Page 11 of Ship Wrecked

Maria had been given the suite right next to his, fuck it all, and all five of them would be eating the included breakfast together every morning in the hotel’s small dining area, just like one big, happy family.

Speaking of which, Maria apparently spoke to her family daily. Even now, she was chatting with them in rapid Swedish as she began to haul her luggage to her door one-handed, piece by piece, her other hand occupied in clamping her cell to her ear.

From all indications, she and her family got along great, and today’s call proved no exception.

“Ja, Mamma,” she said, then unsuccessfully tried to drag aparticularly heavy suitcase over the threshold to her suite as she laughed. “Fem.Fem!”

He’d heard her talking with herpappaon their charter plane in the minutes before takeoff, as well as someone named Vincent, who seemed to be her brother. Her easy, cheerful tone never changed during those conversations. At the end of every call, her wide brown eyes softened with warmth and affection as she said she loved them—his best guess; he didn’t fucking know Swedish—and disconnected.

He had no idea how it would feel, being in a family like that.

He did know that watching it from the outside hurt.

Her one hand clearly wasn’t up to the task of wrangling such oversized luggage. She’d paused in her attempts to hoist her bags over the threshold, probably intending to wait until her call ended. But she needed to get inside her suite and away from him ASAP, and he knew exactly how to hurry things along.

He set his enormous duffel along one side of the hall. Then, placing his hand on her shoulder, using the least possible pressure and dropping the contact as soon as he could, he nudged Maria out of her doorway. Her rapid flow of words faltered for a moment, and her confused stare licked at his skin like a flame, but he kept his own eyes elsewhere.

With two hands and one heave, he deposited her largest suitcase five feet within her suite. Then the next largest, and so on, until all her luggage was resting on that pale wooden floor, against the wall. For good measure, he wrestled the heaviest suitcase, one she’d evidently filled with bricks, or possibly lead weights, onto the waiting luggage rack.

It wasn’t an apology, but at least it was... something.

And fucking hell, he didn’t want to hear those fond family farewells again, even in a foreign language. So without a word, heurged her into her suite using the same glancing, minimal contact with her shoulder as before, paying no attention to her sudden silence. Then he shut the door firmly behind her and set out for a walk that would last until their team’s first official on-location meeting later that afternoon.

He’d admire the panoply of late-spring flowers growing in the grikes. Study the austere stacked-stone walls dividing the island’s tiny green fields and avoid making eye contact with the cattle and sheep grazing on the grass within those walls. He’d wander down to the golden-sand beach on one side of the island and climb up to the cliff tops overlooking the pounding surf of the Atlantic on the other side. If he got tired after a long day of travel, a couple of the local horses were out of luck, because he’d be hiring one of those jaunties to keep him moving.

Then, if that didn’t do the trick, he’d wade into the freezing surf and encourage Dolphy McBlowholeface to slap him around a little, or whatever else it took to get a handle on himself and the way he reacted to Maria. Because this was the first of countless days in close quarters with her, and he needed to keep his shit together.

Worst-case scenario: Seals might not have fins, but they did have flippers optimized for effective slapping. He was pretty certain he could alienate them too, as needed.

He was good at that.

4

During their first week of filming, making Maria and Peter look like absolute disasters took well over two hours every morning, and Maria enjoyed every minute of the process.

“At first, he didn’t believe me,” Jeanine said, twisting and plaiting one side of Maria’s hair. “Then he asked whether it was a Benjamin Button situation, because he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier, if you know what I mean.”

It was just sointeresting, listening to Jeanine and watching her weave all those little braids, then backcomb them so Maria’s hair looked ratty and big and ocean-ravaged and—frankly—like postclub sex hair. Then the hairstylist–slash–makeup artist–slash–costumer would smudge kohl around Maria’s eyes and smear dirt on her face until, in the end, she resembled a well-fucked raccoon who’d recently spent quality time in a dumpster.

When she got back to Sweden, she was totally re-creating the shipwrecked shield-maiden look one night, doing the same for her friends, and hauling everyone to an expensive Stockholm bar, just to freak out all those urbane, besuited business types there.

Peter required less makeup and fewer braids. Getting his beard the right degree of unkempt took extra time, though, and so did the daily application of the prosthetic scar on his cheekbone and the swirling temporary tattoos on his strong arms and broad chest.

Those tattoos, while slightly blurry and monochromatic, suited him far too well. As did his costume. Or rather, his lack thereof, because he spent those early days of filming shirtless, his chest bare, his shredded leather pants exposing more than a hint of his powerful thighs.

Too bad he was a jerk, because she wanted to lick him like an ice cream cone.

And once Maria donned her own tattered leather pants and torn woolen tunic... well, it was pretty amazing. Somehow, Jeanine had made the castaway Viking thing both realisticandsexy. The woman wrought miracles daily for Maria and Peter.

Plus, Jeanine was delightful company. At over fifty years old, she looked thirty. And her greatest joy in life was bedding men in their twenties without either lying about or revealing her own age ahead of time, then—afterward—savoring their reactions as they found out.

It was Jeanine’s version of sports, Maria had concluded.

“Anyway,” Jeanine added, “then he called his mother while still in my room and apologized to her, for reasons I can’t quite comprehend?”

“Wow.” Maria didn’t want to consider the Freudian implications too deeply. “Awkward.”

After ten days on the island, Jeanine had already received two marriage proposals from local fishermen. If what she didwerea sport, the trophy would deservedly be hers.

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