Page 20 of One Weekend in Iceland

She drops my hand and moves toward him. Jon stands, welcoming her hug before stepping aside so she can hug her mother.

The smile she turns to her father is brilliant. “I thought you were leaving on the first flight this morning?”

“I was, but I decided it was much more important that I spend more time with my two favorite girls.”

Her mother’s gaze lingers on them before falling on me. I’m still hovering awkwardly near the doorway, forgotten by the others in the room until now.

“Hallo. You must be Freya’s man, Rory,” she asks, her accent a little thicker than Freya’s when she rolls the r’s in my name.

“Mum, he’s not my man. He’s … a friend.” She smiles back at me, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes, and for the first time today, I see it as nothing more than friendly. All signs of her nerves have gone, replaced by a nonchalance that I don’t really like. I thought what we did last night was a long way beyond friends. I guess I was wrong.

I remember reading somewhere on the internet that Icelandic women are culturally liberal and assertive when it comes to sex. Freya certainly had no problems telling me what she liked or when to go faster or harder. It seems that what I imagined as her being into me was really just her enjoying an evening as a strong, independent Icelandic woman. No game playing, just wanting to have sex because she liked the look of me or thought I could deliver a good time. These thoughts all run into each other in my head in the space of seconds. Every one of them totally inappropriate when I’m meeting her parents for the first time.

“Rory, this is my mother, Andrea, and my father, Jon.”

Mumbling my way through a greeting, I step forward to shake Jon’s hand, then Andrea’s. This all feels way out of my depth, and I’m seriously regretting the decision to come with her to the hospital. Honestly, it’s probably cured me of ever meeting a woman’s parents ever again. I should have just waited at the bed and breakfast for her to return.

Things don’t get a lot better when after covering every conceivable angle on the weather, they start to grill me. Freya makes a valiant effort to steer the conversation to the places we visited yesterday. But her mother is not deterred until Freya finally says the words I’ve been longing to hear. “We need to be going.”

But the torturous inquisition isn’t over until they have asked about our plans for today. It’s hard not to notice the way Freya brushes the question away, cleverly diverting the conversation back to when her mother is expecting to leave hospital.

Oddly, what isn’t mentioned during the half hour we spend in that room is that Freya’s father is an internationally recognized star. I was a huge fan of Midnight Sons growing up and still am. I don’t remember there ever being any mention of him having a daughter, but I guess I was only ever interested in their music. I couldn’t care less about their private lives. Well, that was until today. I like Freya a lot, even if the feelings aren’t reciprocated to the same extent, and I want to know more about her and her family.

We return to the small blue Kia SUV Freya borrowed from her mother for the day. I’m feeling a little shell-shocked, while she doesn’t seem to be as affected. She is seemingly without a care in the world as she practically skips along beside me, humming a tune that may be one of Midnight Sons’ bestsellers. All the questions I have seem to have turned into a twisted ball of confusion in the pit of my stomach, and they could take weeks to make sense of. But all I have is one day.

“Are you ready to go have some fun?” she asks, all sunshine and light, which does nothing to help ease the churn within. I’m glad we’re still going to spend the day together because hopefully, that means I’ll have the chance to understand exactly what’s going on between Freya and myself.

“Aye.” But even I can hear the trepidation behind my short response.

“Good. I want to take you somewhere warm, which is why you needed to bring swimming trunks.” Her cheerfulness sounds a bit hollow. Maybe I’m misreading her reaction.

“Would that be the Blue Lagoon?”

Flicking her flowing blond hair over her shoulder, she smiles, and this time, it feels more genuine. It’s impossible not to stretch across the console and capture her joy with my mouth. We’ve been at the hospital less than an hour, and it already feels like it’s been too long since I could touch her.

The kiss turns heated instantly, our tongues dueling while my fingers twist into the golden strands of hair and hers dig into the back of my scalp. I love the demanding way her nails mark my skin; it’s possessive like I belong to her. If only that could be the case for more than one weekend. But we both understand that’s not possible, and it fuels my desire to take what I can while I can. If this is just a fun, sexy weekend for her, I can roll with that and quash the feelings of disappointment.

“We won’t be getting much further than your room at the bed and breakfast if we don’t stop,” she mutters, her voice husky.

“I don’t see anything wrong with that idea. It’s warm there too.”

Her soft laugh touches parts of my heart that I don’t want her to reach. She’s already made herself unforgettable, and I need to ensure the effect she has on me doesn’t become anything more.

“Fine, my adventure first. Afterward, we can return to your room for your version of adventure.” She sits back in the driver’s seat and brushes her hair back from her face. Squirming a little in her seat, she switches on the ignition.

“That’s a plan.” I keep my tone light and casual.

Last night, I gave my feelings free rein, and today, I’ll be a lot more guarded. If only the memories of us lying exhausted on the waterbed, our naked limbs entwined like puzzle pieces fitting perfectly together, weren’t so clear.

As we leave the grounds of the hospital, I force a more relaxed breath from my lungs before settling back into the passenger seat. Freya drives us through the city streets, making left and right turns until I’m completely disorientated, and soon, we’re zooming along one of the major two-lane highways. This must be part of the nine-hundred-mile ring road around the island. As we chew up the miles, the landscape shifts from colorful houses to a treeless, barren expanse with a range of snow-tipped mountains in the distance. The ground on either side of the road is covered in green-gray moss-covered rocks. No one rock standing taller than the rest. The harsh volcanic-formed landscape is not unusual for Iceland but different from anywhere else in the world that I’ve traveled.

“Nature’s beautiful when it’s left untouched,” I observe.

“Mmm,” Freya agrees. “And Iceland shows it at its newest and rawest. Volcanic activity and the harsh winters continue to twist and shape the landscape. I miss all this when I’m in Dublin.”

“Do you plan to move back?”

She shakes her head, and a shower of gold falls around her shoulders. “Not in the near future, but maybe one day.”

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