The Bride (The Boss) (8 page)

No one seemed to bat an eye at the fact that Neil had such a young girlfriend, but when I met Runólf’s wife, Kristine, I got an inkling of why. Though Runólf was fifty-two, his wife was in her early thirties. She was a former Olympic swimmer who was 6’ 1”, had long, sexy blonde hair I was pretty sure she stole from a 1990’s Glamazon, and her arms were more jacked than Michelle Obama’s.

I had this crazy feeling no one was going to crack a “trophy wife” joke about me in Runólf and Kristine’s house.

“Sophie, so nice to meet you!” Kristine gave me a welcoming hug. “Neil has told us so much about you.”

“He has?” I knew Neil talked to his brothers often, even if he only saw them every couple of years, but I had no idea he’d talked to them about me.

Geir chuckled. “The last time we saw him, he couldn’t shut up about you. When was that, the last time we got together for Christmas?”

“No, it was when your mother was in the hospital,” Helen corrected him. “It’s nice to finally put a face with the name.”

When his mom had been in the hospital? That had been… We hadn’t even been dating at that point, just casually fucking. And he’d been talking me up to his family?

I shot Neil a look, and he coughed, cleared his throat, and turned to Michael, who stood gazing out the windows at the lake. Probably trying to remain totally still, because protective father vision is based on movement.

“Michael,” Neil said stiffly.

To Michael’s credit, he didn’t look as terrified of Neil as he used to. He nodded and raised the glass in his hand, responding, “Happy New Year, sir. And a belated Merry Christmas.”

Michael was everything Neil had probably feared from the moment Emma had been born. Blindingly handsome, well-mannered, tall, dark, and charming, he was Emma’s fairy tale prince come to life, and met every one of the high expectations she had of men. Though Neil hated Michael, there were similarities between them that I would never, ever point out to him, because I was sure it would earn me a very withering look.

“Yes. Well. Same to you,” Neil said, then turned to Runólf and spoke something in Icelandic before they both headed off to the bar.

From somewhere in the room, a baby monitor crackled with the sound of a distressed infant.

“Oh good, she’s up. Finally!” Helen jumped to her feet with the glee of a mother about to hold a child she could give back to its owners, and she excused herself to go with Kristine.

Emma sighed. “Less than ten minutes. I owe Michael twenty dollars.”

I cocked my head in query.

“Less than ten minutes before my father got bilingual to complain about Michael, in front of Michael.” She shook her head with a resigned sigh. “He said, ‘I’m going to need a drink to handle this.’ Come on.”

Emma led me up the stairs, through the foyer and to the surprisingly industrial looking kitchen.

“Maybe he meant he needed a drink to handle bringing me.” I normally wouldn’t have so blatantly hinted for reassurance, but I was starting to get a little paranoid. “He’s been acting really strange, ever since Christmas.”

“There’s a time when my father doesn’t act strange?” She grabbed a glass-bottled soda from the ice bucket on the table. “Want one?”

“Sure.” I took something that looked grape. “You don’t think he’s weird about me being here?”

“Sophie, you know him.” Emma was as pragmatic as ever, and it was very welcome. “If he didn’t want you to be here, you wouldn’t be here. But the man misses you when you go off to the toilet, I don’t think he would want to spend a whole holiday without you.”

She had a point that I mentally conceded as I popped the top off my soda.

Then, with a halt, Emma had a visible realization. “You don’t suppose… Sophie, do you think he’s nervous because he’s planning to propose to you?”

I frowned as I let that roll around in my head for a second. Neil didn’t buy new socks without serious consideration; I couldn’t imagine him proposing to me without first having in depth conversations about our future. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not? You’ve been together for a year.”

“Yeah. A year. Singular. One year,” I said wryly. “I’m not angling for a proposal just yet.”

“A hell of a year, though.” Emma pursed her lips as she thought. “Have the two of you even discussed it?”

“No. Well. Once, I think. Only in the most abstract way.” Neil had confided that he’d planned to propose to me on his last birthday, but he’d changed his mind because he hadn’t wanted it to seem like one of those deathbed/wedding bed scenarios. “We haven’t had any serious discussion, and that’s okay. We’re happy where we are.”

“I suppose.” Emma didn’t sound too happy about having to accept that fact, and I was surprisingly touched. Her father’s last marriage hadn’t ended well, with hurtful accusations that I hoped were all a huge miscommunication between two truly well-meaning people. If they hadn’t been, then Neil’s ex-wife had been a gold digger out to trap him with the child support clauses in their prenup. Neil and Emma felt the latter was the case, so the fact that she could trust me enough to be disappointed that her father wasn’t marrying me was a big deal.

We rejoined the rest of the group in the living room, where Helen was just handing a slightly fussy baby off to Runólf.

“I’ll get her a bottle,” Kristine said, less relaxed than when we’d first come in.

“Do you need help?” I offered, though I wasn’t sure what needed to be done, and I prayed “hold the baby” wasn’t going to be her suggestion.

“I’ll help her. Neil, could you take Annie just for a moment?” Runólf asked, passing the baby off to his brother without waiting for an answer.

“I would love to.” Neil set his glass aside and reached up for the infant, whose tiny limbs wobbled excitedly in the air as she was handed off.

“Careful, you’ve got her now?” Runólf asked, and Neil gave him an annoyed tut.

“I have actually done this before, you know.”
 

Neil was seated in an armchair, so I plopped down in the corner of the sofa nearest him. He held little Annie under the arms, her pigeon-toed feet awkwardly stamping on his thighs. She babbled excitedly, and a thin stream of drool leaked from her lip and onto Neil’s six-hundred-dollar sweater. He didn’t look like he minded a bit.

I leaned my head on my folded arms atop the end of the sofa and smiled over at him. I’d seen the same wonder and joy in his expression in photos of a younger Neil with Emma.

Men with babies. Even if I didn’t want a baby, I couldn’t really deny there was something sexy about a man confidently holding an infant and yes, even making stupid faces at her.

“How old is she?” I asked no one in particular, as her parents were out of the room.

“Almost seven months old now,” Helen said. “She was born on the first, wasn’t she, Emma?”

The human mind is a really cruel thing. I couldn’t calculate what time I had to go to bed to get eight hours of sleep when I had to wake up early, but I instantly snapped back seven months, to the first week of July.

Our baby would have been due in July.

In the past year, I’d found myself thinking, on a couple of occasions, about the abortion I’d had. Occasionally, I had compared myself to a pregnant woman on the street, and wondered if I would have looked like her. I’d never been weirded out in a way that made me regret our choice, though. The first week of July had been a bizarre time for me, because Neil had still been in intensive care. I would have been ready to go into labor at any time at that point, if we’d kept the baby. I’d been too emotionally stressed by the fact that my boyfriend had been in a touch-and-go health crisis. The thought would jar me out of my head for second, and I would imagine how devastating it would have been to deliver our baby without Neil by my side, because he was dying in the cancer ward. It was horrible to imagine. I was glad we’d made the right choice.

Neil looked over at me, as if he could sense my thoughts. He probably could; we spent enough time together, and he read my every mood and facial expression like a cherished book. “Would you like to hold her? They’re so much more fun when they aren’t yours.”

“Oh, thanks, Dad,” Emma said with a snort.

“No, I don’t want to steal your time with your new niece,” I declined smoothly, and he was more than happy to go back to kissing Annie’s squishy fat cheeks and making grumbly noises.

Dinner was amazing, though not vegan friendly. Emma seemed to have anticipated this, and she’d brought her own food, which she chowed down without complaint. Neil and I had given up any hope of a vegan holiday. We’d picked up the diet when Neil was ill, after being convinced of the health benefits by Emma. But Christmas was never healthy, anyway, so we felt free to indulge in
hangikjöt
made of
smoked lamb, though Neil informed me that he preferred the horse variety. There was also fried ptarmigan, a bird I’d never heard of but was stuffed with bacon, so I was sold. There were caramelized potatoes and red cabbage, and steaming warm homemade bread.

“You did all this?” I boggled after I’d inhaled my second helping of rice pudding.

Kristine grinned. “Yes, it was quite difficult. I had to call the caterer weeks in advance, and then pop the trays in the oven this morning.”

Everyone laughed, even Neil, who seemed to have loosened up a bit.

Though it was only five o’clock, it was pitch black outside by the time we’d exchanged presents and let the massive dinner settle. I was sitting in the crook of Neil’s elbow, leaned against him, when he suddenly spoke up. “You know, it only just now occurs to me that Michael has never been for a proper sauna?”

He said this apropos of nothing, immediately rousing my suspicion, and Emma’s too, judging from the way she sat up with wide eyes.

Michael looked up from where his hand was laced with Emma’s on his knee. “A what now?”

“A sauna,” Geir said, gruff and terrifying. “You sit in the steam for a while, get a good sweat worked up, then you run outside and jump in the lake.”

“Nice try.” Michael shook his head with a dazzling smile. “Fool me once, Mr. Elwood.”

“Fool you once?” I asked, and Neil gave me an I’m-totally-innocent look that I was not buying.

“At Michael’s first Christmas with the family, Dad told Michael that it was Icelandic custom to strip naked and roll in the snow on Christmas morning,” Emma said, with a peeved edge to her tone. “He told Michael to meet him in the garden at Langhurst Court before breakfast, then never came down.”

“I sat outside in my underwear for seventeen minutes before I decided he was messing with me,” Michael admitted sheepishly.

“This is all legitimate, I assure you,” Runólf said, chuckling at his brother’s horrible prank. “I’ve even got the hole cut out there.”

“It really is something they do,” Helen reassured Michael. “Although Geir shouldn’t, because of his heart.”

“Um, and maybe somebody who just had cancer shouldn’t do it, either.” All the blood drained from my face. “You’re really going to do it, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely. It’s the perfect male bonding experience, and I haven’t seen my brothers in a while. And anyway, I wouldn’t want Michael to miss out,” Neil said, nodding to him.

“Daddy, don’t be stupid. Of course Michael isn’t going to jump in a frozen lake. He’s not an idiot.” Emma laughed.

“Oh, no offense to be taken from that statement, is there?” Geir grumbled, and stood. “I don’t know about all the rest of you, but I’m going down to start the damn fire. Are you coming?”

“I am, definitely,” Michael said, and I saw in the firm set of his jaw the resolution of a man who saw plunging his overheated body into an icy death lake as a last ditch attempt to win the respect of his mortal enemy.

It was hard not to laugh.

Neil tightened his arm around me and said, low beside my ear, “You’ll be alright without me?”

I nodded and gave him a reassuring smile. Kristine and Helen seemed nice enough, and Emma and I got along great. It wasn’t like he was leaving me alone with Valerie or something.

When the guys were gone, Kristine dropped on the couch beside me with a giant glass of wine. She stretched her legs. “Do you know how long it has been since I’ve had a drink?”

“But it’s all worth it,” Helen laughed. “Still, I wouldn’t trade with you. I like my eight hours.”

Kristine took a huge gulp of wine before responding. “We’re very lucky, we have an overnight nurse, usually. But not at Christmas, that seemed too self-indulgent.”

“So, Sophie, how did Christmas with your family go?” Emma asked, then, to Kristine and Helen, she explained, “It was Dad’s first time meeting them.”

I shrugged. If Emma wanted details, I would fill her in another time. “It went…really well. My mom didn’t like him, but I didn’t think she would.”

Kristine made a sympathetic noise. “My father
hates
Runólf. All he sees when he looks at him is some perverted old man. It doesn’t help that Runólf is only seven years younger than him.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m so glad I’m not the only one in this situation. Neil is actually older than my mom, and she’s super freaked out.”

“I would be,” Helen said with a shocked blink. “If my child brought home a partner who was older than me? Granted, my kids are in their twenties, and I’m fifty-nine…”

“You married a guy your own age, though,” Kristine pointed out. “So you don’t see the draw. Trust me, there are things an older man can do that a young guy—”

Emma looked at me, horrified, and interrupted, loudly, “New topic of conversation!”

“Okay. New topic,” Kristine agreed. “Helen, how are your classes going?”

Helen had retired from her law practice, and now she taught courses on contract law at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. As it turned out, Kristine had just gone back to school, to get her Master’s degree in modern art.

It had never occurred to me before that conversation, but I could go back to school. I was living with Neil, I wasn’t making a ton of money; my advance for my first book had been generous for a debut memoirist, mostly because of its famous subject matter, but it wasn’t a career I could really imagine myself growing to love. Neil was always saying I could do whatever I wanted to do, and he’d support me… I wondered if that extended to an advanced degree.