Lord and Master Trilogy

by Jagger, Kait

  Scrolling down further, Luna saw an image of the exterior of Malcolm’s lambing shed. She clicked the play button in the middle of the image and watched as the camera panned out to the field. The cameraman, who she could only assume was Mika, moved toward the entrance of the shed and as the camera adjusted to the darkened interior, she saw herself, sitting on the floor of the orphan pen bottle-feeding a lamb while two others impatiently waited their turn.

  Her head was turned slightly away from the camera – she’d had absolutely no idea Mika was filming her – as she held the lamb’s head in the crook of her arm, its mouth working away at the bottle. She was wearing one of her many Shetland jumpers, plus a knitted hat, and there was a blade of straw in her hair.

  The camera closed in on one of the other lambs baaing at her and Luna could hear herself chirping in response, ‘Are you hungry, little man?’

  Then both the waiting lambs baaed and Luna laughed, ‘You poor, poor boys!’ Something about the timbre of her voice apparently struck a chord, because this provoked another duet of baas. Ah yes, she remembered this, smiling in anticipation of what happened next. The camera focused on her profile as she pursed her lips and made a kissing noise to the lambs.

  At this, not only did the two waiting lambs baa, but the lamb on her lap disengaged his mouth from the nipple of the bottle and let out his own loud, plaintive baa. Luna watched as her shoulders began to shake with laughter, and the scene faded to black.

  The next scene was of her delivering water bottles to the filming crew out in the field. Again, she’d had absolutely no idea Mika’s camera was trained on her. This was back when she still hated him, which manifested itself in a slightly sassy sway of her hips as she clomped back across the field toward the gate.

  But then – she’d forgotten this – a lamb came gambolling over in her direction and, fit of pique forgotten, she quickly squatted down to greet him. There was no mistaking the downward motion of the camera to focus firmly on her jean-clad arse as she scratched the lamb on its head.

  Luna glanced over at Mika, chatting with Sean at the bar as they waited for their pints. Then she watched in fascinated horror as the final clip played out on her laptop screen. It began with a close-up of two puffins, but then the camera angle shifted to show her fast asleep on the grass next to them. It was shot at very close range; she could see a wisp of her hair waving in the breeze and a thin blue vein pulsing in her temple. It was… intimate. The camera, and thus its owner, would have had to be right next to her to capture this level of detail. Her lips parted and for one awful moment Luna feared that her screen incarnation was going to start snoring.

  But it was worse than that. Her sleeping self sighed, then pursed her lips into a pout. This was more than just intimate – the footage had captured her dreaming.

  Of course, he didn’t understand her objections as they drove home later.

  ‘Sören asked me to get images of you for his blog,’ he shrugged. ‘So I did.’ Then he yawned and rested his head on the passenger window, blithely settling in for some kip.

  Dagmar was similarly unapologetic when Luna approached her later. ‘It’s good, staff in Stockholm knowing what we’re doing here,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, but you could have told me,’ Luna protested.

  At this Dagmar made a face and observed, ‘You are shy, Luna. If I told you…’ She shrugged and added softly, ‘Besides, Mika has made you look skitsnygg.’ Luna knew from Stefan that skitsnygg was the Swedish equivalent of ‘shit hot’, and she glanced at Dagmar with surprise, only for the lanky Swede to duck her head in embarrassment.

  Luna decided, upon reflection, not to ring Stefan back right away. Truth be told, she was a little annoyed with him, both for taking such a tetchy tone with her and for phoning when he clearly had no time for a proper conversation. So, yes, he could wait to talk to her.

  Besides, once she’d gotten over her initial discomfort, she found herself feeling… flattered by Mika’s portrayal of her. Okay, the napping scene she could do without, but she was inwardly chuffed when her phone started pinging with messages from the girls.

  From Nancy: Whoa, check out Luna! www.lundgrenssorenblogShetland

  Then Jem: True story: I was watching this in the office. Got to bit where Luna was in the field and Scott from Design shouted I know that arse!!! ALL THE WAY FROM ACROSS THE ROOM.

  And finally Kayla: Who shot this? R u sleeping with him/her? U naughty girl :-)

  She was quick to message back and clarify that the video had been shot at Sören’s behest, and that she had absolutely no romantic involvement with Mika, adding, He’s shagging the female model on the shoot, Britta. Which, if it wasn’t the truth yet, well, she suspected it soon would be.

  But anyway, it was nice, her friends knowing that she had a life up here. And not just them. To her surprise, she also had an email from Rafe Davies.

  To: luna.gregory@worldmail.co.uk

  From: rafedavies@rafedavies.com

  Subject: Wow!

  Just seen my mate Mika’s latest ‘pet project’. You look gorgeous, and happy, which makes me happy. It really is a small world. Couldn’t believe it when he said he’d met you. I’ll ring soon to talk. I have fantastic news re. the ad. It’s been nominated for a Clio.

  Luna smiled as she read the email. So, Mika had mentioned her to Davies. She tried to imagine how that conversation might have gone, Mika so spare with his words and Davies so gregarious and open.

  That night, as the wind continued to howl outside, she, Mika and Dagmar had a brief planning meeting for the screening event, which segued into a slightly boozy dinner. Somewhat incongruously, Mika had developed a taste for Southern rock during his time in the States, and halfway through the meal he insisted on putting on his ‘mix tape’ featuring Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and The Cadillac Three. So the boozy dinner segued into boozy dancing, followed by boozy lounging in the front room.

  It was only when Luna crawled up the stairs to her room at almost 1am that she saw she had two missed calls from Stefan.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she opened, holding the phone to her ear whilst simultaneously kicking off her boots. ‘We had music on and I didn’t hear the phone.’

  A slight sigh on the other end of the line. ‘No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I shouldn’t have spoken to you the way I did earlier, flicka.’

  ‘Well…’ Luna began, lifting her shoulder to cradle the phone while she removed her jeans.

  ‘I’ve just—’ Stefan hesitated. ‘It’s just been such a rubbish week, and now it looks like you won’t be able to come to Loch Lomond this weekend, and then I see this video of you taking naps with Mika.’

  ‘I did not take a nap with him,’ Luna said firmly, trying to wrestle her jumper off. ‘He caught me napping, that I admit. But your father asked him to take some candid footage of me for his blog, so Mika was only following orders.’

  ‘Hunh,’ Stefan rejoined. ‘It looks to me like he was only too happy to oblige.’

  And maybe, maybe if Luna hadn’t been slightly drunk and still feeling flattered by Mika’s portrayal of her; maybe if she didn’t still have the strains of Tom Petty’s ‘American Girl’ reverberating in her ears and the Shetland sky glowing dark red in the skylight above her bed, maybe she’d have heard the undercurrent in Stefan’s tone and taken the conversation more seriously.

  As it was, she quickly unclasped her bra and threw it to the floor, then reclined back on top of her bed, fully naked, bathed pink in the strange, stormy light.

  ‘I don’t suppose it occurred to you to ask yourself what I was dreaming about when Mika caught me napping,’ she said, smiling mischievously.

  A brief silence, followed by the sound of Stefan clearing his throat. ‘Why don’t you tell me, Miss Gregory?’

  So she told him, at length and in detail. And the conversation moved in an entirely different, altogether more pleasurable direction.

  Would that this had been their only telephone conversation th
at weekend.

  *

  As Stefan feared, the weather remained stormy on Friday, with all flights and ferries to the mainland cancelled. And though Luna was disappointed not to be seeing him, part of her was relieved to have more time to prepare for Tuesday night’s event. Opting for a two-pronged attack, she sent out email invitations and hand delivered hard copies to farmers who’d already signed on to the wool cooperative.

  ‘Very exclusive,’ Mika nodded, wagging his eyebrows, when he suggested this approach. At the same time, he arranged for signs to be put up in the Fisherman’s Rest advertising a private screening, which soon had the desired effect as bar regulars tried to cadge invitations from Team Mika.

  ‘Free food, free bar, what did you expect?’ Ruth joked as she, Luna and Dagmar sat with a cadre of knitting club members in Judith Andersen’s kitchen, taste testing lamb kebabs and spicy lamb burgers for the screening event.

  By Sunday night, they had more than a hundred people signed up to attend, including representatives from the Shetland and Scottish tourist boards, several local businesses, three supermarket chains, and the Lord Mayor of Lerwick. Mika, meanwhile, had commandeered the kitchen for his editing studio, shooing Dagmar and Luna out when they dared to trespass. So the two of them spent that afternoon and evening at the pub with the rest of the team, playing board games and chatting and, for once, Luna felt herself relax a little; not pretending to be anyone else, just sitting quietly and being Luna.

  She intended to remark on this to Stefan during their nightly call, but she didn’t get the chance. It transpired that he’d had a call from Jem that afternoon, some question to do with Remainers, Luna gathered, guessing with a wince what he was going to say next.

  ‘Have you not told your friends that we’re back together?’ he said, sounding bewildered and more than a little unhappy. Before she could reply, he continued, ‘Because I mentioned Mika’s video to her, trying to prove I was a big boy and it didn’t bother me that another man was filming you dreaming about sex. And the next thing I know Jem is talking to me in her “oh poor Stefan” voice. Like, “Oh, poor Stefan, still pining after Luna when she is so clearly over him.”’

  ‘Well—’ Luna began.

  ‘You haven’t told them, have you,’ Stefan interrupted. ‘Are you embarrassed of me?’

  ‘No,’ Luna said, adding for emphasis, ‘No. I just—’

  ‘Or hedging your bets, in case it doesn’t work out?’ He was starting to sound really angry now.

  ‘Will you please let me finish?’ Luna insisted. ‘I am not embarrassed of you, or hedging my bets. It’s just that, the first time we got together, the girls knew about it almost from the start and I…’

  ‘You…?’ he prompted crossly.

  ‘Let me finish,’ she said firmly. She paused for a moment, then continued, ‘The girls knew about us from the start last time, and there were times when I wished they didn’t. That I could just have you to myself for a little bit. Just you and me and nobody else. I – this will sound silly, but it’s been kind of like a honeymoon, what we’ve had up here in Shetland these past few months. It was so horrible when I first came here and now it’s so much better, and that’s all because of you.’

  Presented with as fulsome an emotional declaration as this from his normally reticent girlfriend, Stefan knew when to back down. ‘Älskling,’ he said, sounding mollified.

  ‘I’ll tell them,’ she concluded swiftly. ‘You’re right, I’m sorry. I should have done it before now. I’ll tell them just as soon as I’ve got this screening out of the way.’ And if there was a brief, loaded silence on the other end of the phone at her preference to delay telling her friends till after the event on Tuesday, Luna chose to ignore it.

  The conversation niggled at her, however, for reasons she couldn’t quite pin down, until she woke with a start at 2.15am.

  ‘Does your father know we’re back together?’ she asked without preamble when Stefan answered his phone sleepily. ‘Only,’ she continued, ‘having forbidden you to contact me, somehow I can’t imagine Sören being cruel enough to feature me in a blog you might see. Have you told him we’re back together?’

  ‘I haven’t told him. But maybe you should have a word with your boss.’

  ‘How long has he known?’ Luna demanded.

  ‘A week? Two? Like I say, you should ask Dagmar,’ he said, tone dripping with disdain.

  ‘And your father’s talked to you about this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you didn’t bother to tell me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And now Sören thinks I’m just a silly girl who’s… who’s shagging his son and taking naps.’

  ‘He thinks nothing of the sort. He isn’t happy, but it’s with me, not you.’

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  Another loaded silence, this time crackling with thunder and brimstone. ‘I said I had found you and I would keep you,’ came Stefan’s voice, deep with ire. ‘And that he or anyone else who stood in my way could go to the devil.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was standing room only on Tuesday night at the Fisherman’s Rest.

  Luna spent much of the day in a state of high anxiety, as fog that had been lingering in the area since the weekend failed to burn off and instead thickened as day progressed into evening. But thankfully, all their VIPs managed to make it over from the mainland for the screening event, and now the pub’s small function room was full to bursting.

  Poor Britta – looking stunning as ever in form-fitting leather trousers and a sleeveless Shetland jumper speed-knitted specially by Ruth for the occasion – was sitting directly in front of the video screen, hemmed in on one side by a middle-aged representative from the Scottish Tourist Board, and on the other by an almost impossibly small, wizened man with a massive gold chain around his neck. The Lord Mayor of Lerwick, who looked as though he thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

  The Swedish model glanced briefly at Luna, standing next to the projector, and Luna gave her a quick, cheery wink. Better you than me. And was gratified to see the Swedish model stifle a laugh.

  Scanning the room for Mika, Luna swallowed a yawn. Her call with Stefan on Sunday night had escalated into a full-blown argument, and though he phoned her as usual on Monday evening, it was a terse, unsatisfactory call. After which, in a departure from nocturnal habits dating from her late childhood, when sleep had been a blessed sanctuary from unpleasant reality, Luna had a restless night.

  It didn’t help that, sitting gritty-eyed across the table from Dagmar and Mika at breakfast that morning, she got the sinking feeling that they were aware of her falling out with Stefan. Not so much from Mika, whose face was its usual study in blankness, but Dagmar, who seemed abnormally upbeat.

  ‘This is going to be a great day, I can feel it,’ she grinned, clasping Luna’s shoulder in passing as she went to get milk from the fridge. Easy for you to say, Luna thought sourly to herself, and almost immediately regretted it. It wasn’t Dagmar’s fault that the lion’s share of work that day would fall to Luna.

  Her mood improved later, after the final prep meeting with Team Mika at the Fisherman’s Rest. And it lightened even more when she arrived home in the late afternoon to an empty cottage. Flipping desultorily through her wardrobe, Luna was briefly tempted to dress up for tonight’s occasion, resurrect her black pencil skirt and high-heeled pumps and unleash the slumbering power of Arborage Luna.

  But dressy wasn’t the way to go tonight, not amongst farmers and trawlermen and businesspeople who’d travelled all the way from the mainland on the promise of a proper Shetland knees up. So she compromised, pulling out a short black pleated skirt and matching wraparound top; her ‘naughty cheerleader’ outfit, according to Kayla.

  She was rooting through her top drawer for her black knee-high socks when her eye fell on a box from a lingerie shop in Lerwick. She’d wandered in there a few weeks before purely on a whim, and had come away with a very expensive set of unde
rgarments. For Stefan’s delectation really, but…

  Two minutes later, she stood in front of her bedroom mirror studying herself in her new purchases. The black satin balcony bra ideally suited her modest assets, but the showstopper of the ensemble were the knickers, featuring thin straps at the side that rose up into two elasticated fabric bands, one of which sat on her hips, the other encircling her waist.

  Bondage knickers, that’s what Luna had thought when she saw them in the shop. But they felt awfully good, and when she pulled her pleated skirt up over them she noted with a slight frisson how its waistband skimmed the top elastic band. Stefan didn’t need to know she’d worn them once, did he? She could wash them and put them back in their box and he’d be none the wiser.

  Luna felt the elastic now, clinging ever so slightly, reassuringly, to her waist as Mika entered from the bar and went to stand in front of the projector screen. He was wearing his usual battered leather jacket teamed with a close-fitting fine-gauge grey jumper, and was holding a half-drunk pint of bitter. He briefly lifted a hand and the hum in the room receded.

  ‘The footage is still very rough,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders slightly, ‘but I hope you like it.’

  Luna waited for him to continue, then realised with a start that the quiet Finn had said all he intended to say. She motioned to Dagmar, who was standing at the back of the room, to kill the lights, then hit play on the laptop.

  The opening scene faded in from black to a shot of the roiling sea beneath the cliff in Sumburgh. Then some moody music started to play; Luna recognised the Swedish band Junip, a favourite of Stefan’s. Suddenly Sean’s head emerged into view, climbing the hill, collar of his Lundgren coat pulled up around his neck, walking straight toward the camera. Luna felt a chill run down her spine as the room broke into spontaneous applause and Sean, who was sat in the front row, briefly lifted his hands above his head and clasped them in triumphant acknowledgement.