Page 37 of Viking Vengeance Cruise

Marina links her arm through mine as we follow the group toward the next café. “So. Sienna pointed us toward Poppy.”

“She did.”

“Do we trust that?”

“Not even a little bit.”

“Good. Me neither.”

Up ahead, Nettie is telling anyone within earshot that Harald didn’t even say goodbye.

Men. You give them your heart on a Swedish side street, and they just stand there.

Somewhere in this crowd of Viking-loving, pastry-eating, statue-climbing women walks a killer with a very convincing innocent look on her face.

And my money says it’s not the one who just scaled twelve feet of Swedish lumber to declare her love.

CHAPTER 9

Day 4: at Sea

If Gothenburg was for chasing a murder suspect down a cobblestone side street, today was for pretending I’m a normal woman on a normal cruise.

Sea days are supposed to be the relaxing ones, and I clung to that promise with both hands. I slept in until the decadent hour of eight, met Bess and Nettie for our traditional double breakfast, and spent a solid hour on the lido deck answering letters for my column while the Baltic rolled by in fifty shades of silver.

Nettie spent the morning in mourning over Harald, who never even asked for her cabin number. Bess spent it reminding her that wooden men rarely do.

“He knows where I dock,” Nettie insisted over her third cheese Danish.

“He’s a statue, Nettie,” Bess was quick to tell her. “He doesn’t know anything. That’s his entire appeal.”

In between heartbreaks, I taught two art classes, both on Viking lore, both attended exclusively by women, and both hijacked within the first ten minutes by a unanimous motion that the Vikings be shirtless. I run a democracy, so shirtless they were.

One woman lobbied to lose the pelts entirely on the grounds of climate accuracy. Another argued the spear was “blocking the most important components.” By the second class, the pelts had shrunk to a modesty patch and the spears were, and I quote, “optional.” I’ve never witnessed such a passionate commitment to historical revisionism. Attendance, for the record, doubled.

Then I capped the afternoon off with a nap so restorative I woke up briefly wondering if I’d accidentally been cryogenically frozen.

By evening, we all congregate for dinner in the Main Dining Room, and by all I mean the usual suspects: Bess, Nettie, Marina, Ransom, and even Wes, who decided his captain duties could wait because Marina was going to be at our table. What a coincidence. I’m sure the timing never crossed his mind.

The man can dock a 140,000-ton vessel in a crosswind, but ask him why he’s suddenly free on the one night Marina joins us for dinner, and he’ll start studying the dinner menu like there’s going to be a quiz afterward.

All through dinner, he makes googly eyes at Marina across the bread basket. And she gives a few shy smiles back while turning approximately seventeen shades of pink. Never in my life have I seen anyone blush so prolifically. It’s a time-lapse of a sunset, except the sunset is Marina’s face and it keeps happening every time Wes says literally anything.

“Could you pass the salt?” Wes asks her.

Marina blushes and hands him the pepper.

“That’s pepper,” he says, smiling.

She blushes harder and swaps it for the bud vase, white carnation and all.

“Thank you.” He accepts the vase without missing a beat, plucks the carnation, and lays it beside her plate as though that’s precisely what he requested.

Marina makes a sound I’ve only ever heard from a teakettle. She’s full scarlet now. The woman runs an entire cruise ship’s worth of entertainment without breaking a sweat, but one dark-haired captain asks for a condiment and her circuitry shorts out.

Not that I’m in any position to judge. I was the exact same way when I first met Ransom. Heck, I’m the same way now. Twenty-four hours a day I share a cabin with that man, and he can still ask me to pass the butter in that low voice of his and my IQ drops twenty points.

Nettie leans my way. “Is she having a medical episode or is this flirting?”