The Bride (The Boss)

by Barnette, Abigail

  Neil looked over at me, as if he could sense my thoughts. He probably could; we spent enough time together, and he read my every mood and facial expression like a cherished book. “Would you like to hold her? They’re so much more fun when they aren’t yours.”

  “Oh, thanks, Dad,” Emma said with a snort.

  “No, I don’t want to steal your time with your new niece,” I declined smoothly, and he was more than happy to go back to kissing Annie’s squishy fat cheeks and making grumbly noises.

  Dinner was amazing, though not vegan friendly. Emma seemed to have anticipated this, and she’d brought her own food, which she chowed down without complaint. Neil and I had given up any hope of a vegan holiday. We’d picked up the diet when Neil was ill, after being convinced of the health benefits by Emma. But Christmas was never healthy, anyway, so we felt free to indulge in hangikjöt made of smoked lamb, though Neil informed me that he preferred the horse variety. There was also fried ptarmigan, a bird I’d never heard of but was stuffed with bacon, so I was sold. There were caramelized potatoes and red cabbage, and steaming warm homemade bread.

  “You did all this?” I boggled after I’d inhaled my second helping of rice pudding.

  Kristine grinned. “Yes, it was quite difficult. I had to call the caterer weeks in advance, and then pop the trays in the oven this morning.”

  Everyone laughed, even Neil, who seemed to have loosened up a bit.

  Though it was only five o’clock, it was pitch black outside by the time we’d exchanged presents and let the massive dinner settle. I was sitting in the crook of Neil’s elbow, leaned against him, when he suddenly spoke up. “You know, it only just now occurs to me that Michael has never been for a proper sauna?”

  He said this apropos of nothing, immediately rousing my suspicion, and Emma’s too, judging from the way she sat up with wide eyes.

  Michael looked up from where his hand was laced with Emma’s on his knee. “A what now?”

  “A sauna,” Geir said, gruff and terrifying. “You sit in the steam for a while, get a good sweat worked up, then you run outside and jump in the lake.”

  “Nice try.” Michael shook his head with a dazzling smile. “Fool me once, Mr. Elwood.”

  “Fool you once?” I asked, and Neil gave me an I’m-totally-innocent look that I was not buying.

  “At Michael’s first Christmas with the family, Dad told Michael that it was Icelandic custom to strip naked and roll in the snow on Christmas morning,” Emma said, with a peeved edge to her tone. “He told Michael to meet him in the garden at Langhurst Court before breakfast, then never came down.”

  “I sat outside in my underwear for seventeen minutes before I decided he was messing with me,” Michael admitted sheepishly.

  “This is all legitimate, I assure you,” Runólf said, chuckling at his brother’s horrible prank. “I’ve even got the hole cut out there.”

  “It really is something they do,” Helen reassured Michael. “Although Geir shouldn’t, because of his heart.”

  “Um, and maybe somebody who just had cancer shouldn’t do it, either.” All the blood drained from my face. “You’re really going to do it, aren’t you?”

  “Absolutely. It’s the perfect male bonding experience, and I haven’t seen my brothers in a while. And anyway, I wouldn’t want Michael to miss out,” Neil said, nodding to him.

  “Daddy, don’t be stupid. Of course Michael isn’t going to jump in a frozen lake. He’s not an idiot.” Emma laughed.

  “Oh, no offense to be taken from that statement, is there?” Geir grumbled, and stood. “I don’t know about all the rest of you, but I’m going down to start the damn fire. Are you coming?”

  “I am, definitely,” Michael said, and I saw in the firm set of his jaw the resolution of a man who saw plunging his overheated body into an icy death lake as a last ditch attempt to win the respect of his mortal enemy.

  It was hard not to laugh.

  Neil tightened his arm around me and said, low beside my ear, “You’ll be alright without me?”

  I nodded and gave him a reassuring smile. Kristine and Helen seemed nice enough, and Emma and I got along great. It wasn’t like he was leaving me alone with Valerie or something.

  When the guys were gone, Kristine dropped on the couch beside me with a giant glass of wine. She stretched her legs. “Do you know how long it has been since I’ve had a drink?”

  “But it’s all worth it,” Helen laughed. “Still, I wouldn’t trade with you. I like my eight hours.”

  Kristine took a huge gulp of wine before responding. “We’re very lucky, we have an overnight nurse, usually. But not at Christmas, that seemed too self-indulgent.”

  “So, Sophie, how did Christmas with your family go?” Emma asked, then, to Kristine and Helen, she explained, “It was Dad’s first time meeting them.”

  I shrugged. If Emma wanted details, I would fill her in another time. “It went…really well. My mom didn’t like him, but I didn’t think she would.”

  Kristine made a sympathetic noise. “My father hates Runólf. All he sees when he looks at him is some perverted old man. It doesn’t help that Runólf is only seven years younger than him.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m so glad I’m not the only one in this situation. Neil is actually older than my mom, and she’s super freaked out.”

  “I would be,” Helen said with a shocked blink. “If my child brought home a partner who was older than me? Granted, my kids are in their twenties, and I’m fifty-nine…”

  “You married a guy your own age, though,” Kristine pointed out. “So you don’t see the draw. Trust me, there are things an older man can do that a young guy—”

  Emma looked at me, horrified, and interrupted, loudly, “New topic of conversation!”

  “Okay. New topic,” Kristine agreed. “Helen, how are your classes going?”

  Helen had retired from her law practice, and now she taught courses on contract law at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. As it turned out, Kristine had just gone back to school, to get her Master’s degree in modern art.

  It had never occurred to me before that conversation, but I could go back to school. I was living with Neil, I wasn’t making a ton of money; my advance for my first book had been generous for a debut memoirist, mostly because of its famous subject matter, but it wasn’t a career I could really imagine myself growing to love. Neil was always saying I could do whatever I wanted to do, and he’d support me… I wondered if that extended to an advanced degree.

  What was I thinking? The man had bought me jewelry that cost more than a master’s degree. He would be fine with it.

  Still, I wasn’t actually sure it was something I wanted to do. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I’d hoped I would have figured it out before I was a quarter of a century old.

  About an hour and a half after the men had gone off on their own, we heard whoops and laughter from outside.

  “There they go,” Emma said with a weary sigh, her arms crossed as she looked out the glass wall at the wintery lawn. I saw four bodies, ghostly pale in the full moonlight, racing barefoot and naked across the snow, headed straight for the icy lake. Only one of them hesitated at the square hole cut into the ice; I assumed it was Michael, owing to the yelp of pained surprise we heard through the glass as the other men barreled past and carried him right over the edge.

  “Poor Michael,” I said, shaking my head.

  “He’s the one who’s desperate for my father’s approval,” Emma sniffed, not at all sympathetic.

  Michael was the first up the ladder and onto the dock, and I turned away quickly. “Whoops, not looking.”

  “I am,” Emma said with a mischievous smile. Then her eyebrows scrunched up and she grimaced as she turned her back to the window. “But not if uncle Geir is getting out.”

  We heard the men come in, the rolling babble of three strangely identical voices—I hadn’t noticed that before, but Neil and his brothers all sounded r
emarkably alike—speaking in Icelandic. After they dressed and came back to the living room, it was like every trace of weird, distant Neil had been wiped away. He came to me with his wet hair slicked back from his face and wrapped me up in his arms, burying his cold nose in my neck until I squealed.

  “Michael, you idiot, your lips are blue.” Emma slapped Michael’s shoulder and guided him toward the couch, where he huddled in his clothes, shivering uncontrollably.

  Kristine jumped up. “I’ll get him a blanket.”

  “And I’ll get him some whiskey,” Geir grumbled, clearly unimpressed by Michael’s lack of fortitude.

  “Oh, the boy is perfectly fine,” Neil said with what could have easily been mistaken as a friendly laugh. It totally wasn’t. “Aren’t you, Michael?”

  He gave Neil a weak thumbs-up.

  “Well, I hope he proved himself,” I said, resting my hands against Neil’s chest.

  “He was willing to jump into testicle-shriveling ice water to impress you,” Runólf pointed out.

  “Well,” Neil said, resigned as he looked over at Michael. “I suppose it’s a start.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “I think that went well,” Neil declared as we let ourselves into the house. He hit the master switch by the door and lit up all three levels.

  “Oh, sure it went well. It went so well, you almost gave Michael hypothermia,” I said with a roll of my eyes.

  Neil chuckled. “That’s what I said. ‘It went well.’ If Michael had actually gotten hypothermia, I’d have said, ‘It went spectacularly.’”

  I would save my lecture about his attitude toward Emma’s fiancé for another time.

  “Did you enjoy yourself?” he asked, for the eleventh time since we’d left Runólf’s house.

  “Well, the first ten times you asked me, I thought I did…but now…”

  “Don’t be smart.” He reached out and tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. “You have no idea how nervous I was.”

  “I think I had kind of an idea.” I frowned. “Or maybe not. See, if my family hadn’t liked you, it wouldn’t have changed anything between us. But I get this crazy feeling that it would have changed us if your family hadn’t liked me.”

  I could have slapped him, and he would have looked less stunned. Not that I would ever slap Neil. Though there were times he had sorely tempted me.

  “You seemed tense,” I explained patiently. Maybe he hadn’t noticed his own mood. “You seemed like… I don’t know. Like something was riding on today. You haven’t been yourself since we left New York.”

  He took both my hands in his and looked down at them as he held them between us. Squeezing my fingers, he promised, “If you perceived any amount of tension or you felt that I was…removed in some way…absolutely none of that had to do with you.”

  “Okay. I trust you.” It was easy to say it, because I felt it to my bones. He had never lied to me before.

  Well, except for during our one-night stand seven years before. But neither of us had been truthful that night.

  We hung up our coats and went upstairs to the bedroom. In the master bath, I brushed my teeth and removed my makeup while Neil took out his contacts. He was unusually quiet, until he said, “I wasn’t sure, until the moment Runólf met us at the door, that I wanted to see my brothers today.”

  “What?” It was all he’d been talking about for weeks. “I thought you were looking forward to seeing them.”

  “I was.” He screwed on one lid of his lens case, and he didn’t look up at me. “Until I wasn’t.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I waited until he was ready to go on.

  He took a breath. “The truth is…I was quite hurt that neither Runólf nor Geir came to visit while I was ill.”

  A knife of sudden understanding pierced my lungs, and my inhale was painful. “Oh, baby—”

  “It’s all right, now,” he assured me. “For the past few days, I’ve been thinking about it. Thinking about how terrible it was that Runólf hadn’t come to visit me. We were quite close growing up. Geir was seven when I was born, Fiona was six. I realize that families grow and change and drift apart, but it hurt that they were willing to risk never seeing me again. That they were both…”

  I reached over and put my hand on his on the countertop.

  He looked up with a hesitant smile. “I understand now, seeing baby Annie. Death, just the idea of it… It feels contagious. When Emma was a baby, I obsessed over her safety. If I heard a story on the news about a child dying, I turned it off. I was so happy, it seemed like if I invited even the notion of death in, I would make it happen.

  “Geir is getting older. His mortality is becoming more real to him. I can understand why he wouldn’t want to see his little brother suffering through cancer. And Runólf has a beautiful wife who had just given birth to that sweet baby when my condition deteriorated so badly. Of course he would want to protect them, even if the danger was imaginary.”

  I shook my head. “I still think it’s awfully shitty. Not coming to see you, when it seemed pretty certain you weren’t going to make it.” I hated talking about that time. It made my throat close up.

  “Sophie, believe me. It’s fine now. I made my peace over it.” He leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Hurry up, you don’t want to miss the fireworks. We have a spectacular view.”

  When I came out of the bathroom, wrapped in my fluffy bathrobe, Neil was sitting on the bed, already down to his black silk boxers. In his hands, he had a gift wrapped in elegant green paper. “I know we’d agreed to forego presents this year, but damn it, I couldn’t help myself. So, I bought you something.”

  “As it so happens,” I began, heading to my suitcase. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist, so I got you something, too.”

  It’s hard to shop for a billionaire. If he wanted something, he usually just bought it. So I’d had to get creative. I handed him my present and sat beside him to open mine.

  He tore the paper off the box and lifted the lid. Inside, in an elegant silver frame, was an enlarged version of the photo we’d taken in bed together in Paris the year before, on New Year’s Eve.

  Neil’s hands trembled as he lifted the heavy frame from the box. In a voice choked with emotion, he managed, “Oh, Sophie…”

  “You said you wanted to always remember that trip,” I reminded him, smiling down at the photo of the two of us, damp from a post-sex shower and snuggled up in bed together. That night, he’d tortured me with a personal massager and poured champagne into my mouth full of his cum. It had been one of our most intense encounters, made more so by the knowledge that he’d start chemotherapy when the trip was over. We hadn’t known then what the future would hold. A year later, we had come through so much, and we were finally, finally becoming that couple in the picture again.

  When he looked up, his eyes were a little misty. “Come here, you brilliant woman.”

  Still clutching the frame, he wrapped his arms around me and hugged me tight; I’d expected him to like the present, but I hadn’t expected it to move him so much.

  “I’m glad you like it,” I said with a surprised laugh that was cut off by my lack of breath as Neil squeezed the hell out of me.

  With a soft chuckle of his own, he released me. “Like it? Sophie, I love it. That night was the perfect way to start my year. And this is the perfect way to end it. The middle was a bit dodgy, I’m afraid, but the book ends are lovely.”

  With one finger against the glass in the frame, he traced the line of my jaw. I shivered as though he’d touched me.

  “Okay,” I said brightly, or else I was going to start blubbering. “I get to open mine now.”

  “It’s nowhere near as thoughtful,” he said ruefully. “I’m embarrassed now.”

  Tearing the paper off a Christmas present just thrills my materialistic little heart. I grinned to myself at the half-circle of birds and flowers stamped on the plain box. It was Carine Gilson’s logo. Her lingerie was to die for. I c
ouldn’t wait to see what Neil had gotten for me.

  I parted the tissue paper inside, and my fingers brushed a pool of the softest azure silk I had ever felt. Breathless, I lifted the nightgown by its slender straps and a reverent “oh!” crossed my lips as the ankle-length gown unfurled, revealing the designer’s signature lace embellishments.

  “There’s a robe in there, as well,” Neil said. “Do you like it?”

  “Do I…” My mouth dropped open. I rubbed the silk on my face. It was as soft as I imagined Lily Cole’s skin to be.

  “Put it on,” he urged. “This is almost as much a present for me as it is for you.”

  “How thoughtful,” I said wryly as I stood and let my bathrobe slip from my shoulders. Neil’s gaze raked appreciatively over my naked form as I lifted the nightgown over my head. The silk was absolute heaven, like the softest, sweetest oil slick. It floated to my ankles, skimmed my every curve, hugged my body perfectly.

  Neil’s big hands closed over my hips, and he pulled me forward to nuzzle his face against my belly.

  “Hey!” I jumped back, out of his grasp. “Your stupid beard is gonna snag my fancy new nightie.”

  “Stupid?” he gasped, rubbing his hand over his jaw. “I thought you’d grown to like it!”

  I tried to avoid his reach when he started to grab me, but he’s a tall guy and mostly arms and legs. There was no eluding him, and he tackled me to the bed, both of us laughing breathlessly. He rubbed his rough chin into my neck, making me squeal and squirm as he pinned me beneath him. And just as quickly as the moment had turned playful, it became tender. He lifted his head, smiled his crooked half-smile down at me, and stroked my hair back from my face.

  “This is weird,” I whispered, gazing up at him, searching his eyes for something I wasn’t really sure was missing. “This house, this country, the language… It’s a whole separate part of your life. It’s like I didn’t really know you.”