Page 36 of Ship Wrecked

It was the best night’s sleep he’d had in ages.

9

Peter Reedton was aknäppgök.

By yesterday afternoon, all his scenes for the day were done. He could have gone back to the hotel. Hung out by the fire. Read in bed. Taken a really long, really hot bath. Trimmed his toenails. Learned how to dance the merengue via YouTube videos. Anything, really. Literallyanythingother than spending several unnecessary hours outdoors in the freezing wind and rain.

But noooooo.

Instead, he’d come to watch Maria film that scene on the cliffs. And now, as Nava had informed her at dinner last night, Peter was ill due to sheer idiocy. As well as either a virus or bacteria—or possibly a fungus? Oh, or an amoeba!—but also, definitely, idiocy. Which was why she was taking charge of his health, starting now. Clearly he couldn’t be trusted to do the job adequately.

By the time dinner had ended, it was too late to yell at him. If he’d gone to bed early, as he should have—as she’d make certain he did tonight—she’d only have disturbed his much-needed rest. But it was morning now, even though everything outside the windows was extremely dark and apocalyptic, and she intended to lecture him before she ate a late breakfast in the dining room.

She hoped Peter wasn’t napping, because she needed to explain her newfound authority over his immune system and the protectionthereof without further delay. He could nap later, after she bullied him into good health once more.

By, say, forcing him to nap.

And if that didn’t entirely make logical sense, who cared? Neither did spending all fucking day outside in a fucking Atlantic storm for no fucking reason.

If ever someone had literally shit in ablå skåpet, he was the obvious culprit.

Her knock on his door could have woken the dead—and according to Conor, Peter was halfway there already.

He answered her summons with surprising swiftness.

Oddly, he didn’t look half-dead. And when she hooked an arm around his waist and hauled him back to bed, his body against hers didn’t feel any warmer than normal. He also wasn’t staggering or miserably infirm in the way Conor and Nava’s descriptions of his condition had led her to expect.

Turning his head away from hers, he coughed as she sat him down on the mattress. She paused, crouched by his bedside, and listened to him hack and hack. And after she straightened, she studied him for a minute. Hard.

That cough... that cough, she recognized.

She’d heard it in late November, when Cyprian had fallen terribly ill from hunger and his makeshift home’s inexorable chill, and Cassia had cared for him with reluctant tenderness. The big Viking had hacked and wheezed and groaned, his voice hoarse as he reassured her he was fine. She didn’t need to fret.

Peter’s current cough had the same sound, the same cadence.

Maybe his actual cough exactly matched his fake cough.

Or maybe—

“Show me.” Bending down until he had no choice but to meet her eyes, she stared at him in open challenge. “Show me whatmedicines you’ve been taking. Given the weather, I can’t go to a pharmacy, so I intend to collect whatever you need from everyone at the hotel, and I don’t want to grab duplicates.”

If he was faking, if he’d cost her a night’s sleep due to needless worry over his health, she was going to make certain a moose trampled him whenever he visited Sweden for publicity purposes.

“Uh...” His gaze briefly dropped, and his brow—which was, yes, cool against her palm, as she’d suspected—furrowed. “I forget where I put them. Maria, thank you for checking on me, but maybe you could come back later. I can tell you then what I’ve been tak—”

“No need. I’ll look myself.”

About-facing, she scanned the room. No medication or crumpled tissues on his bedside table. A half dozen strides put her in the bathroom, where... again, she found nothing to indicate illness. Not even a thermometer. Same with his coffee table and the little nook that held his coffeemaker and minifridge.

Another turn on her heel, and she marched back to the bed, where he appeared to be cringing. For good reason.

She stabbed a finger into his perfectly healthy chest. “Faker.”

The wind’s roar, the slight rattling of his windows, the near-violent lash of that endless downpour against the glass were the only sounds in the room for a long, long time.

“Let it be, Maria.” With a sigh, he nudged her accusing forefinger aside. “I don’t want you involved in this.”

“Involved in... what?” She frowned at him, fists braced on her hips. “Why are you pretending to be ill? Did you not want to film our scene today, given the conditions?”

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