“I don’t even have anything with me,” she said. “Someone needs to feed my goldfish.”
“You have a goldfish?”
She seemed reinvigorated all of a sudden, and he was glad of that.
“No,” she said. “But I could.”
“You couldn’t, and we both know it. And if you did, there would be some method of feeding it by way of telephone app, I assume.”
“Telephone app. For all that you’re a tech wizard sometimes you sound a hundred years old.”
“An issue with my understanding of the language, perhaps.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
It wasn’t. He had spoken English from the time he was a boy. In fact, really, his only investment in hanging onto his accent was that he found it benefited him from time to time.
He spoke six languages. Though, he knew Olive wasn’t any less accomplished on that score.
“You often travel. I imagine your apartment is perfectly set up for you to leave at a moment’s notice.”
Her cheeks went red, and he could see that he was correct about that. And that it infuriated her.
Good.
“I don’t have time to go anywhere with you. I have a project to work on.”
“Then you didn’t have time to betray me.”
It was a strange word, that one. Betray.
They were enemies, or rather rivals, so perhaps it wasn’t a betrayal at all.
Except... It was a betrayal of what he had thought she was.
And he did not like being wrong. In fact, he found it unacceptable.
“It is the principle of the thing,” she said. “This. I can’t believe that you wouldn’t...”
“I wouldn’t. If I had a tendency toward such things you would know it by now, Olive. I would’ve destroyed you that way. But I didn’t. Because I do not do things like this.”
They were silent the rest of the drive to the jet.
It was there, prepared and waiting, sleek and well appointed. He did all of his business in major cities, but Iceland would always be his home. Even if sometimes when he breathed too deep he felt like a shard of volcanic rock had lodged itself in his chest.
Even if, he could return to his homeland, but had never returned to his true home.
The house he kept now, tucked into the craggy mountains, just above a natural hot springs was his one refuge. He did not bring people there. Not women, not business associates. No one. It was in fact, almost entirely unknown, even by the media. And that was how he liked it. It would be the perfect place to spirit Olive away to, and have no one know where she had gone.
She was in the corner of the limo, wrapped in the blanket. “Must I drag you out of the car?”
“No,” she said imperiously. She got out, still wrapped in the purple blanket, and thrust her nose into the air as she walked up the steps into the plane, looking every inch an indignant Queen.
He would say one thing for Olive, she had an exceptional amount of nerve.
She settled into the far corner of the plane, a couch the opposite end from him.
“It is a quick flight,” he said. “It won’t take long.”