Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
THE MORNING AFTER THE HOT SPRINGS INCIDENT (WHICH ABSOLUTELY WAS AN INCIDENT)
S he woke up thinking about his hands.
Not a great start.
Elise lay still beneath the heavy duvet while her brain reviewed the previous night—the mineral smell of the springs, the pressure of Stenrik’s mouth on hers, the way the runes had blazed white when she touched them and the way he’d made a pained sound that she felt in her sternum.
Then Gryla. Oh my God, Gryla.
She pressed the pillow over her face. A muffled, slightly hysterical laugh escaped anyway.
What is your life, Moreau ?
She lowered the pillow and stared at the stone ceiling, letting her thoughts settle.
The geothermal vents hummed somewhere deep in the mountain.
Pale light edged around the small high window inset in the wall, reminding her that she was in a cave in a mountain.
Panic began to edge into her mind, reminding her that she was in a cave, but then she caught the scent of woodsmoke and she calmed her breathing, focusing on her ritual until her heartbeat slowed.
Stenrik’s scent along with the mineral scent from the pool .
Yet, she was alone.
When had he left? At some point after Gryla’s spectacular entrance—and pronouncement of daughter-in-law status while Torfi hovered in the archway like a delighted gargoyle—Stenrik had wrapped her in a towel that was approximately the size of a small country and walked her back through the tunnels.
She remembered the warmth of his side. His hand steady at the small of her back, not guiding, just present.
He was silent, as if he was still deciding something.
Then he settled her into her bed. His mouth kissing her forehead. Then he left.
She’d laid awake for twenty minutes waiting for—something. A knock. Footsteps. Something to indicate that the man who had looked at her like she was everything had not then simply walked away and gone to sleep.
Nothing.
She exhaled through her nose.
Don’t be dramatic. They’d known each other a few days.
She didn’t do this—didn’t wake up wanting more of someone before she’d even dealt with their first time.
She was controlled. Strategic. She had a return flight booked and a network deal pending and a channel with two hundred thousand subscribers who expected her to finish the Iceland series and move on to Lisbon.
Her skin still remembered his hands.
She got up.
The bond pulsed faintly as she showered. Present. Low. Insistent. Pointing her toward somewhere deeper in the mountain.
I know , she thought at it, which was new and slightly alarming behavior. I’m going .
She dressed in dark jeans and a cream sweater and opened her door, and the smell of coffee and fresh bread and him hit her all at once and she stood in the corridor for one second gathering herself like a professional before stepping forward.
The kitchen was chaos.
Torfi was eating smoked salmon directly off a serving board while Amanda periodically smacked his hand.
Ketill stood by the stove with a small girl—Lily, sleep-flushed and draped against his shoulder like a decorative child—while Kevin sat at the island aggressively buttering bread with his tongue poking out the side of his mouth.
Gunnar had stationed himself against the far wall with coffee and a long-suffering expression of a man who had survived centuries of his family.
Wren sat beside him with a sketchbook, pencil moving.
And in the middle of all of it, Stenrik.
Dark henley, sleeves pushed up. Hair still damp. He plated pancakes with the same concentration he brought to dinner service, as if even family breakfast deserved precision.
He looked up.
The bond flared.
Not gently. It hit her sternum like a bolt, sudden and certain, and she watched the moment it registered in him.
The stillness, a held breath, the careful schooling of his expression back to neutral that would have worked on anyone who hadn’t spent the previous night watching him come entirely undone.
She knew what undone looked like on him now.
It was not neutral.
“She lives.” Torfi pointed his salmon at her. “And she looks like a woman who slept well.”
Amanda choked on her coffee.
Stenrik picked up a dish towel and threw it at his brother’s head without looking. Torfi caught it one-handed.
“You missed.”
“That was not my goal. ”
Elise crossed to the coffee pot because caffeine was non-negotiable and it gave her something to do with her hands.
Every single person in the room was looking at her with varying degrees of delight except Ketill, who was looking at his coffee, and Gunnar, who was carefully looking into the distance.
Lily waved enthusiastically from Ketill’s shoulder. “Hi, Elise! I’m Lily!”
“Hi, Lily!” She poured coffee. “Why does this feel like an ambush?”
“Because Gryla sent family messages at six this morning,” Gunnar said. “Announcing a ‘major development’.”
Wren looked up from her sketchbook. “There were flourishes. She used red ink.”
“There was a seal,” Torfi confirmed. “An actual wax seal.”
“She has them made for each of her sons,” Ketill said.
“She uses them constantly.,” said Amanda. “Sometimes she mixes them up.”
Elise sat down beside Kevin because Kevin was eight and thus represented the lowest threat level at the table. She accepted the plate Amanda slid toward her, and absolutely did not look at Stenrik again for thirty full seconds.
She made it to twenty-two.
He was already looking at her. Not overtly but the awareness between them pulled like a current in water, and she felt it all the way down her spine.
Her skin had not forgotten anything from last night.
The memory of his hands on her waist and his voice dropping low against her mouth sent shivers down her spine.
From the slight tightening along his jaw, he was in exactly the same situation.
Good. She didn’t want to be in it alone.
“Did you actually fight a food critic?” Kevin asked .
Stenrik closed his eyes briefly. “It was a response. Not a fight.”
“It had footnotes,” Torfi said.
“It was thorough.”
“You cited yourself.”
“My own blog is a legitimate source?—”
“Four people read it,” Gunnar pointed out.
“More than four.”
“Your mother,” Torfi said. “And three people who found it by accident looking for something else.”
Elise laughed. Couldn’t help it. It came out before she could stop it, and Stenrik’s gaze snapped to her immediately. Something flickered in his eyes, quick and involuntary, something that had nothing to do with controlled neutrality.
Then he looked back at the stove.
There it was.
He wasn’t completely unaware of her. He was wound just as tight, just as uncomfortable as she was. But he wasn’t regretting last night. He just didn’t know where to place it. So he did what he always did. He withdrew to his safe place—the kitchen.
Already building the distance. Deciding something for both of them before she’d been given the chance to weigh in.
She recognized it because she did it too. Had spent her entire career doing it—leave first, leave clean, don’t let anything get complicated enough to need a conversation.
The difference was that she’d stopped wanting to leave somewhere around the moment he’d looked at her like she was something the mountain had been keeping for him specifically.
Amanda materialized beside her with fresh coffee. “He’s brooding,” she said, very low.
“I can see that.”
“He’s already built several emotional disaster scenarios. It’s a family trait. Ketill spent a week convinced I was going to move back to Minnesota.”
“Were you?”
“I’d already updated my address. He didn’t ask.” She glanced at Stenrik, then back. “They never do. They decide you’re leaving and act accordingly. Then someone has to interrupt the whole thing before it becomes permanent.”
Wren appeared on Elise’s other side, sketchbook closed now, and the two of them together gently shepherded her away from the crowd.
“You’re feeling it,” Wren said. Not a question.
Elise considered deflecting. She was excellent at it.
“Yes,” she said instead.
The bond answered the admission with immediate warmth, like it was pleased to be acknowledged. Elise pressed her fingers against her sternum briefly before she could stop herself.
Across the kitchen, Stenrik’s shoulders went rigid.
Right. Troll hearing. Damn it.
“He thinks you’ll leave,” Wren said softly.
Elise looked at him. He had turned toward the stove, deliberately presenting her with his back, refusing to look at her while the runes on his forearm—half-visible below the rolled sleeve—flickered faintly silver-gold in the kitchen light.
Something ached under her ribs that had nothing to do with the bond.
Because why wouldn’t he believe it.
Her entire life was organized around departure.
She lived out of a suitcase she’d packed so many times she did it in twenty minutes, had been leaving since she was twelve years old and her parents put her in the first boarding school and caught the next flight to somewhere she wasn’t.
She’d built a career on it. Made it a virtue, even.
Elise Moreau goes everywhere and stays nowhere—that’s the point.
Kevin pointed suddenly, delighted. “Your glowy tattoos are back.”
Stenrik looked down sharply. The runes on his forearm pulsed once, unmistakable, and the entire kitchen went briefly silent that meant everyone had noticed and was pretending they hadn’t.
Then Torfi grinned. Slow and wide as if he’d been waiting for this development since Gryla’s early morning message.
“Oh,” he said. “This is getting serious.”
Stenrik looked up from his arm.
He looked at Elise.
She held his gaze and did not give him the out he was clearly hoping for. She watched him understand that she was not going anywhere — not today.
The runes on his arm stopped flickering. They steadied to a warm, continuous glow.
Torfi gave a low whistle.
“Torfi,” Ketill warned.
“I’m just?—”
“Torfi.”