Page 66 of Ship Wrecked

Peter:Please forget I said that. It was inappropriate.

Maria:...

Maria:I’ll do my best.

Maria:...

Maria:Why don’t I ask Conor to get youan extra blanket too? No need to share.

Peter:Probably a good idea.

Maria:Yeah.

Peter:...

Peter:Yeah.

15

“Yes, I suppose I do look rather affectionate.” Maria peered down at the blogger’s tablet, where a particularly popular gif of her smiling at Peter during a con panel played over and over. “Heisquite a good person, if you don’t consider the various ways in which he’s actually a terrible person.”

In all theGatespress junkets the two of them had endured, they’d never been asked to watch and provide commentary on gifs that theoretically revealed their undying devotion to each other. Not until this very special moment, during their last interview of the day.

Even for her, this was awkward. Peter looked ready to chew metal, despite that stiff smile splitting his dark beard. From the audible rumbling of his stomach, the chicken Caesar wraps they’d wolfed down during a hurried lunch were now a distant memory. He kept rubbing his forehead in what appeared to be an unconscious gesture, so she figured he had a killer headache too.

Not to mention his poor dick. It had to really, really hurt by now.

Late in the afternoon, in an act of gracious goodwill, she’d stopped readjusting her position on the love seat, for fear his head—either of them—would literally explode.

“I’ma terrible person?” His poke of her ribs was half-hearted at best. “Which one of us intimidated our entire crew by threateningto beat everyone with glass jars of pickled herring? Because I can assure you, Pippi, if I were to choose a bottled food product for bludgeoning purposes, I’d find something less smelly.”

He was the only one she menaced with jarredsill, and they both knew it. Threats of herring-assisted violence were her love language.

Not that... not that she loved him. Obviously.

His brow creased as he turned to face her. “And where do you even store those jars, anyway? They appear out of fu— uh, freaking nowhere.”

“Like this?”

Promptly, she produced a jar from her usual spot. Everyone else in the room visibly jolted in surprise, to her immense satisfaction.

She shook thesillmaybe a millimeter from Peter’s nose. “I could tell you,skitstövel. But then I’d have to kill you. By thwacking you over the head with an extremely heavy glass jar of tasty herring, naturally, in accordance with ancient Swedish tradition.”

A blatant lie. She was never telling Peter where she kept the jar. It was too much fun to terrorize him.

“Then I’d eat the herring. It would taste like victory.” She paused, then smiled slowly. Delightedly. “And murder. Delicious, fishy murder.”

From across the room and behind the camera, the PR rep stared at her. Hard.

Maria waved.

That did the trick. Peter started laughing. Those deep furrows between his brows disappeared, and if she was reading the clock in the distance correctly—

“I’m afraid we’re out of time,” the PR rep told the blogger, then began politely but firmly steering him toward the door of the hotel suite. “Thank you so much for coming. You should receive thefootage by the end of the week. If you don’t, please contact us, and we’ll make sure you get it.”

After it was strategically edited, no doubt. Or maybe not, since Marter fans loved it when she and Peter went off script, which the very competent PR team had surely recognized by now.

“Thankyou,” the blogger managed to get out. “Nice to meet you both!”

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