Lord and Master Trilogy

by Jagger, Kait

  He nodded once, not in agreement but to signal that he’d heard her, then turned back to the window.

  ‘You have to forgive me, Stefan,’ she said softly. ‘Please. You have to forgive me.’

  ‘But, Luna,’ he began in a tone so mild that in the subsequent millisecond she almost convinced herself that everything would be okay, that they would have a rational discussion and everything would be fine. ‘In order for me to forgive you,’ he went on, ‘you’d first have to be sorry, wouldn’t you. You’d have to be sorry for what you did. And you aren’t, are you?’

  ‘I—’

  He swivelled his head back to her and smiled a cruel parody of his very best smile, all hardness and sharpness. ‘No, you’re not. Admit it – you might enjoy being honest with yourself, if not with me. As far as you’re concerned, you’ve done what needed to be done and it’s all worked out for the best, so to hell with honesty and trust and telling the truth. Seek forgiveness, not permission, eh, flicka?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ she said. ‘I swear it wasn’t.’

  ‘You swear, do you?’ he asked, his tone so mocking that she flinched. He stood suddenly, and she had to school herself not to step back as he stalked her way, coming to loom over her. ‘I remember a time when I lied to you,’ he murmured down at her in that placid voice she was learning to dread, ‘and my punishment was you disappearing from my life for two months. So what price should you pay for this, Luna? How shall I punish you?’

  She looked up at him pleadingly, but his expression was entirely unyielding. What could she say? What could she possibly say that would appease him? ‘You could… sack me?’ she suggested in a small voice.

  He laughed at her then, and shook his head. ‘No, not good enough. Try again.’

  Clenching her fists at her sides, she burst out, ‘One of the men who stabbed you was roaming the halls of the hospital, looking for his chance to get to you again. I had to stop it, don’t you understand? You were lying there helpless in your hospital bed. I couldn’t just… do nothing.’

  He made an inarticulate noise and ran his hand through his hair, looking for the first time like himself instead of a sardonic facsimile of Stefan. ‘Did you for even a second consider how I would have felt, lying helpless in my hospital bed, if something had happened to you in Venice? If you’d been hurt, or worse, while I was trapped in that bed?’

  Luna opened her mouth. Then shut it. There was genuine pain in his question, and an answering pain in her when she realised that he was right; she’d acted with no thought to his fears for her safety. ‘No,’ she admitted.

  ‘No,’ he agreed.

  ‘It was wrong of me, Stefan. I’m sorry. I know you don’t believe me, but I’m sorry. And I promise I will never lie to you again.’

  A quick, sharp snort. ‘You do see my dilemma here, yes?’ he enquired with an exaggerated shrug. ‘How can I trust the word of a liar?’

  ‘Please, Stefan. I…’ Luna stretched for some words to convince him, some assurance that would prove her fealty beyond a shadow of a doubt. She inhaled. ‘I swear to you,’ she said, voice deepening with emotion, ‘in my parents’ names. I will never, ever lie to you again.’

  Beat. ‘Ah, I wondered,’ he said. ‘I wondered when you would play the dead parent card.’

  Luna’s hand flew on its own. One second she was staring at him, mouth agape, the next there came a resounding crack. She looked down at her palm to see it throbbing and red, looked up at his cheek to see the imprint of her hand. And the trickle of blood in the corner of his mouth where her engagement ring had caught it.

  He explored the side of his mouth with his tongue, blotting it with the back of his hand. And smiled at her tauntingly. ‘Poor. Orphan. Luna.’

  This time she put her back into it, the stitches in her right shoulder pulling as she reached back and slapped him again, hard, leaving him with a palm print on his left cheek to match the one on his right. He started laughing, then, and a tide of red-hot fury subsumed her.

  ‘You fucking—’ She was almost inarticulate with rage. ‘You son of a—’ She raised her right hand again, but he anticipated her this time, his hand capturing her wrist like a band of steel. She contorted against him, lifting her left hand to strike, but he grabbed that as well, dragging her up against him, their chests roiling together.

  She hissed at him, twisting in his arms, but he just tightened his grip on her wrists. A noise, like pain or frustration, vibrated from his throat and something shifted between them. His eyes fell to her lips. Her nostrils flared. And then they were sinking, falling together to their knees, arms reaching, hands pulling. He pushed her down onto the floor and yanked up her tunic, gripping the waistband of her tights and ripping them apart.

  And it was ugly, needy, desperate – grunts and gasps, saliva spinning between them. Stefan pushing his leggings down to his thighs and mounting her, breaching her, burying his head in her neck and slamming into her again and again. He reached for her hands, pushed them over her head and held them down, the better to fuck and fuck and fuck her. It… ah… Luna clamped her mouth shut against a whimper, feeling the stitches in her shoulder stretching, tearing. It hurt, oh it was agony—

  ‘Lerwick!’ she screamed, and immediately he was up and off her, rolling away onto the floor, breathing harshly. Luna remained where she was, eyes shut, flat on her back with her tunic up around her waist and her legs spread wide. She felt his hands at her shoulder and opened her eyes to find Stefan kneeling beside her, staring with horror at the bloodstain beginning to seep through the neckline of her tunic.

  Slapping his hands away tiredly, she crawled away from him toward her handbag. Jesus wept, she was so sick of this wound. She changed her bandage, thankful that by the time she was finished the bleeding had stopped, sparing Dagmar’s lovely new cardigan.

  Stefan was sitting in the middle of the floor when she turned back around. His eyes were fixed on his hands, which lay limp on his knees. Clasping her bag in her arms, Luna knelt back on her haunches and gathered herself for one final salvo.

  ‘You are the strongest, smartest, bravest man I know,’ she said. ‘I followed you back into a burning house, and I would follow you off the side of a cliff, or into a sinking ship. I would go anywhere if it was you telling me to do it. All I did in Venice was deliver the message that you created, finish the plan you set in motion. Nothing more. Please come home with me tomorrow. Please, Stefan.’

  With that she rose, took one last look at him, and walked away.

  *

  ‘He won’t come,’ Mika said, sitting with her that night in Astrid’s restaurant.

  The certainty in his voice pricked her and Luna frowned. ‘You don’t know that.’

  He shook his head contemptuously. ‘You are insufficiently remorseful. He will let you fly home alone.’

  Astrid appeared then, placing a plate laden with steak, au gratin potatoes and mixed greens on the table and resting her hand briefly on Luna’s back. It was too much, all of a sudden, all the kindnesses she’d had in the past days from Mika, Dagmar and Astrid. Luna’s eyes prickled as she smiled her thanks.

  Astrid took her leave and Luna surveyed her plate, wondering how she was going to manage all that food. ‘Eat it,’ Mika snapped. She raised her eyebrows at him and he elaborated irritably, ‘You are anaemic and you’ve lost weight and if I have to, I will force this food down your throat. Understand?’

  Frowning at him again, Luna stabbed a fork into her potatoes, lifted it to her mouth and pointedly began to chew. She ate her meal and he drank his beer in silence, but when she eventually pushed her mostly empty plate away from her, he still seemed angry.

  ‘He made you beg, didn’t he,’ he said at length. ‘He made you plead for his forgiveness.’

  Luna shook her head slowly, but he carried on, ‘I watched him in that hospital room, berating you, making you cry. Bringing you
to your knees when it is he who should be on his knees, thanking you, worshipping you.’

  ‘Mika…’

  ‘No, Luna. You are always telling me I am too quiet, I don’t talk enough. If I’m going to blow a hole through a twenty-year friendship, I will do it your way. With words.’

  He lifted his glass and swallowed the last of his beer. ‘I remember when I first met you on Shetland, I said to myself, “She’s pretty enough, this one. But so fucking cold. Like winter in Lapland. Stefan can keep her.”’ He grinned starkly in recollection, and twitched his hand toward her. ‘But then I came to know you. To know what a loyal friend you are, what a strong sense of responsibility you have, and a generous spirit.’

  His eyes fell to the table and remained there as he continued talking in a low voice, like a penitent confessing his sins. ‘I have watched you, trying so hard to please him, to mould yourself into what he expects you to be. His “flee-kah”, his “goood gurrl”,’ he over-enunciated derisively. ‘But you are ten times what he chooses to see.

  ‘There is a word in my country: sisu, like see-zoo. It means…’ He hesitated. ‘There is no English word that means as much as sisu. Maybe the closest word is fortitude, or bravery. But it is more about doing what needs to be done, no matter what it takes. As much as you can generalise about a race of people, this is the quality Finns prize above all others. And I tell you, Luna, when I stood in that hospital with you and listened to you standing up to my brother, telling him how things would be… What Matthias thinks is recklessness and Stefan sees as disobedience, all I see is sisu.’ Mika looked up at her, face etched with admiration. And something more.

  ‘Don’t,’ Luna warned him. ‘Don’t make me into more than I am.’

  ‘This from the woman who has turned the sheep in Shetland from white to black? Who saves children from burning buildings? Who threatens snivelling Englishmen with castration?’

  Luna pursed her lips. ‘Tempting as it is to see myself as a superhero—’

  Abruptly Mika grasped her hand across the table, a strange light in his eyes. ‘Who brings a Russian bastard to his knees, has a drink with him… and then calmly signs a death warrant for his two henchmen?’

  She stared down at his hand on hers, struck by a sudden dizzying vertigo, as if she were standing atop a high platform and he’d trained a spotlight on her. ‘Did you think I didn’t understand,’ he asked quietly, ‘when you bared your chest to him, what you were doing?’ He gave her a solemn, knowing look. And answered his own question: ‘What needed to be done.’

  *

  Luna stood at the gate for the Heathrow flight, watching bags being loaded onto the plane on the tarmac below. She was wearing her navy wrap dress, heels and a silk shawl to conceal her shoulder injury. She intended to go direct to Arborage on her arrival, straight into her office. Back to reality.

  She glanced toward the main terminal, then at her watch, then turned back to the window, allowing her mind to wander.

  She pictured the view from her office window. The grass on the lawn below would still be wet with dew, rabbits hopping across it, pausing occasionally to nibble. She thought of Viktor Putinov, who, if he knew what was good for him, would be waking up in Moscow intent on putting his house in order. She cast her mind’s eye half a world away, to where Florian Wellstone would be eating his lunch on a dusty ranch, the odour of lanolin, wool and sheep shit all around him.

  And last, she thought of Mika, and the sanguine smile he would be smiling if he could see her now. For the woman at the check-in desk had just made the final boarding call, and Stefan had not come. With a sigh, Luna turned and walked toward the gate.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The PA sat at a small table, the tools of her trade spread out before her: laptop, phone, leather-bound Filofax organiser, and her Parker black and gold fountain pen, a college graduation gift from her parents. The laptop chimed as a diary invitation appeared onscreen. ‘Roland/Luna catch-up’ it read. A half-hour slot smack in the middle of the following afternoon, when Miss Gregory had a meeting with a new member of Arborage’s board of trustees.

  The PA opened the diary invitation, not surprised to see Alex Parker on behalf of Roland White in tiny italics across the top. She bit her lip in annoyance. Miss Gregory’s diary was open for all to see – not what the PA would have preferred, but there it was. If Alex Parker had bothered to look… but he didn’t bother with these things, she knew that. One week into this job and already she was forming opinions about staff members, her view of him overwhelmingly negative.

  She tried to decide whether to reject the invitation outright, or with comments. With comments was the friendlier option. ‘Sorry, Alex, she’s not available then, but here are some times when she is,’ she could write. But outright, oh, it was tempting. Outright might force him to pick up the phone, do his job…

  ‘Hi.’ The PA jumped, rotating in her chair to find a tall woman with long dark-brown hair and extraordinary ice-blue eyes looking down at her, smiling quizzically. The woman held out her hand. ‘I’m Luna. You are…?’

  Leaping to her feet, the PA said her name, adding, ‘I’m your new personal assistant.’ The woman’s expression stiffened ever so slightly. ‘Temporary, of course!’ the PA rushed on, explaining how Arborage’s head of HR had brought her in following the incident in Stockholm, when it appeared her employer wouldn’t be back in the business for some time.

  ‘Purely to organise your correspondence, manage your paperwork for you,’ the PA said, leading the way into the office, gesturing toward the neat piles of paper on the desk, one for urgent matters, another for social invitations, another for expenses to approve, and so on. The PA had also printed off copies of emails she had replied to on Miss Gregory’s behalf, with great trepidation despite the head of HR’s assurance that it was alright, that ‘Luna will thank you for it, I promise.’

  The PA couldn’t help but note that the woman standing before her now wrapped in an elegant paisley shawl looked less grateful than… mildly offput. Oh, she tried to hide it, offering effusive praise for the orderliness of the piles and enquiring after the PA’s welfare, asking how she found Arborage, and who she’d met and did she feel she had the lay of the land. But the PA was fairly certain that Arborage’s head of HR was going to get an earful from her employer when next they met.

  No, Miss Gregory wasn’t used to having administrative help, it was plain to see. She liked to do things for herself. Within an hour of returning she’d already placed five phone calls, held an impromptu meeting with a prospective supplier who came to drop off a box of soap samples, and completely reorganised her schedule for the following day (putting in an early breakfast with Roland White, the PA noticed).

  To the PA, she gave the sop of running over to the Tours office to ask for a daily breakdown of takings for the recent Robert and Margery exhibit. And when the PA confessed that she herself hadn’t had time to visit it yet, Miss Gregory had promptly made arrangements for her to do so, insisting, ‘It’s one of the perks of working here, free admission to our exhibits. Besides, I’d like to hear what you think of it.’

  It was wonderful, was what the PA thought as she walked back to the office later. It and everything about working at Arborage were wonderful, like being part of living history. She badly wanted this temporary role to grow into something permanent, in spite of her employer’s reluctance to accept secretarial support.

  The irony was that Miss Gregory needed support. Badly, in the PA’s opinion. Everyone seemed to want a piece of her. She suggested, after the PA returned to her desk, that they go down together to the canteen for lunch. But Miss Gregory scarcely managed to eat for all the staff members who came up to their table wanting to chat, or make suggestions, or to ask after her health. Watching Miss Gregory interact smilingly with them, the PA could see that many of them were visibly taken aback by her appearance. With no previous benchmark to judge against, the PA r
eflected that she did look pale, and a trifle on the gaunt side. Like someone who needed looking after.

  Her suspicions were confirmed the following morning when, shortly after Miss Gregory returned from her breakfast meeting, a small tartan-clad woman with a platinum-blonde bob stormed through the anteroom into the office before the PA could stop her. Drawing up short in the doorway, the tiny blonde let out a strangled, ‘Luna!’ and promptly burst into tears.

  So the day began with Miss Gregory wrapping her arms around her friend, murmuring, ‘It’s okay. I’m okay, Jem… I’m alright.’

  Her friend stayed for three days, making herself at home in the office, taking walks in the garden, arm in arm with Miss Gregory, and, from what the PA could tell, tapping out a steady stream of SOS messages to other friends, who converged on Miss Gregory through various means. A bouquet of orchids with a card signed simply, Get well, Patrice x. A basket of tropical fruit from Miami and a cool box specially delivered from Shetland containing lamb, mussels and other delicacies, all of which Miss Gregory shared with the PA.

  Direct encounters too. A Skype call from a bolshie sounding East Ender who opened by shouting, ‘What the fuck is going on, babe! I have to hear from Jem that you’re hurt? Do I have to fly back from Iceland? Do I?’ And visits from a succession of well-wishers, including a grandfatherly-looking solicitor, a rather famous filmmaker, and a slight, brown-eyed man called James, who spent an hour talking quietly with Miss Gregory on the settee in her office and left looking furiously angry.

  Still, the PA imagined that Miss Gregory was relieved when her friend finally left and life at Arborage reverted to quiet order. Selfishly, the PA enjoyed having her back to herself, because she liked this woman. She… she wasn’t attracted to her, for Miss Gregory wasn’t her type. No, her type was auburn-haired and curvaceous and waiting at home for her every night. But the PA found herself drawn by her employer’s reserved nature, her drive and focus, the fact that, like a blurry picture suddenly brought into focus, Arborage ran better now that she was back at the helm. No, she wasn’t attracted to Miss Gregory, but something in the PA responded to her, wanted to take care of her.