Except it had been his too. Whether he wished to admit it or not. She had been off-limits for a very long time, and few things were off-limits to him. He set the parameters for his life, and if he wanted something, he usually took it. But not her. For very specific reasons, not her.
He made sure to act dutifully as a better man than his father. But he’d had no confidence he could be better for her truly.
But he’d broken that rule.
And the world had come crashing down on him.
He was an Icelander to his soul. Protecting the land, the natural resources mattered to him more than just about anything.
And he tried to have harmony in all parts of his life. His business life did not conflict with the morals he felt outside of it.
And yet, he had to wonder at the exacting symmetry of all these things.
For it was more as if he had no other life at all.
Olive seemed to be at war. With what she wanted, with who she was. With what she did.
She was a fascinating constellation of fractured stars. Little things here and there that seemed to speak of dissonance in who she was.
Not him.
He was at ease. At one accord.
Finally, they arrived at the summit. Finally they arrived back at the house.
“Go and put something else on,” he said.
She looked up at him, beseeching.
“Go,” he said.
She emerged a few moments later wearing sweats. “Now,” he said. “You will sleep in my bed tonight.”
“I will do no such thing.”
“You have proven yourself to be a flight risk,” he said. “And now I have to keep an eye on you. If you do not like the consequences... You have no one to blame but yourself. And I mean that for every piece of this, all the way down.” He went into the bathroom and changed into a pair of athletic pants, only out of deference to the fact that he would be getting into bed with her. He was not normally so kind, but he also had no interest in terrorizing a woman in that regard.
Even if the woman in question was a holy terror herself.
She was standing there in his bedroom with a mutinous expression on her face. He ignored her, and wrapped his arm around her waist, picking her up and bringing her down into the bed with him. “As jail cells go, you must admit this is a warm one.”
“But it’s still a jail cell,” she whispered.
“Forgive me if I do not find myself to be overly concerned with your protestations. You should’ve thought of that before any of this.”
They lay there in darkness, her softness nestled against him, and desire bloomed in his midsection. This was an exercise in restraint, and he was not a man who normally put himself in the situations that required any.
He should hate her, this woman, for she had upended his well-ordered life.
He had not planned on taking a wife, least of all her. Especially not after what she had done.
And yet, he desired her. And there was nothing to be done about that. It simply was.
It simply was.
And in the morning, there was a phone call, telling him definitively that the child was his. And he knew that their path was now set in stone. There was no turning back now.