Suspiciously Obedient (20 page)

“Lydia?” he said, his voice curious, more disingenuous than anything. “Is that you?”

She stopped and gave him a withering look. Standing eight feet apart, she wondered what they looked like to outsiders. Two Americans, running into each other on the streets of Reykjavik. That probably wasn’t a common tourist event.

“Jeremy. Funny meeting you here,” she said.

“That’s my line,” he replied.

“That’s bullshit,” she answered. “Michael Bournham sent you, didn’t he?”

Jeremy placed a hand over his heart and widened his eyes. “Whatever would make you think that?” he said, eyelashes dancing. “I’m here because I had a hankering for”—he looked around, puzzled—“whatever it is people have a hankering for here in Iceland.”

“A yarn shop?” she asked drily. “There are about three on every block.” Seriously? This was the best Michael Bournham could do? Get his best friend to come and stalk her? Amateur. At least send an ex-Navy SEAL or a Russian mob dude. What about that chauffeur he used—the guy who looked like an extra from
The Sopranos
?

“Yes,” he answered, nodding vigorously. “A yarn shop. I was in the mood to learn how to knit and thought I would come to Iceland where the”—he stumbled over his words—“sheep make such wonderful wool for crocheting—”

“Knitting.”

“
Knitting
,” he repeated.

If it weren’t so absurd tears would fill her eyes by now. But it was absurd, and Jeremy could pull it off just well enough that she wasn’t pissed so much as bemused and conflicted.

“Before I go and find a yarn shop and a knitting instructor or…whatever you do when you learn how to knit,” he said, his eyes kind and hopeful, hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, feet almost doing a strange
aw, shucks
shuffle, almost as if they were eighth-graders and not fully grown adults, “would you mind taking me to the best coffee shop in the city?”

“I don’t know the best coffee shop in the city.”

“Well, then,” he said, threading his arm through hers, linking elbows, “let’s go find it together.”

“This isn’t going to work,” she said flatly. His skin against hers was the first human touch she’d had since she flew out of Logan and hugged her mother. Involuntary reactions ranging from enjoyment to a touch of flushed passion invaded her. She pulled away, blessedly relieved and infuriatingly deprived. What the hell was happening to her?

“What isn’t going to work?” he answered, looking down. His hair was clean but mussed; he obviously hadn’t run a comb through it or done much of anything other than hopped in a shower today. Rumpled. He looked rumpled. She wondered how he could care so little for his appearance and yet still manage to be so appealing.

“Having Michael Bournham send you here—that’s not going to work. I don’t need a babysitter.”

“Michael Bournham. Michael Bournham,” Jeremy said, lowering his voice into a deep, fake baritone, like an announcer before a disaster movie in the previews. “Why do you keep calling him Michael Bournham? That’s so formal. He’s just Mike.”

“No, Jeremy, he’s
Matt
.”

A distressed look crossed his face. He peered down and stopped, forcing her to jerk to a halt, too. They were in front of the Reykjavik equivalent of a dollar store, cheap passport holders in the window along with plastic cutlery and Hello Kitty purses. “He’s both, you know,” Jeremy said seriously. “None of what happened was planned.”

“
Pfft
,” she said, her tone dismissive, tongue rolling in her cheek, practically taking inventory of each molar in the back. “You’re telling me that this up-and-coming playboy billionaire—”

“Millionaire!” Jeremy retorted.

“—N
ear
-billionaire CEO, Michael Bournham, just accidentally stumbled into a hidden-camera situation where a viral sex tape made its way all the way to my mother’s smart phone app for cable news? ‘Oops!’” she said. “‘Sorry, Lydia. I didn’t mean to fuck you on camera!’”

“You’re very photogenic,” he answered, craning around to look at her ass. She smacked him in the chest, hard enough to make him stumble backwards and cry out in pain.

Good,
she thought. “If you’re trying to be here to make peace or to cleanse his reputation or to get me to go back to being his fuck toy, Jeremy, then just go home.” And with that Lydia stormed off, headed directly toward—in fact—the best coffee shop in Reykjavik.

“Hey!
Hey!
” he boomed, running after her. Onlookers turned and stared at them, assuming it was some sort of a lovers’ spat and she wanted to cry out something,
anything
that would make the attention go away.

Just when people began to resume their own business, Jeremy shouted, “I meant to compliment your ass. It looked great on camera. Not many women can pull that off.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Siggi, from the office, emerge from a convenience store with a yogurt in hand. The cocked eyebrow told her he'd heard Jeremy’s words.
Fuck.
Pointedly ignoring him, she hoped he’d keep going. To her undying relief she soon watched his back recede around a corner, headed toward the office.

Lydia stopped, mid-pace, closed her eyes, and sighed. Some things she couldn’t escape, even half an ocean away. Apparently, neither could Michael Bournham. Resuming her pace, the
click-clack click-clack
of her heels on the cobblestones filled her mind. Acting as if Jeremy didn't exist, she slipped on sunglasses and pretended not to know him.

Which was damn near impossible when he ran in front of her, blocked her path, and said loudly, “You know, none of this would have happened if Mike had just come to Bangkok with me and we’d had another threesome.”

He’d chosen the very moment that a kindly old knitting store clerk had stepped out into the threshold of her store to people-watch. She looked like Lydia's archetype of a grandmother—portly and large-chested, wearing a long gray skirt, a white turtleneck, and a gorgeous, intricate hand-knit cardigan made of muted, heathered pinks and purples. Gray hair, deep wrinkles, and those ice-blue eyes she found to be fairly common among Icelanders.

“What? You've never heard people argue about threesomes?” Jeremy asked the woman, who now openly gawked.

“I…you're American, aren’t you?” she asked, her English perfect, her accent like an additional layer of judgment.

“What made you guess?” Jeremy strode into the shop, bending at the doorway, the threshold built into a half-basement-level entrance.

“I am Frida. And you are...?” The old woman looked over her unrimmed glasses at them both.

“I'm Jeremy and this is Lydia,” Jeremy replied, as if this were the most commonplace thing in the world.

“Pleased to meet you. Now, please sit,” she said, gesturing to a semi-circle of rocking chairs on the back of the store.

“Wait, you’re serious? You’re going to sit here and take knitting lessons right now?” Still stunned by the sight of Jeremy—of all people—here in Iceland, Lydia curled her lip up in an expression of incredulity. “Shouldn’t we go to a coffee shop and sit and talk about this?”

“Talk about what? Knitting?” Jeremy found a rocking chair and the old woman handed him a set of needles and a ball of yarn.

“You don’t need a coffee shop for that,” the old woman said.

“No.” She looked at Jeremy and narrowed her eyes. “You know…about Matt, er…Michael Bournham. I mean—”

“Oh, the threesome,” Jeremy said.

The woman tittered. “I was born too late. You children have all the fun.”

Jeremy turned, eyes popped out, his face as shocked as she’d ever seen it, the normal calm, suave, mellow affect completely gone in the face of having a woman the age of his grandmother tell him something so daring.

The woman nudged Lydia, handing her a pair of needles and a ball of yarn as well. “Cast on. I want to watch how you do it,” her English clipped, a slight lilt and a tangy guttural sound somehow living within the language simultaneously, the effect a bit mesmerizing.

Madge had taught her the basics of knitting years ago, so Lydia began casting on, looping the first stitches onto the knitting needle. The woman shook her head,
tsking
. “Waste. Of. Energy,” she said. She looked at Jeremy and nodded with approval. “You’ve been taught properly.”

“My grandmother was Swedish,” he answered, finally composing himself. Lydia watched his nimble fingers weave the strand of yarn into a set of perfect loops, faster and more fluid than her own attempt.

“Oh.” The woman perked up and began speaking in what Lydia presumed was Swedish. Jeremy held one hand up, fumbling to manage the first row of purl stitching that he had started.

“I don’t speak Swedish.”

She frowned. “You Americans, with your one language only.” She rolled her eyes and then examined Lydia’s set of stitches. “Good. Now start with purls.”

Jeremy leaned back, crossed his legs at the ankles, and continued the rest of his row, his hands efficient and quick, the needles clicking in an almost melodious pattern that Lydia admired.

“I may not know many languages, but I do know how to say ‘I’m so sorry, I thought you were a woman’ in Thai.”

In spite of herself, Lydia began laughing. The woman didn’t seem to quite get it. Was she really sitting here in a knitting shop in the middle of Reykjavik, with Jeremy besting her at stitching? Playing hooky from the office to boot?

Who cared. She was the boss now, right? The sham of it all made her loosen up and laugh.

“Mike—uh sorry, Matt—er Michael Bournham…” Lydia couldn’t bring herself to just refer to him as Mike, the casualness of it too much, chipping away at her outrage. “Mike” made it seem possible that there was an opportunity with Mike that she’d thought had been there with Matt, and that was now gone forever, destroyed by the CEO of her company, destroyed by her own unwillingness to listen to him that day he’d come to her. Sending an emissary wasn’t going to make anything change and so whatever role Mike…Matt…
asshole—
whatever you wanted to call him—thought Jeremy could serve, it just wasn’t going to happen.

The comfort, though, of seeing a friendly face, of having a fingerhold on a part of her life back home, was something that stuck in her throat, a cautious, appreciative feeling that made the foreignness of this monumental change in her life just a little easier to bear. Even if it came with some sort of price. What was Michael Bournham going to try to extract from her now? He’d taken, and given, so much. Nothing in her life came without an exchange and so, here came a third party, Jeremy, the
click clack click
of his knitting needles a steady, thrumming sound, like a bizarre heartbeat that lulled her as she made her way through the purl stitches and then switched over for a knit stitch.

The calmness, the peace, of wool on metal, of breaths and of movements, singularly focused on this little piece of fiber being turned into a work of wearable art, whatever it may end up being—a sock, a scarf, a sweater, a blanket. Energy and focus poured into these motions that took her out of her panic, took her out of her alienation, took her out of her surprise and indignation and so many negative emotions that had filled her life lately. Sitting here with Jeremy, with this knitting instructor, surrounded by balls of color, she felt more aware and more at rest than she’d felt in weeks.

“Your gauge is off,” Jeremy announced. She looked up, taken out of her own little world, and turned to find him leaning forward, peering around the arm of the rocking chair she sat in. She held up the four rows she’d managed to knit and asked, “What’s gauge?”

The old woman pursed her lips and shook her head.

If you had told him, even a week ago, that he would be sitting in Reykjavik, Iceland, in a little wooden rocking chair, his knees practically up to his nose,
knitting away
while some old Icelandic woman clucked her tongue and explained the popcorn stitch for the thousandth time while Lydia stared at him with a look of incredulity that would make anyone cringe, he wouldn’t have believed it.