Page 200 of Modern Romance Collection March 2025 (1-4)

“You’re not close to anyone in your family, are you?”

His shoulders tensed. “Why?”

“I don’t know. You seem to be suggesting that you have a lot of…liaisons. And I don’t have time for that kind of carry-on. I have a job, I have my sisters, I have my dad. You told me that you have a job. You also told me that your mother left. So…”

“I have my father.”

“Are you…close to him?”

His expression went austere. “We have and always been. We don’t see eye to eye about a great many things. But my father is a good man. He is…unaffected.”

“What do you mean?”

“When my mother left, I was sent into a great and terrible spiral. I was a terribly unpleasant little boy. No one could deal with me. My father, no one on the staff. He would offer increasingly higher amounts of money for people to come and tame me, but nobody could. Eventually, he hired Greta. And Greta was Norwegian, and thought it best to raise children outdoors. She took me to Norway for a while, had me run around among the pines. This is not wholly unfamiliar to me.” He looked up, and around. “Only Greta was able to tame me. And it was by… Not trying to. She was perhaps the last person to truly take care of me. Though she was not a soft touch. Don’t get me wrong. It was not an indulgent sort of care. She denied me, for the first time. I had otherwise never experienced denial. Other than the removal of my mother’s love, of course. Though, I’m not entirely certain that I ever had that.”

“Oh,” she said.

The kind of childhood he spoke of was one filled with the sort of privilege she could only ever imagine. But it was…also sad sounding. It didn’t put her in the mind of happy memories, or ease. She would’ve said that she couldn’t feel sympathy for somebody who was as apparently rich as he was. But in that moment, she did. They ate the roasted meat, and cold cheese. They drank more water, and sat outside until the sky began to darken. There was nothing to do in a situation like this but try to conserve energy. In many ways, they were lucky. They had food. They had a way to make fire. They had supplies, unexpectedly.

“I guess you missed that wedding,” she said, looking up at the stars.

He nodded slowly. “I guess I did.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“No matter. Though, I suppose had I made it, I would be dancing there now. Rather than…” He gestured to his leg.

“You certainly can’t dance now.”

“Have you not learned yet the dangers of challenging me?”

A hint of amusement crept into his face.

He gripped the makeshift trekking poles, and propelled himself up out of the chair. Then he let one drop, and extended his hand.

“You have to be joking,” she said.

“No, I am always deadly serious about dancing.”

She was stuck in the middle of the wilderness with the most beautiful man she had ever seen, and he was asking her to dance. She had never been held in a man’s arms before.

It made her feel so many things she hadn’t even considered feeling before, not like this. Not so close, and personal and real. He lit her up inside. Made her feel like a woman in ways she never had before.

What if they did die out here? And when they found them, they were nothing but frozen bones. She would’ve wished that she had danced. She would have wished that she had…

So many things.

So she went to him. In her parka, with him leaning on that pole, and he wrapped his arm around her waist, and held her close. He was still leaning heavily on the pole on his bad side. But his hold was firm, and she found herself shocked yet again by his strength.

She looked up at him, and his eyes were burning now. Or maybe it was just a trick of the firelight.

Her heart beat heavily, a surge of excitement winding through her.

This was ridiculous. And ten kinds of wrong. There was no way that she should be… Caught up in the moment like this. In circumstances.

This wasn’t her. And it wasn’t her life.

And you may never get back to your life.

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