A Midwinter Fantasy - Leanna Renee Hieber [91]
She reached for his limp hand and pressed it against her cheek. “We can both go now.”
With her support, Vidar scrambled to his feet and they headed to the door. The two female warriors standing guard eyed them as they passed through the entrance hall, but made no move to stop them leaving.
Sonja clutched Vidar’s arm, her feet frozen in nothing but the pink fluffy socks she’d worn to bed. “Will you take me back to the resort? I can still make my flight if I hurry.” She didn’t want to be parted from Vidar if he really was her guardian angel. She had always loved her angel so that meant she loved Vidar, but this whole situation was too weird. She needed time to get her head around it.
Vidar stopped at the door. His breath heaved in and out on a sigh. “Now you wear Odin’s ring. You’re trapped here.”
She stared at the ring on the third finger of her left hand and frowned. The band had been loose when Odin’s lackeys put it on her. She tugged but it wouldn’t budge. “Don’t tell me this is supposed to be a wedding ring.” The sting of bile burned the back of her throat.
Vidar laughed, bitterly. “More like a manacle. It ties you to Iceland.”
“How? It’s a ring.” But even as the words left her mouth, she conceded it was no ordinary ring. She’d watched in disbelief while Odin’s ring spawned the band that now hugged her finger like a leech.
“We’ll talk when we get back to the resort.”
They exited into the swirling snowstorm. “Gleda,” Vidar called. His huge snow cat approached out of the whiteness.
Vidar swept Sonja into his arms, deposited her on the cat’s back, and then climbed up behind her. “Hang on tight.” He reached an arm on either side of her to grasp handfuls of the cat’s mane; then he shouted a command against the wind.
The cat trotted to the edge of the ice platform and jumped into the abyss. Sonja hung on to the beast’s fur for dear life as her stomach somersaulted. She clamped her thighs against the creature’s sides until her muscles ached. The bite of the wind stole her breath, so she closed her eyes and buried her face in the cat’s fur, praying they reached the ground in one piece.
Wind whistled past her ears, whipping at her hair. Just as she wondered if they would ever stop falling, the cat jolted beneath her. Powerful muscles flexed as the creature bounded along a trail between the pine trees surrounding the resort. Lights sparkled in the distance, and she heard the reassuring sound of corny Christmas tunes.
The creature halted just inside the tree line, its sides heaving. Vidar jumped off and pulled her into his arms. Sonja rested her head against his shoulder, suddenly exhausted, her body ready to shut down after the traumatic night. The security guard opened the small gate for Vidar with a friendly greeting as if it were normal for him to arrive out of the forest in the early hours of the morning carrying a woman in her pajamas.
Once they were inside her cabin, Sonja went to the bathroom to clean up, then changed into dry clothes and wrapped herself in the bed quilt. Now that the ordeal was over, she had started to wonder if she’d been confused about Vidar and her guardian angel being one and the same. If he’d had a mental link with her all her life, surely he’d have mentioned it by now. The whole idea sounded crazy when she tried to put it into words.
Vidar put on his coat and turned up the heat to its maximum. “I hate the damn cold,” he said, rubbing his hands together.
“Then why run a theme park in Iceland?”
Leaning back in his chair, he gave her a weary smile. “My father’s such a sweet old guy; I can’t bear to leave him.”
She snorted and pressed the quilt over her mouth. He held up a hand and flashed the ring on his little finger.
A chill swept through her that had nothing to do with temperature. “You said something about it being a manacle, but a ring can’t stop you leaving.”
Even as her comment fell into the silence, she realized how foolish her incredulity sounded when she’d just been rescued from an ice palace in the sky and ridden a flying cat. She fingered