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The kid is eyeballing Sigurd and looks scared out of his wits.
“Honestly,” I mutter, reaching past his hulking form to hand the tip to the kid. “Here,” I say, shooting him a bright smile. “Sorry for Paul Bunyan; he’s not used to people.”
When the door closes and the kid drives away, I approach Sigurd.
“Who is Paul Bunyan?” The prince asks.
I ignore this. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Huh?”
“You were so mean to that kid.”
“Mean?”
“You stood in his way after I invited him in,” I said.
“He was ogling you.”
“Ogling? Come on.”
“Anastasia, he was staring at your…breasts,” he says, breaking up his sentence with an awkward throat clearing. Sigurd’s eyes are everywhere but on my face.
I shiver at that. No one calls me Anastasia.
“Stasi,” I correct.
“Stasi,” he repeats. “Did you not see the way he looked at you?”
I stare at him, my body still ringing from when he spoke my name.
I don’t want to admit that I felt uneasy about how the young man stared. Because wasn’t I just staring at the prince in the same fashion?
Wait, how did he know my name? Oh, of course, he tracked me down, remember?
With that fact in mind, I don’t want to give Sigurd the satisfaction that he protected me from something. He’s annoying. He’s here because he wants to discuss how he overtipped me. He wants his money back so badly that somehow he found out where I was. I suppose the royal hunter has his ways.
“I can take care of myself,” I say.
We stare at each other for a long moment, neither of us saying a word, but both of us undoubtedly feel the charge of extreme annoyance in the air between us.
An early evening breeze sweeps in through the windows, and I shiver involuntarily.
“Get changed into some dry clothes. I’ll start a fire,” he says.
“Fine.” I swallow the rest of my tea and hand the empty mug over to his outstretched hand. My body is deeply aware of him staring as I walk to the bed to rifle through my suitcase.
Alone in the bathroom, I peel off my swim top and shimmy out of my swim shorts, tossing them into the tub with a wet slap. I get a look at myself in the mirror. A drowned rat looks back at me with a matted mess of hair. The lake water might look clean, but I’ll need to wash my hair now.
And then I see what it is that caused such a fuss. My nipples are as hard as river stones. Likely they were poking right through the swim top. Oh gods.
Heat flushes my cheeks as I rinse my suit under the warm water, hang it over the rod, and idly wonder what happened to my bra.
While I’m washing my hair and trying not to think about my tits, a thought hits me.
When I’d first approached the grumpy-looking Sigurd on the dock, he’d been holding my bra.
And now it’s probably lost in the lake due to my clumsy ass.
