What was I thinking? The man had bought me jewelry that cost more than a master’s degree. He would be fine with it.
Still, I wasn’t actually sure it was something I wanted to do. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I’d hoped I would have figured it out before I was a quarter of a century old.
About an hour and a half after the men had gone off on their own, we heard whoops and laughter from outside.
“There they go,” Emma said with a weary sigh, her arms crossed as she looked out the glass wall at the wintery lawn. I saw four bodies, ghostly pale in the full moonlight, racing barefoot and naked across the snow, headed straight for the icy lake. Only one of them hesitated at the square hole cut into the ice; I assumed it was Michael, owing to the yelp of pained surprise we heard through the glass as the other men barreled past and carried him right over the edge.
“Poor Michael,” I said, shaking my head.
“He’s the one who’s desperate for my father’s approval,” Emma sniffed, not at all sympathetic.
Michael was the first up the ladder and onto the dock, and I turned away quickly. “Whoops, not looking.”
“I am,” Emma said with a mischievous smile. Then her eyebrows scrunched up and she grimaced as she turned her back to the window. “But not if uncle Geir is getting out.”
We heard the men come in, the rolling babble of three strangely identical voices—I hadn’t noticed that before, but Neil and his brothers all sounded r
emarkably alike—speaking in Icelandic. After they dressed and came back to the living room, it was like every trace of weird, distant Neil had been wiped away. He came to me with his wet hair slicked back from his face and wrapped me up in his arms, burying his cold nose in my neck until I squealed.
“Michael, you idiot, your lips are blue.” Emma slapped Michael’s shoulder and guided him toward the couch, where he huddled in his clothes, shivering uncontrollably.
Kristine jumped up. “I’ll get him a blanket.”
“And I’ll get him some whiskey,” Geir grumbled, clearly unimpressed by Michael’s lack of fortitude.
“Oh, the boy is perfectly fine,” Neil said with what could have easily been mistaken as a friendly laugh. It totally wasn’t. “Aren’t you, Michael?”
He gave Neil a weak thumbs-up.
“Well, I hope he proved himself,” I said, resting my hands against Neil’s chest.
“He was willing to jump into testicle-shriveling ice water to impress you,” Runólf pointed out.
“Well,” Neil said, resigned as he looked over at Michael. “I suppose it’s a start.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“I think that went well,” Neil declared as we let ourselves into the house. He hit the master switch by the door and lit up all three levels.
“Oh, sure it went well. It went so well, you almost gave Michael hypothermia,” I said with a roll of my eyes.
Neil chuckled. “That’s what I said. ‘It went well.’ If Michael had actually gotten hypothermia, I’d have said, ‘It went spectacularly.’”
I would save my lecture about his attitude toward Emma’s fiancé for another time.
“Did you enjoy yourself?” he asked, for the eleventh time since we’d left Runólf’s house.
“Well, the first ten times you asked me, I thought I did…but now…”
“Don’t be smart.” He reached out and tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. “You have no idea how nervous I was.”
“I think I had kind of an idea.” I frowned. “Or maybe not. See, if my family hadn’t liked you, it wouldn’t have changed anything between us. But I get this crazy feeling that it would have changed us if your family hadn’t liked me.”
I could have slapped him, and he would have looked less stunned. Not that I would ever slap Neil. Though there were times he had sorely tempted me.
“You seemed tense,” I explained patiently. Maybe he hadn’t noticed his own mood. “You seemed like… I don’t know. Like something was riding on today. You haven’t been yourself since we left New York.”
He took both my hands in his and looked down at them as he held them between us. Squeezing my fingers, he promised, “If you perceived any amount of tension or you felt that I was…removed in some way…absolutely none of that had to do with you.”