A Midwinter Fantasy - Leanna Renee Hieber [107]
Did that mean he was coming with them? She exchanged a glance with Vidar. Much as she wanted to get to know her father and discover how to use her power, she wanted time alone with Vidar. In some ways she knew him so well, but in other ways they had a lot of catching up to do.
“Go on ahead,” Troy said with a glance over his shoulder. Odin had stood and was shuffling toward the door in the back wall. “I’ll find you after I’ve tidied up here.”
Chapter Ten
Two weeks later, Sonja flew from London to Italy to meet Vidar. She waited impatiently for her bags before hurrying out to find him. Even in the middle of the bustling crowd he stood out, looking very Italian in his dark glasses with the collar turned up on his leather jacket.
She abandoned her luggage cart to throw herself into his open arms. While they’d been apart, she’d only had to think of him for his presence to fill her mind, but she’d missed seeing him, touching him, making love with him.
She wormed her fingers inside his jacket while he kissed her. “Did you miss me?” she asked breathlessly when they came up for air.
He grinned. “Always, elskan mií.”
“Shouldn’t you call me something Italian now, like bella?.”
“Angling for compliments?”
She grinned back at him. “Always, my love.”
Vidar loaded her bags in a black BMW before driving her along the Amalfi coast. The serpentine road followed a fairytale route around sparkling blue bays and through quaint villages of tiny whitewashed houses stacked up the steep coastal cliffs. Sonja finally relaxed, releasing the last few stressful weeks in London, moving her few belongings out of her aunt’s house into storage and sorting out her affairs. Her aunt hadn’t been her aunt at all, but a Valkyrie tasked with guarding her. Saying good-bye to someone she’d known all her life but never really known at all had been as surreal as everything else that had happened to her recently. Vidar had spent the time initiating the sale of Santa’s Magical Wonderland to a Norwegian company, and she sensed he would miss the place. He’d told her that throwing himself into developing a business in the human realm had been the only thing that had kept him sane over the last few years. As for the rest of his life, he’d mentioned some years spent with her father when they were young men, and a devastating war between the light elves and the dark elves that had lasted for centuries. Now she and Vidar would have time to talk, she hoped to discover everything he’d done over the last two thousand years.
The car slowed as they approached Positano. “That’s the ancestral home of the Folletti,” Vidar said, pointing. “They’re still a small fairy troop, although there are too many for the house now and some of them have dwellings in the surrounding hills.”
Sonja stared out the car window at the white villa on the cliffs, entranced by the labyrinth of tiny balconies and narrow stone staircases. Green shutters, bright ceramic pots overflowing with huge red poinsettia blooms, and terracotta tiles provided a patchwork of color.
Vidar maneuvered the car into a garage that was little more than a cave beneath the house, and she followed him up a stone staircase hewn into the rock to an entrance hall full of darkly polished wood and colorful ceramic tiles. “The place has changed a lot since I left.” He sounded upbeat, but she caught a hint of wistfulness in his tone. His mother had died centuries ago, so returning must be a bittersweet experience.
Leaving her luggage in a corner, Vidar led her through a comfortable sitting room to a glass door. White pillars circled with vines marked the corners of a covered terrace furnished with an ornate metal table and chairs.
He offered her a plate of biscotti and poured from a pot of tea left on the table by a maid. “I thought you might be hungry.”
Sonja stood at the balcony rail, munching the crunchy almond cookie while watching a fleet of brightly colored fishing boats bobbing far below on the blue sea. Vidar wrapped an arm around her waist. She leaned her head against