Her Master's Servant (Lord and Master Book 2) (16 page)

And a voice next to her replied, ‘
Jag har fyra bröder.
’

Luna jumped and turned around, only to find Mika leaning against the work surface, watching her. Embarrassed to have been caught out, she quickly pulled her earbuds out. ‘You scared me.’

To which Mika merely nodded toward the table, where he had placed a brand new red motorcycle helmet. At Luna’s puzzled expression, he said, ‘Take me out on your bike.’

When he’d seen the sun that morning, it transpired, Mika had decided he wouldn’t do any filming. Paradoxically, most of the images he wanted were all against a backdrop of Shetland’s usual grey, wet weather. So he’d given his crew the day off, and promptly went and bought himself a helmet and some gloves.

And if Luna was taken aback at his rather whimsical demand, this gave way to amused incredulity when Mika removed his mobile from the pocket of his leather jacket and pointedly placed it on the kitchen table.

‘Because life is out there,’ he said, lifting a white blonde eyebrow.

They consulted briefly about where to go. ‘We could…’ Luna began, trailing off as a small wave of shyness overcame her.

‘We could?’ Mika prompted.

‘I was just thinking. I’ve heard puffins are nesting down near Sumburgh. We could go see them if you want?’

‘Let’s,’ Mika replied in his usual spare manner.

So they headed out, Mika holding his Logmar in one hand to capture the passing scenery, his other arm curved firmly around Luna’s waist. An hour later, they were lying side by side on a grass verge overlooking the rocky shore, watching a pair of puffins collecting nesting material. Part of her wished that Stefan was there; with their oversized orange bills and stout little black and white bodies, puffins were arguably the world’s cutest birds, and she imagined cooing with him over their industriousness and the way they seemed to gossip to each other like old fishwives.

But there was pleasure to be had in Mika’s quiet company as well. In addition to buying a helmet, he’d purchased cheese and bread, which they munched in silence as puffins flew overhead, fishing in the waters below. Eventually he decided to climb further down the rocks with his camera, and Luna stayed where she was, folding up her jacket and placing it under her head, savouring the warm sunshine on her face and arms. The noise of the puffins and the waves below entwined together in her ears, and she drifted.

When she woke sometime later, Mika was beside her, lying on his back chewing a blade of grass.

‘I fell asleep,’ she said, then smiled at the obviousness of that statement. To which Mika gave her a quick sideways look, before returning his gaze to the sky.

The drive home felt… companionable, like a bridge had been crossed and their relationship was on a new footing. Less like ‘indentured servitude’, as Stefan had put it, and more like a budding friendship.

They arrived back at the cottage, however, to find Dagmar in a ratty mood. She came out as they sat on the picnic bench, drinking beers in the sunshine, and despite Luna’s attempts to tell her about the puffins seemed to be annoyed with both of them.

‘This has been ringing all day,’ she complained as she threw Mika’s mobile at him and promptly stormed back in the house, slamming the door behind her. Luna raised her eyebrows at Mika and he gave her one of his customary blank looks, which she took to equate to,
Women!
.

Mika studied his phone for a moment, then placed it on the table top.

‘So,’ Luna grinned. ‘How have you felt today, without it?’

‘Naked,’ Mika replied. Luna did a double take, then scrutinised his sober façade. His eyes were twinkling, she could see it now. She burst out laughing.

Whatever ailed Dagmar seemed to pass over dinner that night, and they spent another pleasant evening together. And over the course of the next week, they fell into a comfortable routine that stood in stark contrast to Luna’s first few months in Shetland; she was living with… friends now.

*

To Mika’s satisfaction, after their day of puffin watching the weather took an abrupt turn for the worse. So filming resumed. His demands on Luna remained as terse and all-consuming as ever, but now it felt less like he was barking orders and more like he was talking in shorthand. And she was flattered when he occasionally asked her opinion about a particular shot or setting, as if she had anything to teach him about his job, or made a point of coming to take a coffee break with her in the lambing shed, almost empty now save for a few late arrivals.

And despite her best efforts, she found that Mika’s quiet ways lured her into confidences. Perhaps it was a mutual thing, for on Wednesday night, as a storm began to close in outside, the two of them sat cross-legged in front of the fire, Mika talking about his family. On that subject at least, he could be disarmingly expansive – Mika Salonen clearly loved his parents and brothers very much, and missed seeing them now that they had moved back to Helsinki.

Echoing Stefan’s description, he noted that the family ethic was ‘work hard, play hard’. Luna got the impression that as the baby of the family Mika was lovingly indulged. ‘Oh, that’s just Mika,’ he quoted his mother as saying every time he discovered a new métier, whereas his brothers were all captains of industry, from the way he described them.

He also revealed that it was Stefan who gave him the scar on his brow, during a heated skirmish on the ice hockey rink.

‘I deserved it,’ Mika admitted, adding with some relish, ‘but that’s not what I told my brothers. They beat the living
skit
out of Stefan when they caught him.’ Luna gave him a shocked look that immediately dissolved into laughter in the face of Mika’s puckish mischievousness.

In turn, though she revealed nothing about her childhood or indeed, about her relationship with Stefan, she briefly confided in Mika her fears about her assignment for Sören, and the still unmet challenges that awaited her.

‘Getting the wool processing mill built is just the start,’ she explained. ‘Malcolm still hasn’t found potential buyers for the meat, and he’s trying to get backing from the Scottish Tourist Board for the tourism angle. He says the farmers won’t buy into this unless we can offer them a guaranteed income stream.’

Mika considered this for a moment, then said speculatively, ‘What if we had a little party here on Shetland…’

‘I was so, so wrong about him,’ Luna enthused to Stefan later that night. ‘He’s planned out an entire screening event, and he’s already got his staff working on a guest list and invitations.
And
he just happens to know the CEO of a major UK supermarket chain, who he met on a skiing holiday last year! I completely understand why you and Dagmar like him so much. He’s so clever, but he hides his light under a bushel, doesn’t he?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far,’ Stefan said grudgingly.

He, meanwhile, sounded to have had a thoroughly wretched week, beginning with an unpleasant confrontation with Helen, who had to be practically dragged from the stables to the main house for the summit with her mother. From what Stefan said, Augusta hadn’t been quite as forceful as she could have been, and it had been left to him to instruct her daughter to back out of the deal with English Eventing.

‘And there was something about some of the phrasing she used, all the talk of the Arborage mystique, and how you couldn’t put a price tag on the “intrinsic value” of the equestrian centre. You’re right, Luna. I see Florian’s hand in this.’

To Luna’s subsequent slight guilt, the conversation shifted back to her after that, her excitement about the forthcoming screening party, which she and Mika had agreed would take place the following week, bubbling over.

‘It’s just so nice, to have someone else helping me, someone I can lean on a little,’ she concluded, adding swiftly, ‘Other than you, of course.’

She woke the next morning to the sound of wind wailing and the frame of the cottage creaking in protest. ‘A spring gale,’ Malcolm said heartily when she brought him a cup of tea in the lambing shed, breathless and back into her usual uniform of wool jumper, winter hat and gloves.

In view of the inclement weather, Mika promptly gave everyone the day off except Luna and his leading male, asking her to swing past the Fisherman’s Rest to pick up Sean and then drive them down to Sumburgh, to the cliff’s edge where they’d visited the nesting puffins. The setting couldn’t have been more different in the current gale force conditions, with the puffins all sheltering out of sight and the sea roiling below. Mika told Luna she could wait in the car, and after he and Sean had clambered out of view, she took the opportunity to text Stefan.

Weather appalling here. Winds gusting 70 mph. All flights to mainland cancelled. Fingers xd it improves by tomorrow.

He rang her seconds later.

‘I didn’t mean to bother you,’ Luna answered quickly. ‘I’m just sitting in the car waiting for Mika.’

A brief silence on the phone, followed by, ‘I see.’

Luna launched into an explanation of what Mika was doing, or what she
thought
he was doing. ‘Though now I’m starting to worry a little bit,’ she ventured, glancing out the driver’s side window as a sudden gust of wind buffeted the car. ‘They’ve been down there for a while…’ She trailed off, suddenly conscious that she’d been rabbiting on for several minutes with absolutely no response from Stefan. ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘You still there?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Is something wrong?’

‘I don’t know. You tell me. Have you seen my father’s blog?’

Soren did a weekly blog, mostly to promote new products, plug store openings, that kind of thing. Usually Luna made a point of reading it religiously, but she’d been distracted this week.

‘No. Why? Is there something bad in there?’

She heard a noise in the background. A door opening and what sounded like Stefan’s friend and colleague James MacGregor’s voice.

‘I have a meeting now. I have to go,’ Stefan said. And ended the call.

Luna tried to connect to the Lundgren’s site, but couldn’t get Internet out here at the edge of the world. So she had to wait, a ball of foreboding knotting in her stomach. Mika and Sean were another half-hour, returning to the car glassy-eyed from the wind. When Mika suggested returning to the Fisherman’s Rest for lunch, she promptly agreed, firing up her laptop the minute they got in while Mika and Sean went to fetch a round of drinks from the bar.

Going to the Lundgren’s homepage, Luna found the link to Sören’s blog and clicked it, bringing up the usual photo of him sitting at his desk in Stockholm. Usually Luna tried to at least read some of his posts in the original Swedish, but this time she impatiently clicked the ‘translate’ button.

Are you ready for the Lundgren coat?

Anyone who has spent more than five minutes with me in the past few months will have heard of little else, and anyone who’s seen and touched the samples in the design department knows just how special my little magnum opus is!

Luna scanned down the page, scrolling through CADs, photos of the design team working on the coat, a photo of Dagmar’s bird-themed scarf and other accessories. Really, she thought, what was Stefan’s problem with the blog?

But then at the bottom:

Our friend Mika Salonen has been working hard on Shetland to bring the marketing campaign for the Lundgren coat to life, and I hope to be able to share some of his work with you in the coming weeks. In the meantime, have a look at these images he’s captured of the newest member of the Lundgren’s family, Luna Gregory, who has temporarily made Shetland her home to get this project off the ground. As you can see, she’s made a few friends…

Scrolling down further, Luna saw an image of the exterior of Malcolm’s lambing shed. She clicked the play button in the middle of the image and watched as the camera panned out to the field. The cameraman, who she could only assume was Mika, moved toward the entrance of the shed and as the camera adjusted to the darkened interior, she saw herself, sitting on the floor of the orphan pen bottle-feeding a lamb while two others impatiently waited their turn.

Her head was turned slightly away from the camera – she’d had absolutely no idea Mika was filming her – as she held the lamb’s head in the crook of her arm, its mouth working away at the bottle. She was wearing one of her many Shetland jumpers, plus a knitted hat, and there was a blade of straw in her hair.

The camera closed in on one of the other lambs baaing at her and Luna could hear herself chirping in response, ‘Are you hungry, little man?’

Then both the waiting lambs baaed and Luna laughed, ‘You poor, poor boys!’ Something about the timbre of her voice apparently struck a chord, because this provoked another duet of baas. Ah yes, she remembered this, smiling in anticipation of what happened next. The camera focused on her profile as she pursed her lips and made a kissing noise to the lambs.

At this, not only did the two waiting lambs baa, but the lamb on her lap disengaged his mouth from the nipple of the bottle and let out his own loud, plaintive baa. Luna watched as her shoulders began to shake with laughter, and the scene faded to black.

The next scene was of her delivering water bottles to the filming crew out in the field. Again, she’d had absolutely no idea Mika’s camera was trained on her. This was back when she still hated him, which manifested itself in a slightly sassy sway of her hips as she clomped back across the field toward the gate.

But then – she’d forgotten this – a lamb came gambolling over in her direction and, fit of pique forgotten, she quickly squatted down to greet him. There was no mistaking the downward motion of the camera to focus firmly on her jean-clad arse as she scratched the lamb on its head.

Luna glanced over at Mika, chatting with Sean at the bar as they waited for their pints. Then she watched in fascinated horror as the final clip played out on her laptop screen. It began with a close-up of two puffins, but then the camera angle shifted to show her fast asleep on the grass next to them. It was shot at very close range; she could see a wisp of her hair waving in the breeze and a thin blue vein pulsing in her temple. It was… intimate. The camera, and thus its owner, would have had to be right next to her to capture this level of detail. Her lips parted and for one awful moment Luna feared that her screen incarnation was going to start snoring.

But it was worse than that. Her sleeping self sighed, then pursed her lips into a pout. This was more than just intimate – the footage had captured her dreaming.

Of course, he didn’t understand her objections as they drove home later.

‘Sören asked me to get images of you for his blog,’ he shrugged. ‘So I did.’ Then he yawned and rested his head on the passenger window, blithely settling in for some kip.

Dagmar was similarly unapologetic when Luna approached her later. ‘It’s good, staff in Stockholm knowing what we’re doing here,’ she said.

‘Yes, but you could have told me,’ Luna protested.

At this Dagmar made a face and observed, ‘You are shy, Luna. If I told you…’ She shrugged and added softly, ‘Besides, Mika has made you look
skitsnygg.
’ Luna knew from Stefan that
skitsnygg
was the Swedish equivalent of ‘shit hot’, and she glanced at Dagmar with surprise, only for the lanky Swede to duck her head in embarrassment.

Luna decided, upon reflection, not to ring Stefan back right away. Truth be told, she was a little annoyed with him, both for taking such a tetchy tone with her and for phoning when he clearly had no time for a proper conversation. So, yes, he could wait to talk to her.

Besides, once she’d gotten over her initial discomfort, she found herself feeling… flattered by Mika’s portrayal of her. Okay, the napping scene she could do without, but she was inwardly chuffed when her phone started pinging with messages from the girls.

From Nancy:
Whoa, check out Luna! www.lundgrens\sorenblog\Shetland

Then Jem:
True story: I was watching this in the office. Got to bit where Luna was in the field and Scott from Design shouted I know that arse!!! ALL THE WAY FROM ACROSS THE ROOM.

And finally Kayla:
Who shot this? R u sleeping with him/her? U naughty girl :-)

She was quick to message back and clarify that the video had been shot at Sören’s behest, and that she had absolutely no romantic involvement with Mika, adding,
He’s shagging the female model on the shoot, Britta
. Which, if it wasn’t the truth yet, well, she suspected it soon would be.

But anyway, it was nice, her friends knowing that she had a life up here. And not just them. To her surprise, she also had an email from Rafe Davies.

Luna smiled as she read the email. So, Mika had mentioned her to Davies. She tried to imagine how that conversation might have gone, Mika so spare with his words and Davies so gregarious and open.

That night, as the wind continued to howl outside, she, Mika and Dagmar had a brief planning meeting for the screening event, which segued into a slightly boozy dinner. Somewhat incongruously, Mika had developed a taste for Southern rock during his time in the States, and halfway through the meal he insisted on putting on his ‘mix tape’ featuring Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and The Cadillac Three. So the boozy dinner segued into boozy dancing, followed by boozy lounging in the front room.

It was only when Luna crawled up the stairs to her room at almost 1am that she saw she had two missed calls from Stefan.

‘I’m sorry,’ she opened, holding the phone to her ear whilst simultaneously kicking off her boots. ‘We had music on and I didn’t hear the phone.’

A slight sigh on the other end of the line. ‘No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I shouldn’t have spoken to you the way I did earlier,
flicka.
’

‘Well…’ Luna began, lifting her shoulder to cradle the phone while she removed her jeans.

‘I’ve just—’ Stefan hesitated. ‘It’s just been such a rubbish week, and now it looks like you won’t be able to come to Loch Lomond this weekend, and then I see this video of you taking naps with Mika.’

‘I did
not
take a nap with him,’ Luna said firmly, trying to wrestle her jumper off. ‘He caught me napping, that I admit. But your father asked him to take some candid footage of me for his blog, so Mika was only following orders.’

‘Hunh,’ Stefan rejoined. ‘It looks to me like he was only too happy to oblige.’

And maybe, maybe if Luna hadn’t been slightly drunk and still feeling flattered by Mika’s portrayal of her; maybe if she didn’t still have the strains of Tom Petty’s ‘American Girl’ reverberating in her ears and the Shetland sky glowing dark red in the skylight above her bed, maybe she’d have heard the undercurrent in Stefan’s tone and taken the conversation more seriously.

As it was, she quickly unclasped her bra and threw it to the floor, then reclined back on top of her bed, fully naked, bathed pink in the strange, stormy light.

‘I don’t suppose it occurred to you to ask yourself what I was dreaming about when Mika caught me napping,’ she said, smiling mischievously.

A brief silence, followed by the sound of Stefan clearing his throat. ‘Why don’t you tell me, Miss Gregory?’

So she told him, at length and in detail. And the conversation moved in an entirely different, altogether more pleasurable direction.

Would that this had been their only telephone conversation that weekend.

*

As Stefan feared, the weather remained stormy on Friday, with all flights and ferries to the mainland cancelled. And though Luna was disappointed not to be seeing him, part of her was relieved to have more time to prepare for Tuesday night’s event. Opting for a two-pronged attack, she sent out email invitations and hand delivered hard copies to farmers who’d already signed on to the wool cooperative.

‘Very exclusive,’ Mika nodded, wagging his eyebrows, when he suggested this approach. At the same time, he arranged for signs to be put up in the Fisherman’s Rest advertising a private screening, which soon had the desired effect as bar regulars tried to cadge invitations from Team Mika.

‘Free food, free bar, what did you expect?’ Ruth joked as she, Luna and Dagmar sat with a cadre of knitting club members in Judith Andersen’s kitchen, taste testing lamb kebabs and spicy lamb burgers for the screening event.

By Sunday night, they had more than a hundred people signed up to attend, including representatives from the Shetland and Scottish tourist boards, several local businesses, three supermarket chains, and the Lord Mayor of Lerwick. Mika, meanwhile, had commandeered the kitchen for his editing studio, shooing Dagmar and Luna out when they dared to trespass. So the two of them spent that afternoon and evening at the pub with the rest of the team, playing board games and chatting and, for once, Luna felt herself relax a little; not pretending to be anyone else, just sitting quietly and being Luna.

She intended to remark on this to Stefan during their nightly call, but she didn’t get the chance. It transpired that he’d had a call from Jem that afternoon, some question to do with
Remainers
, Luna gathered, guessing with a wince what he was going to say next.

‘Have you not told your friends that we’re back together?’ he said, sounding bewildered and more than a little unhappy. Before she could reply, he continued, ‘Because I mentioned Mika’s video to her, trying to prove I was a big boy and it didn’t bother me that another man was filming you dreaming about sex. And the next thing I know Jem is talking to me in her “oh poor Stefan” voice. Like, “Oh, poor Stefan, still pining after Luna when she is so
clearly
over him.”’