“Oh. That. All’s fair,” she said, brushing some crumbs off of her knee. And suddenly, his blue eyes sharpened.
“What exactly are you doing?”
“I am having a sick day,” she said.
“You’re in the office,” he pointed out.
She shrugged her shoulders and took a saltine out of the cracker tube, because really, there was no pretending this wasn’t happening. He had caught her in an inglorious position and she refused to scramble out of it, which in her mind would be giving in. Bending to the pressure of his presence, and she refused to do that.
“If there’s work to be done, I’m here. Just with crackers.”
“You are on the floor.”
“Yeah. They did a study? In Sweden. It was very obscure. You probably haven’t heard of it. But it was about the increase of workflow when you sit in unconventional spaces. Something about the freedom to shape your body how you feel you ought to.”
“Olive,” he said, harder this time.
And just then, the absurdity of all of it crashed over her. He was her mortal enemy in many ways, always had been. Trained up from the time they were children, essentially. And in other ways, he was the person she knew best left in all this world. Her father was gone, and aching grief that hadn’t eased up even once in the last six months, and she had never had time to have friends. As far as she knew, Gunnar didn’t have friends either.
He had lovers.
Which she supposed she was now among. But they actually did know each other. And right now, she wanted to confide her woes in him, except he was the source of them, and he could never know.
He made her feel guilty for having double-crossed him, and that was ridiculous.
His father had certainly taught him the same values as hers. When it came to business, nothing was off the table, her dad had been clear on that. And that Magnus had acted in the same fashion.
“Well. If all is fair, then you will appreciate what comes next,” he said.
He crouched down in front of her, and she felt her stomach get tight.
He grabbed the edge of the cracker packet, and tugged it out of her hands. “I shall need you paying attention. And not eating crackers.”
“I didn’t eat crackers in bed,” she said. “You can’t be too annoyed by the crackers.”
“You did not eat crackers in bed, you did not stay long enough to have a snack.”
“I wasn’t aware snacks were on the table, so to speak.”
His eyes flashed with ice. “They weren’t.”
“See. There was no point bringing it up, then,” she said weakly.
“You were the one that mentioned bed.”
“So I did.”
And he just sort of looked at her, those blue eyes piercing deeper than she would like.
“I’m going to ruin you.”
He said it conversationally. As he had said everything else since he had walked in.
“What?”
“You know, what you did is illegal. In many jurisdictions.”
“Well, you’re going to have trouble figuring out which jurisdiction exactly I did it in. We both travel all over the world, we have corporate offices all over the world.” She was terrified, her heart beating so hard she felt dizzy.