Page 29 of The Last Viking

“What purpose do these garments serve?” he was asking a pencil-thin, blond sales clerk who’d appeared like a flash of lightning at his side.

“Those are teddies, hon. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a teddy before.”

“Nay, never,” he replied, his mouth dropping practically to the floor with appreciation as she held up one scandalous creation after another.

“That one,” he said, stopping her at a pink satin, two-piece outfit, with tiny straps. Very simple and very sexy.

“What do you think, sweetling?” he asked, drawing her to his side with an arm looped over her shoulders. They’d dropped their packages to the floor back by the see-through nighties.

“I think you’re crazy, that’s what I think,” she muttered, but when he called her sweetling, she felt warm and tingly all over. Like a schoolgirl. Oh, Lord!

“She loves it,” Rolf told the salesclerk, who was assessing him like a giant cotton candy she’d like to inhale. He squeezed Meredith closer and kissed the top of her head.

“No, I don’t love it,” she argued. “It’s…it’s pink.”

“And?”

“I’m thirty-five years old,” she informed the brute in an undertone. “Thirty-five-year-old women don’t wear pink.”

“They should,” he proclaimed, but by now his focus was diverted elsewhere. He was gaping at a mannequin in the back of the store wearing the undergarment sensation of the nineties.

“Bloody hell!” he breathed.

“That’s it. No way! Never!” she asserted. “I draw the line at a Miracle Bra. Come on.” She tugged on his arm.

“Miracle Bra,” he said on a sigh, but he followed after her. While paying for his purchases, he remarked to her in an aside, “I have a brother Magnus who would buy a dozen of those, one for each of his mistresses.”

She glared at him dubiously.

“He would,” Rolf contended. “Magnus has a fondness for big tits.”

Meredith sputtered at that crudity.

“Hi, Ms. Foster,” Amy Zapalski and Joleen Frank crooned in unison, halting whatever tirade she would have come up with for the coarse Viking. The girls’ eyes were glued on Rolf’s bulging biceps and tight buns, highlighted when he bent down to pick up a quarter he’d dropped. Then their observation moved on to the items he was purchasing. The girls glanced from Rolf to her to the garments, and giggled.

Meredith cringed. She just knew the rumors would be flying around campus by morning. Professor in hot pink. Or would it be hot professor in pink? Or professor in pink with hot Viking?

Two hours! They’d been in the supermarket for two hours! Meredith had never spent so much time in a grocery store in her entire life.

Of all the odd things this odd Viking had encountered since arriving so oddly in her life, he claimed that the grocery store was the most marvelous. In the fruit section, he’d examined each and every different item, and she’d had to stop him from eating as he went along.

“But where does all this come from?” he’d exclaimed.

“From all over the world.”

“On ships?”

“Some of it.”

He’d had the same incredulous reaction in the vegetable department. “Who would have e’er guessed that so many bloody vegetables exist.”

Then it was the boxes that held all the items in the store, whether they were cereals or pastas or ice cream. “I have ne’er seen a land with such a reverence for boxes.”

Hmmm. She’d never thought about it before, but she guessed he was right.

And metal cans, as well, drew his fascination.

But the meat section alarmed him most. “I don’t understand. What do men in your country do? What is their role? If they are not the hunters and protectors of their families…” His words had trailed off in dismay. “Are men not men here?”