The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) (15 page)

Chapter Fifteen

By five the next afternoon, the forested ridges on either side of the valley blocked most of the sun. Christina walked a few steps behind Stig on the gravel shoulder of the road leading to the town of La Roche-en-Ardenne. The Rock in Ardenne. Their progress toward the medieval fortress that once guarded the town was slowed by switchbacks on the steep two-lane route. Because she’d been asleep by the end of last night’s drive, this was her first glimpse of the castle ruins and the rows of side-by-side stone buildings lining the banks of the twisting river far below.

“Thank you for not asking me to bicycle down this hill, but is there a reason we didn’t drive?” Trees marched to the edge of the ditch, crowding Christina with their dark trunks and tattered winter leftover leaves.

“Luc and I left the car in an abandoned quarry this morning. At the bottom. Then we stopped and bought your trainers and clothes with the breakfast croissants, all while you were still sleeping.”

“Sorry I missed the field trip.” The heavy sweater she’d borrowed from their host reeked of cigarettes and mothballs, but the extra layer was welcome protection from the drizzle settling on her hair. “I assume you have a plan for this meeting with Ivar.”

“Indeed.” On her left, Stig turned slightly to face her as a car sped by, his body blocking the tire spray.

“Care to share?”

“First, we pair the bread and moules appetizer with a nice lambic beer. In Belgium you should have beer, not wine. Then we—”

“I wasn’t talking about dinner.” Although her stomach rumbled in a way that indicated perhaps she should be.

He cupped her elbow to guide her around the road’s hairpin turn. “One of my bedrock principles is to avoid serious discussions on an empty stomach.”

“Another rule?”

“The simplest. Always eat first. Deprivation leads to regret.”

Under the arch of trees, with no vehicles in either direction, they reached a pool of complete darkness. There was a glow ahead of them rising from what Christina imagined were buildings at the river level, but they were alone in the gloom. Ahead lay light, food and hospitality, but if she stayed with Stig, she’d be sucked deeper into his schemes.

She quickened her pace. Finding a shop that sold SIM cards for the phone she’d transferred to her purse would be useful.

He tutted and caught her as her ankle buckled on a loose rock. She shouldn’t be out here walking on the side of a road, shouldn’t be anywhere near this man or this town, but he steadied her waist and said, “You need me, don’t you?”

His body pressed against hers, warming her thighs and buttocks where the heavy sweater didn’t insulate. He was a furnace, and the arm he wrapped around her ribs was a steel span probably more reliable than the trusses of the bridge she saw below.

“I won’t let you fall.” The low throb in his voice promised more than just help with this step, but with every pledge he made, she knew the investigation that could destroy her dreams was proceeding in parallel. He had the power, with a phone call, to confess to Bodeby’s and clear her name. Undoubtedly she’d lose most of her business, but she wouldn’t be held guilty of fraud. Maybe with a core set of clients like Elaine and Jack Johnson, she could rebuild.

It would take him one call.

“I don’t care about falling.” She shrugged away from his arms.

He was almost invisible, and he didn’t make a sound, but she sensed the warmth drifting away and a chill descending.

“All I want is for you to clear me with Bodeby’s. Tomorrow morning.”

They were silent for the rest of the walk, which was good because it required complete concentration to place each foot so that she didn’t slip. Distances here were smaller and closer than the scenery suggested they should be, because she and Stig quickly reached the bottom of the hill. Parallel to the river, a narrow street ran between two long rows of connected houses.

He lifted his chin toward a restaurant occupying a triangular-shaped lot where the river road and another street made a Y. “That’s the Greek’s.”

“The sign says Polski Dom. I don’t think that’s Greek.”

“Well, times change.” He held open the door.

“Thought you were immortal.”

“Doesn’t mean everyone else is.”

* * *

Other than the addition of a hanging television and glossy paper adverts standing like tents on each table, the new owners hadn’t changed anything at the Greek’s. With his chair almost knocking into the wall and Christina blocked between his seat and the corner, Stig’s position allowed him to observe the door, the patrons and the brass-trimmed bar. He’d see Ivar as soon as Ivar saw him.

“Cute place,” Christina said.

“Stavros would sob in his apron if he heard you call his pub cute.”

“Authentic, then.”

“Better.” His painting of La Roche in winter, the rock cliff and ruined fortress hulking above the snow-covered town, still graced the back of the bar. Not even the weathered barn-wood frame Luc had knocked together in June of ‘44, when they’d traded the scene for a half-dozen bottles of pear brandy to celebrate the Normandy invasion’s success, had been upgraded.

The small talk of ordering ale and food occupied several minutes, and then he and Christina were alone. Since the cardboard drink coasters and the disposable paper mats on their table featured reproductions of his painting, his exercise to relieve boredom between sabotage operations must have become the pub’s defining image. Not bad. None of his Caravaggios in their fancy gilt frames hung where an average Joe Bloggs could enjoy a pint.

“Stig?” Christina’s voice startled him.

He looked away from his painting and followed her gaze to the paper mat on the tabletop. His fingers had found a pencil stub, perhaps tucked with the list of televised football games, and filled in the blank spaces around the central image. He’d added the rushing river in the foreground and dark pencil slashes where the forested hills stretched away from La Roche. While he’d been staring at his painting, his hand had committed his memories to black and white.

“That’s beautiful.”

His stomach knotted at the sight of piles of rubble along the river bank and tendrils of smoke in the hills, ghosts of the winter after he’d painted the original scene. When the last Nazi offensive had engulfed this region, he and Luc had spent their nights in the woods, crisscrossing the shifting lines. Every dawn had left new destruction.

Christina touched the upper corner of the sketch. “Is this the road to Luc’s?”

“Yes.” Before he could explain his action to himself, let alone to her, he folded the paper mat in half, then half again and whisked it under the table.

“But it was amazing.” She reached for it.

“Don’t.” Other than the scene over the bar, he hadn’t shown a painting in a century. The abstract shapes at his former loft were the only types of art he created now, and only for himself.

Her head tilted to one side. “You’re a very good artist, aren’t you?”

“Merely a forger.”

She looked at him, eyebrows curving up at the same time her dark eyes tilted down at the outer edges like she expected him to fall in and blubber until she patted his head and told him he was a good man. He wasn’t, and the ability to draw pretty pictures didn’t make him a hero. She could wait all she wanted for him to continue, but he had to gird himself for Ivar.

“I think you’re more than that.” Then her soft fingertips stroked the back of his palm, sending tremors through his arm. Her hand was in his lap, on top of his hand and wondrously close to brushing his thigh. She leaned near enough that the scent of Castile soap on her skin came to him, simple and comforting to equal the promise of a home-cooked dinner.

He let her take the paper, but he didn’t watch as she unfolded it and smoothed it flat.

“Did you paint the big picture over the bar?”

The stone in his stomach told him that she wouldn’t believe he’d painted it seventy years ago. “What do you think?”

“It looks like it’s been there for years.” She was fishing, wavering between faith and skepticism, if he had to guess from her pauses and slightly rising tone.

“I could have aged it by boiling water with cigarette butts, then mixing that with umber paint and coating the front and back.” Predictably, she looked horrified. “Or I could have painted it seventy years ago when I met Luc.”

Her lips thinned, but the arrival of their drinks halted her intended reply. The brew of hops and coriander crossed his tongue, as welcome as the mead-cups of Valhalla, maybe more since he didn’t have to die gloriously to enjoy this beverage. After a few sips, the skin across her cheekbones relaxed too. At least they agreed on beer.

“Do you still paint?”

He set the pint back on the wood top, taking care not to spill it when half his heart wanted to tell her to stop asking him questions if she wasn’t going to believe his answers, and the other half yearned to snag the pencil and sketch her. “No. I don’t.”

Her free hand spread across the paper so he couldn’t retrieve it. “Why not?”

“Because.”

She waited, staring at him over the rim of her glass. She was good at outwaiting him. More likely he was terrible at remaining silent.

“I don’t want to study a place like this.” He struggled to keep his voice even and quiet. “You examine it, paint it over and over, and then when you go back later, it’s all gone to hell in a plastic bag. I don’t want to paint someone I care about and then have a piece of art leaning against a wall when they’re gone, so I don’t paint people anymore either. I’d rather not be burdened with memories of what I can’t have.”

The words hanging in the air were true, but he hadn’t meant to make her chin sink and her eyes go twice as large and shiny with liquid. Silently replaying his outburst, it connected with the details he’d discovered about her life when he researched his scam. Her mother and stepfather had both died younger than average, and no one knew what had happened to her biological father. She’d lost most of the people she cared about.

“I’m sorry.”

She neither looked at him nor answered.

He was a whiny, stupid git who didn’t deserve to be saved by the arrival of their food, but the full plates set in front of them gave them both time to regroup. Shutting his trap and chewing while he churned through the permutations of how to manage Ivar and Christina in the same evening, in the same restaurant, didn’t lessen his appreciation for the roasted half chicken and frites served by the new owner.

“These fries are fabulous.” Christina speared another forkful of the wide-cut and perfectly crisped chips. Food had brought back her cheerfulness. “Really good.”

He seized the safe conversational topic she’d tossed. “Three things are always excellent in Belgium. You’re enjoying two of them.”

She looked between her chips and the nearly empty half-liter beer glass sitting by her right hand. The windy walk had loosened strands of hair from her ponytail, and the alcohol had added a flush to her cheeks. “What’s the third?”

Flirting was easy as long as she didn’t mention his art. “Chocolate.”

“Oh.” Her lips made a little circle and her eyes locked with his, pulling him right back to the restaurant in Calais. Or maybe her lips had him ready to test the bonnet of another car.

He shrugged to shift his collar away from his burning neck, but the movement didn’t relieve his discomfort. An honest man—which he aspired to be—would admit that it wasn’t the new clothes making his skin burn. She’d applied lipstick before they’d left Luc’s. The coral color flattered her skin, and he wanted to snog it off her and then watch her stroke another coat across her lips and then help her work the color off a second time, on his cock.
Getting ahead of yourself, mate.

He wasn’t rising from the table in the next couple of minutes. “We’re not eating out again. Not if you’re going to look at me like that every time we have plates of food.”

Her lips curved very slowly and her chin lowered until she was peeking at him through her lashes. Then she raised a particularly thick spear of potato on the tines of her fork until it stood straight up in front of her lips. “Like what?”

Since he was feeling aroused by watching her eat a forkful of chips, she knew exactly what. He leaned toward her. “Like you want me to put something else where that—”

“Charming.”

Ivar’s interruption made Christina jump, but Stig settled slowly into his seat and spread one arm along the back of her chair.

“Ivar.” Stig didn’t stand. “So unexpected of you to join us.”

Ivar didn’t sit. In the twenty-first century he had a short haircut rather than a Viking mane, and his black overcoat looked warmer than a chain-link byrnie, but the man at the end of the table looked as much the same after fifteen hundred years as they all did. Still blond and blue-eyed, still fit and still unsmiling. He’d never been as good for a laugh or a loan as his brother Wulf, but tonight their anointed leader seemed even more like a man created from stacks of rock in the far north.

“Now that your friend is here, I’ll be—” Christina slid her chair away from the table, but before she could escape the corner, Stig blocked her path.

“Not so fast,
partner
.” He laid his hand over hers on the surface of the table.

“I’m sure you want to talk privately.”

“I wouldn’t want you to get lost so soon after you agreed to help me.” He admitted to a hope that Ivar wouldn’t ask him to do a job if Christina stayed. Silly, but even men like him hoped.

“Agreed? In your dreams.”

“Finished with the foreplay? I don’t want to be waiting when the bar closes.” Ivar’s speech rhythms were different than Stig remembered, the sounds thickened as if he was using the trick of a mouth full of pebbles.

“Humor, Ivar?” Stig lifted three fingers to signal another round to the barman. “Didn’t realize you could buy that.”

The other Viking removed one black-gloved hand from his coat pocket and shoved at the chair opposite Stig until it angled at forty-five degrees to the table, allowing him to see more of the room from his seat.

“You’re the man in the painting.” Christina’s head tilted to one side as she focused on Ivar’s face. “Holding the skull and flowers. Stig called it a memento mori.”