Suspiciously Obedient (19 page)

“Where are the boundaries here?”

Mike felt sized up, and he was right. Jeremy was trying to figure him out, to tease out the core of Mike’s request. And Mike was grateful—deeply grateful—his friend knew him well and was trying to gauge what all of this meant for Mike. Being emotionally in tune with someone else was a rare gift, and for more than ten years he and Jeremy had shared that, even as they’d shared women—perhaps
because
they’d shared women. It was a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Normally, Mike could put a wall up around it, the simple acceptance that the relationship was there, his to touch when he needed and his to push away when he didn’t, enough to allow him to follow his ambitions in the world. Always having a home to come back to. But home meant something different now. Home was Lydia, too.

She was on her way to Iceland right now to a job that he had created to help her escape a mess that he, too, had created. He needed his home, his Jeremy, to go and put together the shattered pieces of a life Mike had almost lived.

Jeremy found himself in a precarious situation here, navigating a complicated series of short, stilted phrases coming out of Mike’s mouth. Knowing his friend, what he meant when he said “protect Lydia” was something quite different from what Jeremy thought it meant. And yet, ultimately, what he thought Mike was saying was “make sure she’s well, make sure she’s happy, and see if she’s
the one
.”

This idea of “the one” was Jeremy’s, not Mike’s. For years he’d wanted someone to complete them. Dana had been close but she’d wanted something more conventional, ultimately choosing Mike. And when Mike had rejected that, she had left them both. A year-long traveling binge that ended in jail had helped take away some of Jeremy's pain, for a time, until Dom had bailed him out in some Asian country that Jeremy still couldn’t recall. The sadness of being incomplete had never quite left him.

What he’d learned over the past year, though, was that being complete wasn’t something that you acquired by loving the right person. It was something you had to put together within yourself so that when you did meet the right person you could detect their completeness. And that was when you knew you were home.

“So, you want me to make sure that she’s happy,” he said, trying to understand and clarify.

“Yes,” Mike answered, staring out the window.

Jeremy had to admit to himself it was a gorgeous view, but he’d never understood why Mike spent so much of his money on these things: the right apartment, the right car, the right jet—rented, but still—the right charity balls, the right
everything
. As if by choosing and manipulating and selecting and being seen in the company of high-status people that he, himself, through osmosis would acquire that status as well, and as if Mike could translate that status into some sort of power. Jeremy didn’t even understand the math behind any of that, and certainly didn’t care.

But this kind of calculation? Of hope and love?
That
he understood.

“Does making her happy include sleeping with her?” There. He said it. He had to. It was the elephant in the room that they were both trying not to acknowledge, had been trying not to acknowledge for some time. Jeremy had become quite taken with her at the autism charity ball where they'd first met, and he would never step on Mike’s toes but…being sent to protect her? Being sent to make her happy? That was a completely different game-changer.

Mike’s jaw flexed and Jeremy could see him doing the calculations behind his eyes, formulas that he couldn’t fathom but that would end with a sum, a result that would add up to their future. He turned, brow furrowed, eyes opened and vulnerable, and locked on Jeremy.

“I want you to go to Iceland. I want you to find out how she’s doing. And I want you to discover why I don’t think I can live without her.”

Jeremy’s heart felt as if someone had pierced it with an arrow, the pain emanating through and through, into his fingertips and down between his toes, across his hips and into his mouth, his tongue, making him go numb. “This is your ‘one,’ isn’t it?” he asked, the blue sky so bright it matched Mike’s eyes, the room so starkly real it was as if he were wearing 3D glasses and seeing everything in an extra dimension.

“Yes,” Mike choked out.

Could she be our 'one'?
Jeremy wanted to ask.

“If she won’t have me…” Mike added, his throat tight on the words, more emotion in that sentence than Jeremy had probably heard from him in his entire friendship with the man. “If she won’t have me,” Mike repeated, his voice stronger, “then I at least need to know that I haven’t caused her some sort of irrevocable damage. That what I did in losing my mind over her and forgetting those fucking cameras doesn’t turn her bitter, doesn’t harden the very qualities in her that softened me.”

He clapped a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder, then reached farther than you would expect. Fighting the instinct to crouch down like he did for everyone, Jeremy stood and just listened, letting his friend open up, liking what he saw. “Of all the people I know, Jeremy, you’re the one that I think can bring her back. Not…” He held up a palm. “Not back to me. But back. Back to her true self. She won’t show that to Michael Bournham. She doesn’t believe that he is anything but a snake…and maybe she’s right,” he said.

Chapter Six

The giggling tipped her off. Day two at the office and, so far, four hours into her day she had had four cups of coffee, one overpriced lunch because hot dogs were $10 in Iceland, had sharpened all of her pencils, checked her email, answered two, written about fifteen to various members of Bournham Industries asking exactly what her job was, and had cleaned and re-cleaned her empty cubicle.

Elsa was of absolutely no help, after all, when it came to administrative issues, aside from helping her to understand how health insurance law worked in Iceland. There was no employee manual, there was no chain of command, there was no directive for creating her own employee manual, there was…nothing. She didn’t know who she reported to. She didn’t know who reported to
her
. And by one o’clock on this second work day the reality that there was no “director of communications for European operations” position hit her with full force.

Michael Bournham had turned her into a bird in a cage. She had to hand it to him, it was crafty—and, given enough time, she’d have her student loans cleared out. She would be able to legitimately say that she had European experience with this great, fake title. Human resources could give her a reference and confirm her employment. Working here, even for a few months, would make her résumé shine if she could play this just right.

But Siggi kept giving her sideways glances and then plugging earbuds into his computer and watching something. Elsa was polite but tight-lipped. No one went out to lunch with her, no one sat down in the coffee room with her, and the handful of other employees there seemed to have jobs. What they did was a mystery. A sales force of about four or five people were on the phone constantly. When Lydia would ask them about their campaigns they answered happily, but at no point did anyone ask her for help or advice.

In desperation she’d reached out to the senior vice-president for communications in the Boston office, who had promptly ignored her. To be fair, it was day two on the job, but Lydia assumed a tight ship run by Michael Bournham would…oh. Scratch that. The company was no longer run by Michael Bournham, according to the terse email sent yesterday, a two-paragraph ditty that said more in what it
didn’t
say than in the corporatespeak it used. Still, a few days after his absence she couldn’t imagine that the systems would change
that
quickly.

Bournham Industries had turned into a very lean, mean, efficient machine over the past year as Bournham had some kind of bet with the board of directors—at least, that was what the rumor said—to increase profits. The idea that she would get a job that paid
this
much and have absolutely nothing to do—and not get a single response back from the SVP for communications when asked what she was
supposed
to do—fed her growing discontent and assumptions that she was here out of favoritism and not merit.

How long would this ruse go on? She could ride it; she had no problem taking Bournham Industries’ money. Lydia also knew that deep inside it would rot her soul. She could do this for a month or two, but the need to achieve, to do well, to do work that was productive and beneficial and that helped her own mind to grow was what fed her. That was one reason why being an admin had been driving her nuts. She could make travel arrangements, order supplies, process incoming email requests, handle filing, information management, storage, update web files, and do all of the administrative work that helped keep departments running. But it had gotten boring. It had gotten tedious. It had started to make her a little bit insane, at least on a professional level. The inefficiencies and absurdities in the system showed. Receiving an email from a boss telling her to send the email to other people in their email system was one such example. Or being told that as the company shifted over to a cheaper office supply company she would need to print the attached PDF, fill it out, send it back so that they could enter her information into a computer system, and give her a new computer account made her logical mind spin in horror and burst into flames.

All of that she could tolerate at home, in Boston, hanging with Grandma, spending time with Krysta, working to put in her time before she got the promotion. But
here?
She had dumped everything for this. She had
been
dumped. She had been suckered. And even so, she couldn’t stop thinking about him, her mind replaying every tortured moment that he had touched her, every second that she had reveled in it. Every touch that had made her alive, every exploring kiss, each hot, fevered grope.

The sense of his breath on the back of her neck in the elevator, how his arms had felt around her ribs, hand brushing against the edge of her breast—it tortured her. The moments in her office and then his, late at night, stripped to nothing, gone bare in a soulless, colorless corporate environment, spiced and vibrant only by the sound of her screams through gritted teeth and of his groans as they took something that wasn’t supposed to be and made it into so much more.

That Matt Jones had turned out to be Michael Bournham boggled her mind and made her heart race, her pulse thready. That knowledge made her smile a secret, sly look that she couldn’t wipe off her face even now. She had been sleeping with one of the most eligible bachelors in Boston and didn’t even know it. What did he look like now? Had he dyed his hair back? Were those blue eyes piercing? And those fake green eyes were now so ludicrously unreal that she understood why he had been almost a caricature of a superhero.

He’d been fired. She heard the news reports that said he’d resigned, but she knew the truth. He’d been fired, and the board of directors had taken control of his company. That had to hurt. He wasn’t exactly the kind to roll over and go submissive. Certainly not in bed. Thinking about him in the most intimate of manners made her heart feel as if it had been pierced.

Sitting at her desk, collecting an overpriced paycheck in a country she had never even had on a top twenty list of places she wanted to visit, with everyone speaking a language she didn’t understand, left Lydia feeling lonely for the first time in her life.

Coffee. She needed coffee. Without a word of explanation she got up and walked outside into the impossibly bright sunshine.
The streets were quite empty, the mid-morning hour a time for napping babies and the pre-lunch hush. Sidewalks were hers, for the most part, and she took her time, savoring the quiet. Disconnected from work, she found herself unraveling a plan, like a ribbon being pulled from a large roll. If she could undo her life in Boston so quickly, she could reverse this one even faster…

And then she spotted the most unlikely Viking in Iceland. Jeremy.

He certainly fit in with many of the men here is Reykjavik. They were tall—impossibly so, sometimes—and at six-six he had a handful of men taller than him walking along the cobblestone sidewalks, but he looked about as different as could be. First of all, few people in Iceland wore Chuck Taylors, his shoes standing out from the crowds. Second, he wore a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt. While early August in Iceland was warm, it wasn’t
that
warm, and she wondered how he could walk along and not shiver.