9
Peter Reedton was a kn?ppgok .
By yesterday afternoon, all his scenes for the day were done. He could have gone back to the hotel. Hung out by the fire.
Read in bed. Taken a really long, really hot bath. Trimmed his toenails. Learned how to dance the merengue via YouTube videos.
Anything, really. Literally anything other than spending several unnecessary hours outdoors in the freezing wind and rain.
But noooooo.
Instead, he’d come to watch Maria film that scene on the cliffs. And now, as Nava had informed her at dinner last night, Peter
was ill due to sheer idiocy. As well as either a virus or bacteria—or possibly a fungus? Oh, or an amoeba!—but also, definitely,
idiocy. Which was why she was taking charge of his health, starting now. Clearly he couldn’t be trusted to do the job adequately.
By the time dinner had ended, it was too late to yell at him. If he’d gone to bed early, as he should have—as she’d make certain
he did tonight—she’d only have disturbed his much-needed rest. But it was morning now, even though everything outside the
windows was extremely dark and apocalyptic, and she intended to lecture him before she ate a late breakfast in the dining
room.
She hoped Peter wasn’t napping, because she needed to explain her newfound authority over his immune system and the protection thereof without further delay. He could nap later, after she bullied him into good health once more.
By, say, forcing him to nap.
And if that didn’t entirely make logical sense, who cared? Neither did spending all fucking day outside in a fucking Atlantic
storm for no fucking reason.
If ever someone had literally shit in a bl? sk?pet , he was the obvious culprit.
Her knock on his door could have woken the dead—and according to Conor, Peter was halfway there already.
He answered her summons with surprising swiftness.
Oddly, he didn’t look half-dead. And when she hooked an arm around his waist and hauled him back to bed, his body against
hers didn’t feel any warmer than normal. He also wasn’t staggering or miserably infirm in the way Conor and Nava’s descriptions
of his condition had led her to expect.
Turning his head away from hers, he coughed as she sat him down on the mattress. She paused, crouched by his bedside, and
listened to him hack and hack. And after she straightened, she studied him for a minute. Hard.
That cough... that cough, she recognized.
She’d heard it in late November, when Cyprian had fallen terribly ill from hunger and his makeshift home’s inexorable chill,
and Cassia had cared for him with reluctant tenderness. The big Viking had hacked and wheezed and groaned, his voice hoarse
as he reassured her he was fine. She didn’t need to fret.
Peter’s current cough had the same sound, the same cadence.
Maybe his actual cough exactly matched his fake cough.
Or maybe—
“Show me.” Bending down until he had no choice but to meet her eyes, she stared at him in open challenge.
“Show me what medicines you’ve been taking.
Given the weather, I can’t go to a pharmacy, so I intend to collect whatever you need from everyone at the hotel, and I don’t want to grab duplicates. ”
If he was faking, if he’d cost her a night’s sleep due to needless worry over his health, she was going to make certain a
moose trampled him whenever he visited Sweden for publicity purposes.
“Uh...” His gaze briefly dropped, and his brow—which was, yes, cool against her palm, as she’d suspected—furrowed. “I forget
where I put them. Maria, thank you for checking on me, but maybe you could come back later. I can tell you then what I’ve
been tak—”
“No need. I’ll look myself.”
About-facing, she scanned the room. No medication or crumpled tissues on his bedside table. A half dozen strides put her in
the bathroom, where... again, she found nothing to indicate illness. Not even a thermometer. Same with his coffee table
and the little nook that held his coffeemaker and minifridge.
Another turn on her heel, and she marched back to the bed, where he appeared to be cringing. For good reason.
She stabbed a finger into his perfectly healthy chest. “ Faker .”
The wind’s roar, the slight rattling of his windows, the near-violent lash of that endless downpour against the glass were
the only sounds in the room for a long, long time.
“Let it be, Maria.” With a sigh, he nudged her accusing forefinger aside. “I don’t want you involved in this.”
“Involved in... what?” She frowned at him, fists braced on her hips. “Why are you pretending to be ill? Did you not want
to film our scene today, given the conditions?”
But that wasn’t like Peter at all, was it?
His health, his body, and his convenience meant nothing to him.
Not when weighed against the dictates of the showrunners and his desire for professional success.
So if this damnable farce wasn’t about his own comfort and safety, then what in the world would prompt such an underhanded, secretive . . .
Fy fan. Fy fan.
She knew. She knew precisely what he was doing and why. And the source of that anonymous tip about shooting conditions on
the island—the one various media outlets had already emailed her agent about in a request for her commentary—wasn’t such a
mystery anymore.
She preferred face-to-face confrontation, and she didn’t mind risk.
Peter, though... he would want to minimize any threat to his future, and he had. But he’d still taken a risk, however contained.
And he’d taken it for her.
Whether he knew it or not, she’d glimpsed his expression after that scary little bobble at the cliff’s edge yesterday, seen
him white-faced and frozen with horror at the end of the take.
She never wanted to see that expression again. It hurt to witness, almost as much as it seemingly hurt him to watch that near-miss
on camera.
So yes, she’d known he cared about her safety, cared about her . What she hadn’t known: He cared enough to actually do something about it. Not as she would have, but in his own extremely cautious but undeniably effective way.
He’d made certain her next cliffside adventure wouldn’t involve wind gusts of 150 kilometers per hour. He’d ensured that the
set would have increased scrutiny from now on, so she’d never be put in a similarly precarious position again. And he didn’t
want her to know what he’d done, because her ignorance meant plausible deniability if everything went to shit despite his
precautions.
Even his lies were an attempt to protect her.
“Um...” His fingers plucked at the fluffy duvet on the bed. “If I don’t seem ill right now, the doctor said my condition
might, uh, vary from moment to moment, so...”
He paused, still fumbling for an explanation. After licking his lips, he started to say something else, no doubt another lie,
and she didn’t care what it was, she didn’t care whether he ever told her the truth, because she understood now.
“Come here, skitstovel ,” she said.
Then she ducked down again, cupped his bristly cheeks, and kissed him. Hard.
His lips were already parted, so she teased his tongue with hers, then delved deep and reclaimed her territory after far too
long an absence. He responded like a starved man at a feast, a low groan rumbling deep in his chest as he seized control of
the kiss—and of her.
Within moments, he’d stood, but only to push her onto the bed, onto her back, crawling between her legs and trapping her in
the cage of his big body. The bruising pressure of his lips against hers eased, but only so he could nip and suck a hot, open-mouthed
trail along her jaw and down her throat.
His hands delved under her sweater, and then her bra loosened, and her breasts were cupped in his hot palms. She rounded his
hips with her legs and slid her own hands beneath his jeans, beneath the soft material of his boxer briefs, to squeeze his
ass greedily.
Gods above, she loved his body. No man had ever made her this hungry to stare. To touch. To take.
Shoving her sweater up to her neck, he dove down to suck her nipple, while he plucked and twisted and rubbed the other, and
she was done with foreplay.
Unbuttoning his jeans took a heartbeat, and her fingers moved swiftly to his zipper.
At that moment, his entire body shuddered against hers. Shuddered and stilled.
“No,” he ground out hoarsely, lifting his head from her breast. “No.”
Her knuckles pressed against his sizable erection, she immediately stopped unzipping him. “Peter?”
“We’re not doing this.” His face flushed, his gaze still devouring every inch of her bare flesh, he slowly tugged her sweater
down. “We can’t.”
Removing her hands entirely from his body, she laid them flat by her sides as he clambered off her, his jaw like stone. Nostrils
flared, breathing ragged, he sat at the edge of the bed, his jeans still unbuttoned, and gripped white-knuckled fistfuls of
the duvet. He stared across the room blankly.
She was lost. Frustrated and bewildered.
“I thought...” After a pause, she sat up. “You don’t want to fuck me?”
It certainly looked like he did, at least on the most basic physical level. She was surprised his zipper was holding up so
well under the strain, frankly. But desire wasn’t consent, and neither was a hard dick.
His bark of bitter laughter shook the bed, but he still didn’t turn his head and meet her eyes.
“It doesn’t have to be serious, Peter, and it doesn’t have to be public.” Thoughts fuzzy with her own arousal, she tried to
think through his possible reasoning, then find the right phrase in English. “We could be costars with secret benefits, if
you wanted.”
Because she was giving up, at long last. She’d burned like an inferno for him from the moment they’d met, and now she also
knew him. Liked him. Trusted him, at least a little. Enough to offer that much of herself, even if he couldn’t offer her everything
she needed in return.
When they were done, it might crack her heart around the edges, but she’d try her best to keep the core intact. And maybe