High Risk

by Simona Ahrnstedt

  “I called you because I wanted to see you,” he said calmly.

  “We . . .” she began, but she was interrupted by a man forcing his way in between them. Jill had chosen a seat that would make her as invisible as possible, but it was hard to go out in Stockholm without being recognized. She sighed.

  “Aren’t you . . . ?” the man said with a grin, pointing rudely at her. Jill nodded, hoped he would go away. “My pals didn’t think I would have the nerve to come over, but I recognized you.” His eyes moved down over her chest before he turned toward a group of men who were waving and shouting at him. Damn it, he was going to cause a scene; she could feel it. She tried to catch the eye of a staff member, someone who could help her.

  “You said hi. Now could you please leave?” Mattias said, though he didn’t get up. Jill gave him a warning shake of the head. The last thing she needed was for Mattias to try to play the hero. She couldn’t handle any more drama.

  “This your old man or what?” the drunk man asked with a huge roar of laughter.

  Mattias got up from his bar stool. He was shorter than the drunk man, lighter, and at least ten years older. “She doesn’t want to talk to you. So either you leave on your own, or I’ll help you out.”

  Jill put a hand on Mattias’s arm. She wasn’t exactly worried, but she knew this kind of situation could escalate quickly.

  But then Mattias did something, Jill didn’t see what, and suddenly the drunk man was on his knees in front of them. His face was twisted in pain and his breathing was strained. She stared.

  “You took a fall,” Mattias said with a cool voice. “I think you should go back to your friends now, and then I think you should leave.” Mattias looked at his watch. “I’ll give you two minutes.” He moved, and the man gasped in pain.

  “You’re crazy,” he panted.

  Mattias bent down and said something into the man’s ear. The man blinked firmly before he nodded.

  “What are you doing?” Jill hissed.

  Mattias sat back down on his stool, seeming completely unfazed. The other man got up from the floor, hesitated for a moment, and then stumbled off back to his pals. He said a few words and then they all got up and left the bar. Jill had never seen anything like it.

  “What did you do to him? Was that some kind of judo move?”

  “Yeah, kinda,” Mattias said. He raised his glass and took a few sips. Jill studied him critically.

  “I hate violence, just so you know.” She was serious; she’d had enough violence in her life. More than enough.

  “Same here,” he replied.

  “Your table is ready,” a waiter came over to tell them.

  Now there were members of staff around.

  Mattias got up again and held out a hand in front of him. He walked behind her as she followed the waiter to the table.

  Mattias was much bossier than she expected. He seemed so polished and sophisticated; she hadn’t expected him to be so dominating. She didn’t like men who tried to take charge of her, was used to being the one in control, and preferred it that way. But being out with a man who could make irritating idiots shut up wasn’t all bad.

  “Here you go.” He pulled out a chair for her.

  The restaurant offered international fine dining, and Jill could see Russian oligarchs, a foreign royal, a few Swedish financiers, and then completely ordinary people celebrating weddings or the like. She scanned the menu. It was expensive, even for Stockholm, and she wondered for a moment whether Mattias expected her to pay.

  Nothing would surprise her. She had been on far too many dates that ended with her paying the tab. She could afford it, so she didn’t care. She’d supported herself since she was sixteen, had always been the one to give to others, dated men she gave money, never the other way around. It gave her a feeling of control, of being the one with the economic power. She didn’t want to depend on anyone—she and Ambra were alike in that sense. Aside from the fact that Ambra earned a mediocre amount at Aftonbladet, whereas Jill was economically independent several times over.

  They each ordered steak. Mattias politely asked whether he could choose the wine, and Jill nodded. She was an uncomplicated soul in that respect; so long as she got drunk and avoided a headache, she was happy.

  “Was it true you bought my CDs?” she asked.

  He looked up from the wine list. “Yup. And I listened to them. Your voice is fantastic.”

  She froze a little. Roughly half the men she’d ever met said she must have rhythm in her blood, considering where she was from. She hated it. But Mattias didn’t say anything of the sort; he just seemed genuinely impressed.

  “But it’s not your type of music?” she asked.

  He ordered a French wine before he replied. “I wouldn’t have thought so. But I like your music, a lot. I’m grateful I can widen my horizons. What kind of thing do you listen to?”

  Suddenly she couldn’t tell whether Mattias was messing with her. Had she ever been on a date where anyone asked what kind of music she liked? It was actually quite strange that no one had asked. “I like most things,” she replied guardedly. “Jazz, pop, country.”

  “Metal? Classical?” he asked with a smile.

  “I don’t really think you can generalize. I like some songs, don’t like others. It’s all part of my job to listen, so I guess I’m really an omnivore.” She was so interested by their conversation that she forgot to flirt. It really was relaxing, and she wondered whether it was all a strategy on his part. Not that he needed any kind of strategy. Unless he messed up somehow, she was fairly convinced she was going to sleep with him.

  They continued to make small talk about music, travel, and different wines as their food arrived. They ate their steaks; the wine he ordered was like poetry in her mouth, and for the first time Jill understood the point of pairing the wine with the food. She reached for her bag, her hand on her cell phone. She knew she should be taking pictures of the food, uploading them to Instagram. She paused. Took it out. “Can I take a picture?” she asked, and, for the first time in a very long time, felt embarrassed.

  His fingers drummed the table and he shook his head. “I’m sorry, Jill, but I can’t be in any pictures.”

  She took a quick picture of her plate, wrote something meaningless, and uploaded the image, then grabbed her wineglass and took a deep sip.

  “I have a job where I can’t be visible in that kind of way.”

  “Yeah, I gathered as much.”

  “You’re mad with me,” he said.

  “No,” she lied, couldn’t understand why she was reacting like a child. But he had every advantage. He knew about wine, he could handle pushy men, he had an important job. And he didn’t seem at all charmed by her. They’d flirted in Kiruna, and he’d called her, but now she felt so unsure of him, unsure of whether she could really handle him.

  “Jill?” he said.

  “Tell me what you’ve been doing since I last saw you,” she said, flashing him a quick smile. She would force herself to be happy. She smiled again, could already feel it working, away with all the negative thoughts, away, away.

  “Working,” he said, studying her closely.

  She smiled again, felt like normal. “Not the whole time, surely?”

  “Yeah, actually. And then I’ve been thinking about you a lot.”

  She laughed. She couldn’t figure him out at all. There must be something about her he liked. “Thinking what?”

  “How fun it was in Kiruna.”

  “Aside from the fact that Tom and Ambra sulked so much.”

  He waved his hand as though they were irrelevant. They were, after all. “The way you sang in that bar. If you knew how often I thought about that night.” There was a glimmer in his eye, something primitive, and Jill felt a thrill rush through her. He was sexy in his controlled, restrained way. Especially when his eyes glimmered like that, like a wolf that had caught the scent of something. Yes, she would definitely let him have sex with her tonight.

  The
waiter came back to their table, asked whether they wanted dessert. Jill deliberated with herself. And then she heard him order chocolates, which were probably her favorite thing of all. If she was being honest, she probably even preferred chocolate to sex.

  “How did you know?” she asked.

  “I saw it on your Instagram.”

  “Half of that’s lies.”

  “Yeah, but I took a chance on your love of chocolate being real.” She chose a milk chocolate praline from the plate that arrived and nibbled at it appreciatively.

  “I saw the kind of comments you get too,” he said with a frown.

  She pouted slightly, didn’t have the energy to talk about her idiotic haters. She rested her chin in her hand, didn’t care that she had her elbows on the table. She was tipsy and full-to-bursting. “They’re idiots,” she said dismissively.

  “They’re awful.”

  “Yeah, that too. But you can’t let them see that you care, or it’ll just get worse.” She had learned that over the years. The haters were like hyenas, just waiting for a bared throat or the slightest sign of weakness. She saw Mattias’s jaw twitch. Was he angry? “But they’re not your problem. Or were you planning to fight them back too?”

  “Maybe,” he replied.

  She took another chocolate, didn’t want to think about those crazy people. “Where do you live?” she asked instead.

  “In town.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Where in town? Is it a secret? Are you even allowed to go on dates?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Because you’re some kind of secret spy.”

  He shook his head. “I can go on dates.” He slipped back into silence, seemed to be thinking.

  “Mattias?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You need to forget those trolls. It’ll drive you crazy otherwise, and then they’ve won. Okay?”

  He nodded. Took a chocolate but didn’t eat it, seemed to be thinking again.

  She wondered what he was like in bed. Considerate? Firm, or maybe eager to please?

  When she glanced at the time, she realized it was almost midnight. She didn’t know where the time had gone.

  Mattias waved the waiter over and took the check. He didn’t even glance at her, just paid. When they got up from the table, she snuck a glance at the tip he had left. He was generous. Or was it just to impress her?

  As they left the restaurant, she leaned in to him slightly, was looking forward to kissing him. He went to collect her jacket from the coatroom in the hotel lobby, helped her into it, and she leaned in to him again. He would take the chance right now, wouldn’t he? But he didn’t. She turned around, slowly. Looked at him, ran her fingers down her coat, stopping just above one breast.

  He looked at her for a long moment, pulled on his leather gloves, and buttoned up his coat. “I got a call,” he said, and his voice sounded apologetic.

  “When?”

  “Just now. In the coatroom.” He placed a hand at the base of her spine and guided her gently toward the revolving doors. The air outside was cool and fresh. “I have to go back to work,” he said as a huge black car rolled up toward them.

  “In the middle of the night?”

  He waved to one of the cabs waiting outside the hotel and held the door open for her.

  “This wasn’t how I was hoping the evening would end,” she complained as she sat down in the backseat.

  Mattias bent down, studied her, and then kissed her on the cheek—a long, lingering kiss.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Here.” He handed her a bag with the Grand Hôtel’s logo on it, and then closed the door. He waved one last time before he jumped into the huge black car that had pulled up behind the cab. The moment he closed the door, it drove off.

  Jill told the cab driver her address and then opened the bag. Mattias had given her a box of chocolates. She opened it, took one out, and chewed thoughtfully as Stockholm passed by outside. Well, after tonight, it was fairly safe to say that Mattias wasn’t a consultant after all.

  Chapter 39

  “Let’s do the morning meeting now,” Grace said, looking out across the office. She grabbed her cell phone and her headset and started making her way to the conference room.

  Ambra followed her, finishing off the article she was working on at the laptop as she tried to avoid walking into anything. She hit one last key and sent off the piece, and then sat down. Representatives from the various desks came into the room and spread out around the table, and Grace wrote up the discussion points on the white board.

  Oliver Holm was among the last to enter the room. Ambra groaned internally. She didn’t realize he was even working today.

  Oliver glanced around, flexed his muscles, and nodded. “Hey, man,” he said to one of the men from the Foreign desk, thumping him hard on the back. They shared some private joke and laughed a private laugh, as though to show what cool players they were.

  Ambra exchanged an eye rolling glance with the reporter from Entertainment.

  “Okay, let’s begin,” Grace said with the marker pen in her right hand. “Cissi, what do you have on Crime today?”

  Cissi, the crime reporter who’d found herself a boyfriend and abruptly stopped asking Ambra to hang out, replied, “Expecting a ruling on the park bench murder. We should have a flash for that.”

  Grace nodded and wrote it up on the board. “We’ll help you with that. Society?”

  “We’re watching the parliament debate today. We’ll be sending live.”

  “Web TV?” Grace asked, glancing over to Parvin, the paper’s best-known TV anchor. It was Parvin who’d thrown the New Year’s party Ambra had turned down. Ambra liked her.

  “We’re live at ten. We’ll talk about the gang rape on a Finland ferry last night, the train disruption expected if a strike goes ahead. Someone also found a boa constrictor in a crate of bananas,” she finished with a pained look on her face.

  “That’s good, no?” Grace asked.

  Parvin shuddered. “Maybe if you don’t hate snakes.”

  People laughed. Ambra glanced over to Oliver, who was looking at his computer with a smile on his face.

  Oliver Holm was Ambra’s age, but he had been with Aftonbladet for exactly one year longer. Oliver’s grandfather was the news editor at the paper back in “the good old days”—in other words when the reporters were all tough, whisky-drinking men and the women were their secretaries. These days, the men at Aftonbladet were all feminists, officially at least. They wouldn’t survive otherwise. But Ambra suspected that Oliver preferred the way things were before.

  Oliver was one of the popular up-and-coming talents. He had experience in Washington, had been on long trips for work, had written about gang killings, liked tough jobs, went to the gym, hung out with the elite. He was a good writer, and if he wasn’t such an ass, then maybe she would’ve been able to cope with his mixed talents. Oliver was a father, too; had custody of his two-year-old son every other week and was popular with the opposite sex. Maybe he treated other women better than he treated her.

  “Oliver, do you have anything on that truck crash?” Grace asked.

  “I got hold of the head of the rescue team. I’ll give him a call soon.”

  “Great.”

  Oliver Holm would hardly be happy being an ordinary reporter, Ambra thought when she saw his satisfied face. Oliver wanted to move on to one of the bigger desks: Foreign, Politics, or of course Investigative. The desks where you could really shine, work on things that won major awards, where you got sent on prestigious jobs and invited to annual dinners with the bosses, if you really did well. She didn’t blame him; she wanted the same things. Possibly minus the dinners.

  “What do you have on Plus?” Grace asked. Aftonbladet Plus was their special feature segment: interviews and longer articles that cost extra to read.

  The head of the Plus desk looked tired, unshaven, and gray-faced.

  “Half my team’s sick, but we have Oliver doing a series o
n murders of women out jogging. The unprovoked woman killer.”

  “What does that mean? That some killings of women are provoked?” Ambra couldn’t stop herself from asking. “And why say woman killer? You would never say man killer.”

  Oliver groaned. “It’s a good headline. Don’t start with that crap again.”

  “We’ll take another look at the headline,” Grace said firmly.

  “Of course,” Oliver said smoothly, but he exchanged a sardonic glance with his direct manager.

  Ambra remembered the first time she went out on a job with Oliver Holm. It was back in the very beginning.

  She was new at Aftonbladet, but she had been doing some work for a small local paper ever since she was sixteen, and she considered herself experienced. After she finished her studies, she applied for various jobs and was accepted as one of the year’s summer temps with Aftonbladet. They were fiercely contested positions, but she had good grades and all her experience with the local paper on her side.

  When regular reporters went on vacation, the inexperienced summer temps got the chance to work on all kinds of things. Ambra had already covered a gang murder, traffic accidents, and press conferences. The temp who shone had the chance of being given a job once the summer was over. Ambra had made up her mind to be that reporter, to work harder than all the others. She was home alone in Stockholm that summer; Jill had started touring seriously, and Ambra could give the job her all.

  After she had been there a month, she was given the task of going to report on a riot in the projects in Akalla.

  “Take Oliver Holm with you,” the temporary news editor said. Ambra went to introduce herself to Oliver.

  “Want me to drive?” he asked politely, and Ambra nodded obligingly.

  “Have you been working here long?” she said, trying to make conversation.

  “Just a stand-in, one month. You?”

  “Same here,” she replied, nodding when their exit appeared. They were probably competitors, she realized. But he seemed nice and she wasn’t worried, knew her performance was way above average.