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‘I thought we might take Sóley into town next week. They’re switching on the Christmas lights.’
It was suddenly hard to breathe. As Lucas’s voice reverberated inside her head she looked up at her brother’s face. It was so familiar, so reassuring, and yet she still hadn’t worked out a way to tell him what was happening.
In the distance she could see the broad expanse of the marshes. Above their heads the sky was pale grey, silent and immense. It felt overwhelming, and yet in another way it was liberating, for it put everything into perspective. In comparison to something so infinite and enduring, surely her problems were puny and trifling and her secrecy superfluous?
She glanced across at her brother, seeing the scuffed patches on his leather jacket and the tiny points of stubble along his jawline, and suddenly she knew that this was it. The turning point. The moment she had been waiting for and both hoping and dreading would happen.
Up until now it had all been just in her head. It had felt safe, contained, indefinite. But telling Lucas would make it real.
‘That would be lovely,’ she said carefully. ‘Only I’m not going to be here.’
‘Really?’ Lucas frowned. ‘I thought you were clear up until Christmas.’
She swallowed, or tried to, but the truth was blocking her throat, making it ache.
‘I am—I was. But I’m...we’re going to Iceland.’
He was staring at her now, his dark brown eyes trying to make sense of her words.
‘Iceland? Wow, really?’ He shook his head. ‘That’s pretty random. What brought that on?’
For a moment she was too busy trying out various sentences in her head to reply, but the need to share the truth was swelling inside her.
‘We’re going away with Sóley’s father,’ she said quickly. ‘Just for a couple of weeks,’ she added. ‘So he can get to know her.’
Whatever Lucas might have been expecting her to say, it wasn’t that. Her brother was difficult to shock. He was tolerant and easy-going. But she could tell that he was stunned by her words.
‘I thought you didn’t know who he was?’ His eyes searched her face, trying to guess at the truth of what she’d told him in the past.
‘I didn’t. But then I found out by accident and I went to his office and told him about Sóley. Then he invited me to his house, and we talked.’
Lucas cleared his throat. ‘When was this?’
‘A couple of days ago.’
His eyes narrowed with disbelief. ‘What? And he just invited you to go away with him?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you agreed to go?’
As she nodded a slick of heat spread over her skin. Put like that it sounded cra
zy, but what was she supposed to say? Actually, he didn’t so much as invite me as issue a directive.
She could imagine her brother’s reaction. He would be furious—and understandably so. From his perspective it would seem she had been backed into a corner. Only his anger wasn’t going to change the facts. Ragnar was Sóley’s father, and he had a right to know his daughter.
Her heart skipped forward guiltily and she felt a slow creep of colour stain her cheeks. Ragnar’s desire to know his daughter was not the only reason she had agreed to go to Iceland with him. That involved a different kind of desire.
Her mind went back to that moment in the kitchen, when the anger and tension between them had slipped into something else, and the intensity of their emotions and the nearness of their bodies had resurrected the ghost of their unfinished connection with impossible speed.
Here in the cool November sunlight she could dismiss it as the result of nervousness or an overactive imagination, but alone with Ragnar it had been impossible to deny. In that moment the truth had been irrefutable. She wanted him—wanted him more than she had ever wanted any man.
But the suffocating force of that longing was one truth she wouldn’t be sharing with her brother.
She glanced up at his profile. He looked calm, but she could read the confusion in the lines around his eyes and the tightening along his jaw.
‘You think it’s a bad idea,’ she said slowly.
