He took a long stride towards her and she stepped back again. His eyes bored into hers as if she were the devil and he the righteous warrior. Another step forward, and one step back had her against the door of the cabin. She hated that he was using his body against her when that same body had brought her so much pleasure in the past. For a shocking moment she thought he wasn’t going to stop. Wasn’t sure she even wanted him to, and the blush that rose on her cheeks when he stopped as if reading her thoughts was one of pure humiliation.
That was the feeling he always made her circle back round to. Embarrassment. He had played her for a fool once. She knew it,heknew it. Thank God no one else did.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, trying desperately not to raise her hands between them to ward him off or reach for him, she didn’t know. Flustered, she tried to hold onto the thread of conversation. ‘Why haven’t you been able to come back home?’ she asked, unable to mask the quiver in her voice.
His eyes were an arctic blaze, flaring and sparking, his jaw clenched, the powerful neck muscles bunched as if every single millimetre of his entire body was tensed and ready to fight, but completely and utterly restrained.
He would never strike her, never ever cause her physical harm. She knew that with a certainty that she had about very little in her life at that moment. But it didn’t mean he wasn’t a threat. The emotional vortex he was pulling her into was something she’d avoided for eight years.
Her pulse leapt at the heat of his breath on her lips and she pressed her thighs together, trying to relieve the intense pull she felt between her legs. No one had ever affected her like this, no one other than him. She’d not even been this close to a man in the time since she’d last seen him. The smell of him was tauntingly familiar and making her ache in ways that she’d thought she’d forgotten.
‘You said you never wanted to see me again.’
Her throat ached, as if she had only just yelled the words at him. They had haunted her for months after that night.
‘Yes. I did.’
‘Those words were clear enough to my commanding officer.’
‘Your what? I don’t know—’
‘Tell me, Freya, what made you think that they would all ignore such an order from their royal?’
She looked up at him, still without any idea what he was talking about. What order? Her heart had been breaking over his betrayal. The young student she had studied with, laughed with, danced with, drunk with and slowly and gently given her heart to, givenherselfto...why would sheeverwant to see him again when she found out that he’d been employed by her father as her bodyguard? She didn’t understand what he was trying to—
‘Exile, Freya. You exiled me.’
The beep of the satellite phone’s ringtone cut through her shocked silence and he didn’t know whether to laugh or rage. That she hadn’t even realised what she’d been doing all those years ago was incomprehensibly cruel.
‘Answer it,’ he said, disgusted with her, with himself. He just wanted her gone. He turned his back on her and walked towards the internal door to the cabin. He nearly laughed at the irony thathenow wanted out of the very space he’d enclosed them both in.
No matter how much he wanted to walk into his sanctuary, he would not do it while she was still here. But he was at the very end of his patience. Her brother had taken this too far in sending Freya to deliver the medal, but he’d overplayed his hand. This refusal would be his last. He wouldneveraccept that medal.
He heard Freya speak quietly into the phone, unable to resist glancing to the side where he could just make out her turning away from him in his peripheral vision. The words grew urgent and louder, until, ‘No, wait! Gunnar!’ she shouted, flinging open his front door and disappearing into a flurry of blinding snowflakes.
Kjell cursed loudly and violently, grabbing his coat before shoving the front door closed behind him as he ran after her. He threw an arm into a coat sleeve as he jogged in the direction of the helo and strained to hear Freya’s angry shouts in the distance as he pushed into the other sleeve. His heart pounded even as his quick mind began to process the reality of this new situation.
The blades were already in motion and he hurried forward, knowing that in Freya’s state of mind the danger they posed might not actually stop her. By the time he caught up with her the helicopter was already two feet off the ground and the downwash was fierce enough to have her shielding her eyes. Her hat had fallen off somewhere in the snow and her long dark hair was streaming out in waves, buffeted by the air from both the helicopter’s blades and the storm that was now, for all intents and purposes, here.
He pulled her back from the downwash, their hunched forms blindly retreating until they were far out of reach from the pounding waves of air and snow. From a position of safety, they watched as the helicopter jerked up into the air, hovering momentarily as if offering its regret for leaving her behind, before gliding up and away from view.
Kjell watched her as she stared into the sky long after distance and visibility had made it impossible to see, as if she couldn’t believe that it wouldn’t come back. He peered at the cabin through bloated fluffy flakes of snow that looked harmless until they overloaded a helicopter’s engine, making it too dangerous to fly, or too dangerous to wait for the very important person they had left behind.
‘Give me the sat phone,’ he ordered.
She held it out to him without looking, her fingers already red from the cold. She couldn’t stay here. She wouldn’t last five minutes. She was too soft for his world.
He pressed the button as he turned back and headed to the outbuilding. ‘Gunnar,’ he shouted into the phone past the howling wind, ‘I can get her out to the other side of the lake.’
‘It’s too late.’
‘Don’t give me that. Your pilot has done far more in worse conditions,’ he said, noticing that Freya had started to follow him more quickly as she realised that he was trying to get them to come back.
‘Not with a royal on board, Kjell.’
‘That’s bull and you know it, Gunnar.’ Freya reached for the phone but he lifted his elbow out of the way and turned so she couldn’t reach it. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’ Kjell demanded, trying to keep his question out of Freya’s hearing.
‘I have my orders, Kjell. We’ll be back to pick her up when the storm clears.’