Subject: Urgent—really
12th April 11:49 a.m.
I don’t have a secretary.
From: Olin, Henna
To: Restad, HRH Aleksander
Subject: Urgent—not really
12th April 11:51 a.m.
Exactly!
From: Restad, HRH Aleksander
To: Olin, Henna
Subject: Please answer the phone
12th April 11:55 a.m.
Are you there?
From: Restad, HRH Aleksander
To: Olin, Henna
Subject:
12th April 11:59 a.m.
Henna?
Henna had left her office before she did something even more stupid than she had already done by responding tothe King of Svardiawith emails like that. She had come to the Palace gardens to try to regain a sense of calm, inhaling the crisp bite in the air and letting the sunshine warm her skin.
Pulling her shawl tighter around her shoulders, her heart turned as she admitted that she didn’t recognise herself at the moment. Her behaviour was not that of the person who genuinely enjoyed helping people find solutions to problems, who drew a great deal of satisfaction from coordinating people and events in a way that created smooth and seamless transitions through the day. She’d always found it orchestral and harmonious, and it had given her great pleasure to be the conductor. But ever since the Vårboll, things had been discordant.
No. Discordant wasn’t the right word. It was more like frantic, nervous,wanting.
Every time his name appeared in her inbox, her pulse leapt, her mind tuned into a frequency of pure static and she felt that same electric current zipping through her veins. Every time she remembered the heat in his eyes as he’d looked at her in the restaurant it wrecked her pulse and put thoughts in her mind she couldn’t take back. Images. Hot, heavy, intimate images. And when he pushed at her she wanted to push back. She wanted to chip at the arrogance on his shoulders, puthimon the back foot. Press and push until they were up against a wall and...
She groaned out loud, startling a bird in the hedgerow. She couldn’t work like this. She couldn’tlivelike this. Aleksander was her best friend’s brother. He was the King. A king who would one day in the very near future choose a queen for whom he felt absolutely nothing.
Love is not on the table. It is not a possibility.
The crunch of gravel behind her broke into her thoughts painfully and she turned round, her heart racing from shock.
‘Henna—’
‘You scared me,’ she accused.
‘And you interrupted me,’ Aleksander shot back angrily. ‘The CEO of Nordstad has left without the meeting and I could really do without the bad press at the moment. I have three meetings this afternoon and I don’t even know what they are.’ His hand raised as if to bracket his temples, but it dropped again as if he wouldn’t even allow that moment of self-comfort.
The heat in his words enraged the embers of her frustration and she couldn’t help but match his exasperation. ‘You have a meeting with the Principal Private Secretary. The co-ordinator for Freya’s engagement party wants to finalise the order of events, and Sven needs the information for the delegation arriving from Japan in two days’ time.’
‘Why am I meeting Anita Bergqvist?’ he asked, as if it was perfectly natural for her to know his every move.