt unworthy of Stefan’s efforts, but listening to him talk about all the different directions he’d been pulled in prior to their break-up, and looking at him now, dark shadows under his eyes, she felt… chastened. She wanted him to know that she could be different too. ‘There have to be things you’d like me to change.’
‘Three things,’ he said, quickly enough that Luna’s lips twitched again; clearly he’d already given the matter some thought.
‘First, I understand why you felt you had to leave me in January, after we’d stood there in that garden and I was too pig-headed to listen to you. But from now on, I promise that if you tell me I’m doing something wrong I will try my best to fix it. Or
we will work it through together. Please don’t just leave again. I don’t think my heart could take it.’
He laughed a little at this, but it was a pained laugh and Luna’s own heart compressed as she nodded.
‘Second thing,’ he said. ‘I hesitate to bring this up because it is one of the things I love most about you, the fact that you would sooner gnaw off your own arm than to ask for help. But I want to help you, Luna. And I swear to you, no matter how much I trusted Augusta, if you had said one word to me about what you were going through with Florian, I’d have been on a plane back from Berlin so fast.’
She nodded again, and Stefan paused, as if considering the wisdom of sharing his third thing.
Bright blue eyes meeting hers, he concluded, ‘Everything you accused me of in that garden, I was guilty of. Except for one. You said, “You love me like a child loves a toy.”’
Luna remembered it. It was the only thing she regretted later; the one thing she’d said purely to wound him.
‘I don’t love you like a toy, Luna,’ he said solemnly. ‘You are not a game I have been playing in my spare time. And I know, I know that what you said wasn’t true. But I need you to take it back. Something about the way you said it…’ He pressed a knuckle to his brow, looking almost bewildered. ‘I can’t seem to get it out of my head.’
His voice broke a little on this last word and Luna felt her heart pumping.
‘So I need you to—’ he began.
‘I take it back!’ she cried, half-rising from her chair and throwing her arms around his neck. ‘I didn’t mean it, I take it back.’ She slid to her knees on the floor in front of his chair, clasping her hands around his waist. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I take it back.’
He gathered her to him, kissing her hair, and Luna pressed her cheek against his chest, hearing his heart pounding in answer to hers.
They tidied the kitchen after that, Stefan washing the dishes and Luna drying them. When the last dish was put away, he turned to her over the sink and said, ‘What would you like to do today, flicka? I clearly need to take you shopping for food first.’