Page 37 of Hell Hath No Fury
He stared back at me evenly, not entirely without hostility. He was still on guard, his shoulders were tense, his hands were fisted. Didn’t blame him. “I suspect I have one,” he replied dryly.
I rolled my eyes. “Well, you left it with the rest of your memories, or it got beaten out of you.”
His lip curled ever so slightly at my response, and I grinned. “We’ll call you…” I trailed off, thinking of something appropriate. “Vidar,” I declared mischievously.
It was somewhat of a test… Both of his memory and his knowledge.
He put his coffee cup down and leveled an irritated stare at me.
“That’s not my name,” he said.
I cocked my hip. “How do you know?”
His lips thinned. “I know.”
“You don’t know,” I shot back. “Because if you did, you’d be able to tell me your name.”
“I know that’s not it,” he gritted out.
I beamed at him, feeling a certain erotic satisfaction at getting him so pissed off. “Well, we can change it whenever you get your memories back. For now, you’re Vidar.”
“I’m not a fucking shoemaker,” he barked.
I leaned back in triumph. “Yet you have not forgotten your history lessons, it seems.”
His lip twitched in what could easily be teased into a smile.
“What would you prefer, then?” I asked sweetly. “Bragi?” I suggested.
“I’m not a poet either,” he said gruffly yet without irritation.
He was becoming more impressive as I got to know him.
Not many mortals knew of the old gods.
“Fine,” I conceded. “What about … Max? Decidedly ordinary.”
His lips thinned, but something light moved in his eyes.
He obviously knew the root of the word ‘Maximus’ as being Latin for ‘largest,’ and he also knew that I had undressed him last night and had it on good authority that he was definitely large.
I waited, grinning behind my coffee cup.
His own lips curled.
The air warmed, a breeze filtering through the windows. Yet this one was comforting, sweet, warm.
“Max,” he agreed.
* * *
The rest of the day passed in somewhat of a blur.
Max argued with me about doing the dishes. I was not a tidy cook, and I argued not because I liked doing the dishes—I loathed it—but because he had a broken leg and an undiagnosed head injury. He was stubborn… As was I.
We compromised with him loading the dishwasher and me doing the rest. He grimaced the entire time, and I muttered a spell under my breath to take the edge off his pain. I gritted my teeth against the resulting fire of agony in my own leg. He’dstared at me intently in the moment, a question on his lips. We’d stayed suspended in time for a long moment before he shut his lips and turned back to the dishwasher.
Then we went into the garden.
