Page 43 of Hotter on Ice

She smiled brightly, bursting with pride.

And then it was on, and he was back there at the Icehotel. The clip was from inside one of the cold rooms—the beds, the sculptures and even the damn reindeer pelts were all in view. He could see everything, feel everything. He could feel her.

“Mummy and me looked for you, but we didn’t see you,” she said. “Why not?”

Henning searched for an answer that a five-year-old could understand, but he was coming up with nothing.

Molly had already turned back to the screen. “Here she is, here she is. Mummy said she thought this was your friend.”

And then Alya was there. On the screen. It was the day of the photo shoot, and the Viking bed was in the background. The clip started with her laughing at something that was said off camera. God, she was lovely. After spending all those days with her, it shouldn’t have caught him off guard, but seeing her took his breath away.

The sound of her laughter hit him hard. The weight of the last few days without her crashed down on him, and his body felt so heavy, too heavy to even move. He was in love with Alya, and he couldn’t have found a less suitable match if he had chosen deliberately. This amazing woman was everything he wasn’t. Everything he didn’t deserve, especially after that last day together.

Molly was expertly skimming through the video until she found a little snippet from an interview. It was from the last day, and he had waited in the lobby instead of following her into where they had set up a makeshift studio. Alya was answering a question about Federov’s style, but Henning barely heard a word of what she said. All he saw were those big, blue eyes, those lips, her skin—so soft, he could still feel it under his fingers. He would never stop aching for this woman.

“Is she really a princess?” asked Molly, interrupting this downhill train of thought. “Is she magical?”

Henning felt the uninjured corner of his mouth tug up, despite everything. “Are princesses magical?”

Molly nodded eagerly, her eyes wide.

“Disney,” Suzanne muttered, rolling her eyes.

“Is she?” Molly asked again.

Henning nodded solemnly at his niece. “She’s not a princess, but I guess you could say she’s magical.”

“Can I meet her the next time you see her?”

He swallowed another lump in his throat and gave Molly a kiss on the top of her head. “I don’t think there is a next time, sweetheart.” The words were so painful to say, and he braced himself as the heaviness came back. “But if there is, you can definitely meet her.”

Suzanne was staring at him, her lips parted, her eyes wide in shock. Shit, he had to pull himself together. Alya’s interview was still playing, and Henning couldn’t bring himself to tell Molly to turn it off.

“It must be difficult to have a private life in such a high-profile role,” said the interviewer.

“Yes, though my ‘private’ life hasn’t been that private, right?” said Alya with a little chuckle. Damn, she was amazing. She looked so confident, even as the interviewer asked about one of the hardest times of her life. “It’s my experience that we don’t choose who we fall in love with.”

“So how do you manage that balance, the personal and the public?”

She shook her head, smiling. “I don’t have any good advice in this department. I tend to fall in love with the wrong person, and it’s never a secret for long. But each time, I still hope that we’ll get it right.”

Suzanne’s voice broke into the interview. “Molly, put that tablet back upstairs, please. Uncle Henning has seen enough of that.”

His niece frowned in confusion, and she looked like she was going to protest, but Suzanne added, “Now. Please.”

As soon as Molly left the room, Suzanne put her hands on her hips. “That woman is in love, and now I’m almost sure it’s with you. I saw it. You’ve got that look on your face like you’re going to lose it soon. Explain to me what the hell is going on?”

“It’s complicated,” he muttered. “It’s for the best. Really.”

Except it didn’t feel that way at all. It didn’t even feel complicated anymore. It just felt like shit.

It felt like shit as he ate his hotdog and his pink cupcake and as he played Molly’s favorite princess card game, and he felt even worse as he sat in his black Audi on the drive back to his empty apartment. Suzanne and her family were the most important people in his life, and he was spreading his brooding misery to them, too. At least Molly hadn’t seemed to notice.

But Henning just couldn’t let go of it. Somehow, in this unfair world full of death and sadness, the most beautiful, most amazing woman in the world had wanted him. And he had shoved the invitation to stand by her side tonight at the fund-raiser back in her face out of fear for her. He’d overreacted outside the Icehotel out of fear. Henning sat in his car long after he had turned off the engine, gripping the steering wheel, trying like hell to figure out why he had sabotaged the most beautiful week of his life. Why was he clinging to this fear, even after the threat had faded, still letting it guide him? For the first time in five years, he let himself examine the part of him he had tried so hard to bury.

He hadn’t felt fear when he walked into that warehouse with Sanjay; it was one of the reasons he had quit the AFP. Instead, he had calculated the risk of going in early, just the two of them, and assessed it as the best option. If he had held them back, acted out of fear, would that have saved his teammate? Maybe, or maybe the explosion would have happened when the whole team came into the building. Maybe even more of his team would have died. Still, lying in the hospital bed in the days after the explosion, he had wondered if that absence of fear meant something was wrong with him, if years of seeing the very worst of people had turned off something fundamentally human about him.

But at Blackmore Inc. he had felt fear for Alya. It was the reason he had been so drawn to her, long before their days at the Icehotel, and the reason he had gone so far beyond the parameters of his job. It wasn’t just about making her feel safe. His fear for her had let in a sliver of hope that his years on the AFP hadn’t permanently damaged him, that there was a chance he could be whole again.