A Restored Viking: Sveyn & Hollis: Part Two (The Hansen Series - Sveyn & Hollis Book 2)

by Kris Tualla

  Matt insisted on a candlelight dinner for the two of them that night. He even managed a private corner in an exclusive boutique restaurant, tucked away from the random people who recognized her that afternoon.

  He held her chair and Hollis sat at the beautifully appointed table. “Thank you.”

  “I took the liberty of ordering the food and wine pairings,” he said as he took his seat at her side. “Pretend we’re at my house and I cooked.”

  “You always were a better cook than me,” Hollis admitted. “I’m afraid I haven’t gotten any better.”

  Mann grinned. “I figured that when I looked in your fridge and saw nothing but condiments and beverages.”

  Hollis put up her hands in surrender. “If we’re going to do this, then full disclosure is required. Don’t you agree?”

  “I do.”

  Hollis smiled. “I like the sound of that.”

  A waiter came and poured their first wine. “Please enjoy. Your hors d’oeuvres will be out shortly.”

  Matt lifted his glass. “To the most beautiful girlfriend a man could imagine.”

  Hollis blinked slowly. “Is that what I am?”

  “I hope so.” He clinked his glass against hers. “If you’ll have me.”

  Hollis tasted the wine instead of answering. Her eyes widened. “Matt, this is amazing.”

  “I’m glad you like it. An amazing woman deserves an amazing experience.”

  She considered Matt across the table. His incredible gold-streaked eyes, trim six-foot frame, perfectly tailored shirt and pants, spicy aftershave. He made her heart ache with love.

  This is what I always wanted.

  And now, he was here.

  Friday

  January 8

  Hollis let herself into the museum offices early. She wanted to avoid being seen, planning to hide out in her office for the majority of the day.

  Tomorrow was the opening of the Renaissance Faire east of Phoenix, and all she needed to do was make it through today without too much drama. Tomorrow she would use the mindless and distracting event as a cushion, before she dealt with the trauma and the money which Everett Sage’s invasion of her life brought with it.

  Things could be worse.

  Hollis smiled.

  Matt had been so nice to her, that she told Stevie to hold off on the text messages from Captain Hart. Based on Matt’s occasional references to her imaginary lover, the ruse had done its job. Plus Matt was working hard on winning her back to his side.

  Maybe I’ll break up with the Captain.

  “Not yet,” she murmured. “Let him wonder.”

  “Matt?” Sveyn asked. “What does he wonder about?”

  “The Captain. My imaginary boyfriend,” Hollis answered. Someday she might remember not to talk out loud to herself.

  Sveyn smiled. “The Captain of your heart.”

  Hollis opened her email, and began putting out fires and deflecting offers to speak. Her mood plunged when she saw that the requests by various mediums, ghost hunters, and spiritualists had quadrupled overnight.

  “Crap.” She looked at Sveyn. “Now that we know the Dead Cat Threats had nothing to do with the occult, we don’t have a reason to say no.”

  “But you do not need the extra money any longer,” Sveyn pointed out. “You are a rich woman now.”

  Hollis chuckled. “Not really. You’d be surprised how fast that could be gone.”

  Miranda appeared in her office doorway. “I saw your car in the parking lot.” She looked around. “Who are you talking to?”

  Hollis shrugged. “Myself.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m hiding from everyone else.”

  Miranda laughed. “So Sage settled.”

  “Yep.”

  “And you still showed up for work.”

  “It wasn’t the lottery, Miranda. I still need to work and there’s plenty of work to be done.” Hollis motioned Miranda closer. “Take a look at this.”

  Hollis leaned back and turned the monitor so Miranda could see all the requests to visit their resident ghost.

  “Holy guacamole!” Miranda straightened. “The lines to get in yesterday were crazy.”

  “Stevie told me.” Hollis put the monitor back in place. “I wonder what Benton’s going to want to do with all this attention.”

  Miranda laughed again. “Make money. What else?”

  *****

  At one o’clock that afternoon, Hollis got her answer.

  She sat in front of the museum director’s desk, sipping a diet cola, and bracing for whatever he was about to throw at her.

  “When the Arizona History and Cultural Museum first received word of Ezra Kensington’s bequest, we were overwhelmed, to be honest.” Benton spread his hands. “We were a museum whose mission statement focused exclusively on these lands and these territories.”

  “Yes, sir.” Hollis supposed that was the expected response to the old news.

  “But the Board took a look at the money, and the possibilities in the man’s collection, and we rewrote our mission statement so that we could accept his most generous donation.”

  Again, none of this was new. “That was very forward thinking of you, sir.”

  Compliments never hurt.

  He accepted the words as his due and continued, “Then we embarked on a search for the right collections manager to handle the massive amount of things that needed to be sorted, attributed, and catalogued.”

  “Stevie Phillips has been indispensable, Mr. Benton.”

  The director looked surprised. “I was talking about you.”

  Hollis gave a little nod. “I know. But I don’t work alone.”

  She had obviously thrown Benton off script. “No, of course not…”

  “And I saw the position posted when I was working in Chicago,” Hollis prompted.

  “Yes. Yes! And while your references were impressive, your interview was unmatched.” Benton smiled. “I hate to use a cliché, especially one so appropriate to our business, but…”

  The rest is history.

  “…the rest is history.”

  Hollis smiled. “Yes, it is sir.”

  Benton shifted in his chair and his expression grew more serious. “The question which faces us now is, what does the future hold?”

  “For the museum?”

  “Yes.” Benton steepled his fingers. “And for you.”

  “I don’t have any plans that go beyond February twenty-eighth,” Hollis admitted. “That’s the end of my contract here.”

  “I believe we need to make some plans,” Benton said smoothly. “Don’t you?”

  “I am very open to that, sir,” Hollis replied. “As long as my compensation reflects my permanent status.”

  One of Benton’s brows lifted. “How much are we talking about?”

  Now Hollis shifted in her seat. “I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to check the requests for ghost visits, sir, but they had quadrupled by this morning.”

  “That’s good news.” He paused. “Isn’t it?”

  “It is, if we continue to charge what we have been.” Now Hollis steepled her fingers. “The problem arises because there are only forty hours in my work week, so in order to fulfill all the requests, I would have to work an additional four hours a day.”

  Benton’s face smoothed with understanding, then twisted in question. “What do you propose, Ms. McKenna?”

  “I propose to work forty hours a week as a salaried employee, and those specific hours will flex depending on how many paying visitors we book and how many hours they buy of the museum’s time.”

  “So we still charge them, but the museum keeps the money?” Benton clarified.

  “Yes.”

  Benton was confused. “But you lose the extra one hundred dollars per hour that way.”

  “I received a substantial judgment yesterday from my civil suit against Everett Sage.” Hollis gave the director a patient smile. “Mr. Benton, I don’t need that extra money anymo
re.”

  “Oh.” Benton looked pleased. “Excellent.”

  Hollis shrugged. “And of course, with my time in such high demand, I’ll need additional help to manage the Kensington collection.”

  His smile faded. “What sort of help?”

  “I want you to use the extra money to hire Tom the intern as my full-time Assistant Registrar.” Hollis kept talking, not giving Benton a chance to argue. “He’s capable, smart, and knows a ton about European history. I can trust him to take some of my load and perform well.”

  Benton gave a non-committal nod. “I’ll take that suggestion under advisement, Ms. McKenna.”

  Hollis flashed her most dazzling smile. “I’m glad sir. Because I do like working for you.”

  As she rose from the chair, she let her happy smile morph to a tentative one. “I’d hate to have to move again so soon. I was really feeling settled in Phoenix.”

  Benton’s email agreeing to her terms arrived in her inbox at five-forty-five that afternoon.

  Contract attached.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Saturday

  January 9

  Though Hollis got exactly what she wanted, she didn’t sign the contract just yet. There was still her future with Matt to consider.

  If he agreed to move to Phoenix, then she had her dream job nailed down.

  And if things went south with him, she still had her dream job nailed down.

  But he might want her to move back to Milwaukee with him. Until they talked seriously about their future, Hollis couldn’t sign the contract and commit her services to the museum.

  Matt had been so kind, so attentive, and so encouraging lately that Hollis was hopeful about their relationship. So hopeful, that she came very close to caving in to his request for full-fledged sex last night.

  Until Sveyn reminded her of his presence in the condo. The effect was akin to being dumped with ice water.

  “That wasn’t an accident,” she snipped at him later. “You interrupted us on purpose.”

  The Viking didn’t even look contrite. “Yes. I admit that I did.”

  “Why?” Hollis glared at him. “Jealous?”

  Sveyn glared back. “Of course I am jealous. He is able to give you everything that I deeply desire to, but cannot!”

  “And never will be!” she shouted. “Don’t you understand that?”

  Hollis groaned and spun in a circle of frustration until she faced him again. “Do you really expect me to give up all hope of marriage and children because of you?”

  “No!” Sveyn scuttled his hands through his hair, leaving it in unprecedented disarray. Hollis could feel his intense anger like a static charge raising the hairs on her arms. “But as I have said before, this man is not right for you!”

  Hollis threw up her hands. “How do you know that?”

  “I can feel this.” He thumped his chest with a fist, his eyes dark with fury. “In here.”

  “Feelings? That’s it?” Hollis shook her head. “No. You don’t know what went on between us before.”

  “It does not matter.”

  “Yes it does!” Hollis stomped her foot, a sadly unsatisfying gesture on carpet. “Matt has changed.”

  “Men don’t change,” Sveyn growled.

  “Yes they do! In today’s world they can, and they do!” she cried. “So leave us alone!”

  Hollis stormed into her bedroom and slammed the door. She didn’t turn on the television either, leaving Sveyn alone with his thoughts and hoping he came to his senses.

  When she started to dream about him, her subconscious had the good sense to remember their argument and she rebuffed the Viking’s sly advances.

  This morning, when she emerged from her bedroom already dressed for the day, Sveyn waited on the couch. His hands were folded in his lap and he regarded her from beneath a lowered brow.

  “I apologize, Hollis.” His deep voice was quiet but it vibrated through her chest nonetheless. “Though my intention was to save you from further heartbreak, I perhaps acted inappropriately.”

  Hollis pinned him with her own gaze. “Perhaps?”

  Sveyn gave her a sullen shrug. “I will not interfere again.”

  Hollis crossed the space between them. “I accept your apology, Sveyn. And I do understand your frustration.”

  He stood and looked down at her. “I love you, Hollis. More than I can say with words.”

  She gazed up into his beautiful blue eyes, noting the web of fine lines extending from their corners, the scruff of his beard with a few white hairs sprouting on his chin, and the thick sun-streaked hair resting on his shoulders.

  Damn, he’s sexy.

  Hollis fervently wished he was real. This cosmic prank they had both fallen victim of wasn’t amusing in any way.

  “You look pretty good for a man born in ten-thirty-six, you know that?” She tried to touch his hair, but her hand moved through it. She let her arm drop to her side. “I don’t like fighting with you.”

  “I do not like it either.” He smiled softly. “I promise that I will strive to not provoke you again.”

  “Thank you.” Hollis turned around to pick up her purse and make sure she had the tickets for the Renaissance Faire—and the backstage tour passes.

  Sveyn looked over her shoulder. “Tell me about this Faire.”

  “I’ve never been there, but it’s my understanding that the idea is to present what life might have been like back then.” She looked at Sveyn. “Without the filth and the stench, of course.”

  “Interesting.” The Viking looked skeptical. “May I tell you the errors I spot?”

  Hollis laughed. “Sure. There will be plenty, I imagine.”

  A knock on the door prompted her to grab her jacket. She walked to the condo’s front door and paused with her hand on the doorknob and looked back at Sveyn.

  “Just remember, this isn’t a museum. The point is to have fun. So it’s more like a theme park.”

  “What is a theme park?”

  Hollis smiled. “You’ll see.”

  *****

  “How far is this place?” Matt asked as the density of the Phoenix area gave way to hilly desert and cactus.

  Hollis looked at the map on her phone. “Almost there. It’ll be on the right.”

  Sveyn pointed over her shoulder from the back seat. “There is a sign.”

  “Oh, there’s a sign,” Matt echoed the Viking’s words.

  Matt turned the car onto a dirt road and followed a line of cars into the huge parking lot. It was already more than half full. “Where are we meeting George and Stevie?”

  Hollis closed the app and put her phone in her purse. “By the first aid building. She thought the information booth might be too crowded.”

  Matt steered the car in the direction that the parking attendant directed them. “Sun glasses, do you think?” he asked after he shut off the engine.

  Hollis considered the cloudy sky that in any other climate might signal rain. “Probably. Want me to put them in my purse?”

  Matt handed her his sunglasses case and the three of them exited the vehicle. As they approached the courtyard-like entry to the Faire, Sveyn’s expression shifted into a broad grin.

  Curious as to why, Hollis didn’t want to speak to the apparition in front of Matt because it would remind him that they had constant company.

  Plus she would look like a crazy woman. There was that.

  And while the Bluetooth ruse was would keep others from doubting her sanity, she couldn’t claim to have phone calls without Matt wondering who she was talking to all day.

  Her only recourse for communicating with the Viking was to give him meaningful looks and hope he understood their point.

  She turned away from Matt to look at Sveyn and lifted her brows in question.

  “Do you see how the people here are dressed?” he asked.

  Hollis nodded as she scanned the costumed actors and attendees.

  “There’s a costume shop over there.” She
pointed to one of the stores in the courtyard outside the turnstile-controlled entry points.

  Matt shot her a surprised look. “You didn’t want to dress up. Did you?”

  “No. I was just making an observation.” Hollis smiled at him. “But a lot of people get into this, apparently.”

  She handed the grinning King Henry the Eighth look-alike at the gate her tickets and he welcomed her and Matt with a flourish of his pewter wine cup. “Enter and be jolly, my lord and lady!”

  Once inside, Sveyn repeated his question in her ear. “These people are wearing clothes that look like many centuries ago. Do you see this?”

  Hollis nodded.

  Sveyn strode ahead of her and Matt, then turned to face them, his grin as wide as his arms. “For today, my clothes fit the occasion!”

  Hollis smiled. He was right.

  The people strolling through the Faire were dressed in fashions from Sveyn’s middle-ages through the sixteen hundreds. And leather pants, vest, and a linen shirt fit pretty much all those time periods.

  “Looks like anything goes,” she said to Matt. “The term ‘Renaissance’ is apparently fluid.”

  “Uh, huh.” Matt was focused on the map. “Here’s the First Aid building.” He looked up and pointed. “Right there. Oh, dear.”

  Stevie and George waited outside the door. And they were both dressed in elaborate costumes. Matt slid his what the hell gaze to Hollis.

  She elbowed him the ribs.

  “Well those certainly aren’t Jane Austin Society outfits,” Hollis said to the beaming couple for Matt’s benefit.

  “No, but when we saw the costume shop we couldn’t resist renting them for the day,” George explained.

  “We both just love dressing up in historical clothing.” A giggling Stevie did a complete turn and faced them again. “And then—we appreciate our modern conveniences that much more when we take it off.”

  Hollis didn’t look at Matt, afraid his expression might irritate her. “Did you ask anyone about the tour?”

  Stevie nodded. “Yes. They said we should meet them at the gate beside the main arena at one.”

  “Great.” Matt seemed to have gotten over his costume-induced shock. “That gives us time to explore. And eat. Who’s hungry?”