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He chuckled. “As a baby, you had curious eyes. I see some things haven’t changed.”
“So far, you’re just like this refugee from the WWE you sent here to strong-arm me.” She glared all the harder at Hauk and then accused into the phone, “You keep evading all my questions.”
“Come to me. You will know all.”
“That’s what he keeps saying.” He didn’t so much as blink. He was doing what he always did, sitting utterly still, staring steadily back at her.
Her father coaxed in her ear, “Elli, I do long to see your face, to talk with you at length, to get to know you, at least a little….”
Her throat closed up again. She swallowed. “I said I would come. I meant it.”
“Good then.”
“But first—”
Even through the static, she heard her father sigh. “I don’t think I like the sound of that.”
“Father, be reasonable. I can’t just…disappear. I have a life and my life deserves consideration. I have to get someone to feed my cats and water my plants. I have to call my principal at school, arrange for some family leave. And I have to see Mom and tell her—”
“Not your mother.” Her father’s voice was suddenly cold as the steel blade of Hauk’s knife. “Absolutely no.” It was a command.
Too bad. “There is no way I’m disappearing without explaining to her what I’m doing. She would be frantic, terrified for me. I could never put her through something like that.”
“If Ingrid knows where you’re going she’ll never allow it.”
“You don’t know that for certain—and besides, Mom doesn’t tell me what I can or can’t do.”
“I do know for certain. I’ve already approached her on this issue. She flatly refused me.”
That was news to Elli—big news. “You spoke with Mom about my coming to see you?”
“I did.”
“When?”
“A few days ago.”
“You…you called her? On the phone?”
“I did.”
“But you two haven’t spoken in—”
“A very long time.”
“She hasn’t said a word to me about it.”
“I don’t find that in the least surprising.” Her father’s voice wasn’t as icy as a moment ago—but there remained a distinct chill in it.
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s quite simple. I called your mother. I asked that she send you and your sisters for a visit. She refused. I tried to get through to her. I pointed out that I’m your father, that I’ve waited all these years and I have a right to know my daughters. She wouldn’t listen. She told me that you and your sisters wanted nothing to do with me, that I was to leave you alone and stay out of your lives. And then she hung up on me.”
Elli knew for certain now that she wouldn’t leave Sacramento before she’d had a serious talk with her mother. “Father.” The word still felt strange in her mouth. “I’m an adult, past the age when my mother decides what I can or can’t do. I make my own plans. And I plan to come and visit you. It’s Monday night. Give me two days. By Thursday morning at the latest, I will be on a plane, on my way to Gullandria.” She added, with a meaningful glance at the Viking sitting still as a statue across from her, “You have my word of honor on that.”
There was a silence on the other end. Even the static stopped. And then her father said thoughtfully, “Your word of honor…”
“Yes. My word of honor.”
“Put Hauk on.”
She felt irritation rising. “Why do you need to talk to—”
“Please, Elli. Put him on.”
Elli marched over to the Viking. “Here. Tell him my word of honor can be trusted.”
He took the phone. “Yes, my lord…yes…yes, I do…” He listened. His face remained expressionless, but something in the set of his jaw told her he didn’t much care for whatever he was hearing. “Yes, Your Majesty,” he said at last and gave her the phone back.
She spoke to her father again. “Satisfied?”
Her father answered calmly. “I think we have an agreement.”
“We do?”
“That’s right, my daughter. Speak with your mother if you must. And be on that plane by Thursday morning.”
Elli smiled. “Great. Thank you, Father. I’m looking forward to seeing you at last.”
“And I’m looking forward to seeing you.” His voice was tender again. “So very much.” Then he added offhandedly, “Hauk will stay with you. He’ll see you safely to my side.”
The Viking was still staring at her. Elli spun away from him, stalked back to the couch and plunked down onto it. She sent a fulminating glance across the room before she muttered into the phone, “You have my word. There’s no need for—”
“Elli. He stays with you.” Her father’s tone was flat. Final.
She could speak flatly, too. “You know what this tells me, Father? You don’t trust my word.”
His tone softened and acquired a wheedling note. “Humor an old man. Please.”
Her father was in his early fifties. Old, by Elli’s standards—but not that old. “Oh, stop. I know you’re working me.”
“This is one point on which I cannot back down.” He was all firmness again. “Accept it. You will have the time you want to do whatever you say needs doing—including visiting your mother. But Hauk will not leave your side until he’s delivered you safely into my presence.”
“You think Mom is going to talk me out of coming, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“She won’t. I swear it.”
“Better safe than sorry. I do, after all, know your mother.”
She looked across at Hauk again. Till Thursday—and beyond—with him right there, watching, every time she turned around. “I’m really not happy about this.”
“It’s my only condition.” He said it as if it were a tiny thing—something so inconsequential, it meant next to nothing. “Accept it and we’ll find ourselves in perfect agreement.”
Elli said goodbye to her father and immediately called her mother. She made that call brief. She wanted to speak to Ingrid in person about her trip—and about the call Ingrid had received from her father, the one Ingrid had failed to mention up till now.
“Are you all right?” her mother asked. “You seem…pensive.”
Elli glanced across the room. Hauk was still there, in the chair, looking on.
Might as well get used to it, she told herself. She reassured her mother that she was fine and made a date with her—dinner at Ingrid’s house in Land Park the next night.
After her mother, Elli managed to reach her principal at home. She spoke—somewhat vaguely—of a family emergency, said she had to leave within a couple of days. Her boss was far from pleased. Elli was in her first year with her own classes and didn’t have a lot of leave built up.
He said that yes, he would call the district for her and get someone to start tomorrow. Then he asked the logical question, “How long will you be gone?”
Unreality smacked her flat again. She hadn’t even considered how long her trip might last.
But it couldn’t be that long. It was a visit. A visit lasted… “Three weeks,” she said, getting up and going to have a look at her kitchen calendar. “I’ll be back and in my classroom by the twenty-seventh.” At least that way, she’d be there for the final two weeks of school. She reassured him that her lesson plans were all in good order. The substitute should have no troble figuring things out. But should a problem arise, Elli would be in town for a day or two. The sub could give her a call.
Somewhat grouchily, her boss wished her well. She realized, as she hung up the phone, that this trip could possibly cost her her job.
Elli was fortunate, and she knew it. She didn’t need the money. Her mother was, after all, a Freyasdahl. And anyone with any awareness of who was who in California knew that being a Freyasdahl meant you had money—and lots of it. Elli could live quite comfortably on the proceeds from her trust. But she loved teaching and she took pride in her work. It bothered her to think she was letting her school—and especially her two classes of kindergartners—down.
She glanced over, saw Hauk again, huge, bemuscled and implacable.
Well. She’d made a promise and she would keep it. Might as well put a bright face on it.
She flashed the Viking a big, fake smile. Those golden brows drew together and he looked at her sideways, his chiseled face set in suspicious lines.
“Tell you what,” she said, so cheerfully it grated on her own nerves. “You just make yourself right at home.” She dared to get close enough to grab her suitcase from where it waited, upright, beside him. “And if you don’t mind, I think I’d prefer to do my packing for myself.” She turned and marched away from him down the hall.
In her bedroom, she hoisted the suitcase onto the bed. She left it there, unopened, and went into her bathroom, where she took care to engage the privacy lock.
She planned to use the toilet, but somehow she found herself leaning over the sink, staring at herself in the mirror. Her eyes looked huge and haunted. Her face was too pale, except for the cartoon-red splotches of hectic color high on her cheeks.
“I want to go and meet my father,” she told her slightly stupefied reflection. “I want to do this.” At the same time, she was still having serious trouble believing any of it was really happening. Not long ago, she’d been carrying her groceries up the stairs, humming a tune that had been playing on the radio in the car, thinking about what she’d fix for dinner.
Now everything was changed. She was going to Gullandria.
She used the toilet, washed her hands, brushed her hair and got another long, cool drink of water from the tap. She put on fresh lip gloss.
And then she went out to face the Viking—which happened sooner than she expected, as she found him standing beside her bed.
She shrieked in outrage. “Get out!”
“Princess, it is not my intention to frighten you.”
It was too much—him here, in her bedroom. She made shooing motions with both hands and shouted, “Out, out, out!”
“Silence!” he boomed back, then reminded her, way too softly, “Remember your promise. No loud noises.”
She lowered her voice to a furious whisper. “That was before, when you were kidnapping me. Now you are merely my… escort. And I want you out of my room.”
Instead of leaving, he came toward her. Those huge, heavily muscled legs were so long, it only took about a step and a half.
She wasn’t afraid of him—she wasn’t. But she couldn’t stop herself from shrinking out of his path when faced with all that size and power coming right at her. He was so tall that the hair at the crown of his head brushed the top of the doorframe as he entered her bathroom.
She moved into the doorway behind him, folding her arms across her middle to keep her fists from punching something. “What in God’s name are you doing?”
He didn’t even bother to answer her, just started checking things out, opening the slatted pebbled-glass window and peering down at the carports, looking in her cabinets at her towels and extra bars of soap, sweeping back the shower curtain to view the tub.
“What, you think I’ve got someone hidden in the tub? You think I’m planning to bust out—just take all the slats out of that window and jump onto the hood of somebody’s Jetta? Oh, puh-lease.”
Apparently, he had finished his invasion of her privacy, because he stood still, facing her. “My orders are to guard you closely, Princess—to stay at your side at all times, to see that you don’t change your mind about your agreement with His Majesty. I’m doing that and only that. You came in here very quickly. I felt it wise to find out if there was some reason for your haste.”
“I came in here quickly because I had to go to the bathroom. Is that a problem for you, if I go to the bathroom?”
“No, Princess.” He stood with that huge chest thrust out, shoulders back, his arms tight to his sides, a soldier at attention.
“And let’s back up here for a minute. Is that really what my father told you, to…guard me closely, to stay at my side all the time?”
“Yes, Princess.”
“I think I’m going to have to talk to my father again.”
The Viking didn’t move.
“Did you hear me? I said, contact my father again. I wish to speak with him.”
“I’m sorry, Your Highness. I can’t do that.”
“Sure you can. Just go get that beeper thingy and—”
“Princess.”
“What?”
“Your father told me he didn’t wish to be disturbed again. He said he was certain you’d think of an endless list of new questions as soon as you hung up the phone. He told me to tell you he would answer them all—”
She knew the rest. “When I see him in Gullandria.”
“That is correct, Prin—”
“Hauk.”
“Yes, your—”
