Page 9 of A Nine-Month Deal With Her Husband

He was old enough, experienced enough, to recognise their mutual attraction and the urge to drop his head was overwhelming.

Her scent swirled around him and he lowered his head just a fraction, the distance between their lips lessening. The air between them tasted of coffee and whisky. He was about to kiss Millie...

He was...

About to...

Kiss Millie.

The thought landed, his eyes flew open and he jerked up, stepped back and rubbed the back of his neck, utterly disconcerted at their instant, intense attraction.

This was Millie. Hiswife.

He pulled away, took a step back and pushed an agitated hand through his hair. Needing time, he picked up his phone, pretended to check for messages and tried to regulate his over-excited heart. Stupid thing. Its job was to pump blood, nothing else.

‘I like the changes you made to your office,’ Millie stated, after sitting on his couch and crossing one long leg over the other.

Thank God for the change of subject.

‘When I bought the building, I refurbished the entire place,’ Ben replied, keeping his eyes on his phone, needing a little time to take her in. She was everything, and more than, he’d thought she’d be. The wild child was gone, and she’d come a long way in twelve years.

He knew a little about her...she’d attained a degree in art history, was a jewellery designer and owned and lived in an apartment in Notting Hill. He sent her company statements, which she never queried, and he paid her share of the profits into a bank account she provided. They weren’t emotionally connected and there was never anything more between them than a piece of paper and a legal agreement.

She’d married him to avoid a jail sentence and take control of her life, he’d married her to take control of the business he loved, and they both got Magnús out of their lives permanently.

Ben sipped his whisky and felt the welcome burn in his throat. Millie drank hers and looked out the window, seemingly entranced by the view. He eyed her profile—which was lovely—and looked for something to say.How was your flight?seemed trite,Welcome to Reykjavikeven more so.

He sighed. In a work environment, talking was never an issue and he was suave enough, unemotional enough, to talk a woman into bed. But when someone meant something to him—and as his wife and business partner and as Jacqui’s daughter, Millie did, just a little—he found making small talk difficult. Keeping tabs on his stutter harder.

That she’d morphed from a girl who’d worn nothing but black as a teenager into one of the most beautiful, self-possessed, and stylish women he’d encountered in a long time didn’t help at all. If she was just another woman he wanted, his words wouldn’t stick in his throat. But she wasn’t. And wanting Millie in all the ways he shouldn’t rocked him to his core.

For the first ten years of his life, he could barely hold a conversation, and when he found someone with the patience to listen to what he had to say, they were both exhausted at the end of their discourse. Picking out words between the stutters was hard work for everyone. It was easier not to talk at all; if he kept silent then he didn’t receive as many pitying glances and rolled eyes.

Memories, unbidden and unwelcome, rolled over him. At thirteen and already struggling to fit in at his local school, his mother, who wholly believed in the ‘if you put your mind to it, you can achieve it’ school of thought, decided that boarding school wouldsort him out.

If he thought he’d been bullied and teased before, it was nothing to what he endured at one of the best boys’ schools in the country. If he tried to speak, he was bullied. If he didn’t, he was bullied even more. He was the ultimate easy target and his frantic text messages and emails to his mum—he was far too upset to try to get the words out on a call—begging her to pull him out of school went unheeded. Four months into what, for him, was hell on earth, he knew nobody was riding in to save him and he was on his own.

He’d been on the point of running away when his English teacher stepped in and roped in the school’s counsellor. She referred him to a speech therapist, who helped him get the worst of his stuttering under control. Then he signed up for a university trial, working with a language professor. Using his innovative techniques, Ben’s stutter all but disappeared. The bullying died down when his stuttering did and his sudden growth spurt at fifteen also helped. Running and skiing made him fast and strong and he was able to fight back, which made him less of a target. He finally made friends and then girls also started paying him attention.

He learned, quite quickly, that females really did go for the strong and silent type.

As he got older, grew stronger, and more confident, his mother’s once-powerful intellect started to diminish. As he gained knowledge, at school and university, his mum lost hers and the once sharp, cutting and undeniably charismatic woman grew confused, a victim of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Her condition deteriorated rapidly and, in his last year of university, Ben made the hard decision to put his mother into a residential home. She’d screamed, insulted him and called him a million names. As her brain withered, she lost all her filters and informed him she should’ve had the abortion, she’d never wanted him, and that embarrassing stutter of his was a constant source of humiliation.

Six months later she passed away, the day after he graduated from university.

Wanting to get out of London, he’d applied for a job at PR Reliance in Reykjavik and was pulled under Jacqui’s wing. He not only found her knowledgeable, and easy to talk to, but in her he found the older sister and best friend he’d so desperately needed.

She’d been the only person he talked to about his struggles to communicate and, with her encouragement, he started dating, had a few relationships and then fell in love. When Margrét tore into him at their engagement party, yelling at him for embarrassing her in front of her family and friends, it was Jacqui who’d steered him out of the room.

Jacqui didn’t agree with his decision to avoid love and relationships, she believed being emotional required mental strength and bravery. Ben didn’t often disagree with Jacqui, but he did about that. Emotion was a weakness and one he wouldn’t tolerate.

It was highly problematic that Jacqui’s daughter made his words—temporarily, he hoped—stick in his throat.

And that wasn’t, in any way, acceptable. Theirs was a legal arrangement, nothing more or less. Business.

Get it together, Jónsson.

He sat on the chair opposite the couch, leaned back, hitched his suit pants up and placed his ankle on his opposite knee. Ben wanted to see her in a business light, but the impulse to push the coffee table out of the way, pull her band from her hair and lower his mouth and body to hers was unbelievably strong.

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