CHAPTER TWELVE
SHEWASINa dreamless sleep, cocooned in warmth. And when she woke up, the sun was shining bright in the room. She couldn’t make heads or tails out of where she was, not for a moment. And then, suddenly, she remembered.
She was in Gunnar’s room, and Gunnar’s house. Because she had tried to run away last night, and she had nearly frozen to death and then he had dragged her naked into a hot springs. And that was now too many times that she had been unconscious in the presence of that man.
She was starting to feel like what she had never been. A wilting flower, incapable of standing on her own feet. That wasn’t her. It never could be.
It wasn’t her.
She was supposed to be better than that. She was supposed to be stronger. It was important that she...
She could hear herself, talking, what she had told him last night. It was the saddest admission she could think of. The way that she had said that she was basically a shadow person. The way that she seemed to think that it was acceptable.
She had never articulated those things before, and she wasn’t sure why she had done it now. Hypothermia. It had to be. Because it just didn’t make sense otherwise.
It was just...
It was just all a little bit too much. These last few days that she had spent in Gunnar’s house were the only real vacation she’d had in years. And this was basically a kidnap. And it felt like a vacation.
She rolled over onto her back. And that was when she remembered he had slept holding her in his arms all night. But he was up now.
She flushed, thinking about it.
How could she not? She still wasn’t used to all that kind of thing. She flushed even more thinking about the hot springs. About the way his hard, hot body had felt pressed up against hers.
Really, if she could be aroused thinking about a situation wherein she was maybe dying, it was really very bad.
She got out of bed, and padded out to the living area. And he was standing there, arms crossed over his broad chest. He was wearing a black sweater, and black pants, and the outfit looked like it could barely contain his muscles. But she could not ignore the fact that it was an outfit that looked alarmingly like the one that she typically liked to wear every day. The one that he had denied her.
She opened her mouth to say something, but the forbidding nature of his expression stopped her.
“What?”
“The paternity test results are back. I am the father.”
“Well. I knew that already, Gunnar. I think you did too.”
He said nothing.
“But you said to me that...that love is hard for you and I just don’t understand...” She cleared her throat. “Why are you so intent on having me? On having the baby?”
He said nothing for a moment, his eyes going so cold they made the snow outside look like it might be a retreat into summer. “Do you know, I went to live with my father when I was twelve years old.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t know that. I just assumed that...”
“Of course you would assume I had always been with him. But no. Until I was twelve I was raised by my maternal grandparents. When I was older, when I wasn’t a little boy, I thought I wanted to go and live with my father, you see. He sent me letters. From time to time. And I idolized him. I looked up photos of him on the Internet. I thought that he was brilliant. Exactly the sort of man I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to meet him more than anything in the world. I wanted to live with him. And when I was twelve I got my wish.”
“Gunnar...”
“I still remember the thrill of it. He came in a helicopter. He was wearing a suit. He looked exactly like he had in the photos. And I knew... I knew that it was the right thing. He took me to where he was living in London. I had never seen a city. It was... It was incredible.
“It did not take long for me to realize that he was not the man that I had dreamed him to be. There were women. Always in the home. In various states of undress. They were... They were paid to be there. Or perhaps manipulated. I came to find out later that he had a close association with a rather infamous man who was renowned for trafficking women. I will always wonder if those women were there of their own accord or not.”
“That’s terrible.”
“It is. Of course, I was a boy, and I did not know the meaning of those women wandering about in flimsy robes. But I could see the way that he treated them. The disdain. As if they were something beneath him.” He took a breath. “I understand now, that this was his cruelest abuse. But when I was a boy I only knew the pain of what he did to me. He kept my room Spartan and spare. And that, I did have feelings about. Because I missed my toys, no matter how humble they had been. I missed... But he said that I could not have toys. He said that I could not have friends.”
And at sixteen, he’d eaten her birthday cupcake, and she’d thought him a villain. When he was a boy with a room that had nothing nice, and probably had no sweets, judging by the collection of candy he kept in that room.