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O n the following Saturday, I opened the door to a brisk knock, and looked into Ral Jonasson’s cheerful face.

“Good morning, Mr Arnesson,” he said, and beamed. “I’m here for your swimming lessons.”

“Ah.” I scratched the back of my neck. “Is Mikko?—”

“Busy?” Ral cut in. “Yes. Far too busy. Can’t make it. I am here in his stead, sir. At your service.”

I could hardly turn him away. It was an hour’s walk from town, and he was doing me a great favour.

Besides, though he was a cheerful lad, I wasn’t fooled. There was a stubbornness to his expression that suggested he wouldn’t go easily.

“In that case, thank you, Ral. I appreciate it.”

His smile widened as he stuffed his hands in his breeches pockets, shooting me a curious glance from under his lashes. They were a startlingly dark brown, as were his eyebrows, making a strong contrast to his fair skin and the ash-blond mop of hair which was currently tied back in a short queue.

I caught a blur of movement in the trees behind him, and sighed. “This is Ral Jonasson. He’s here to teach me how to swim. Please don’t frighten him.”

“I beg your pardon?” Ral said.

Sayan was standing so close behind him that when he exhaled, the fine hair on the top of Ral’s head lifted. “I will not frighten him,” Sayan said, then stared with wide eyes when Ral yelped in shock and leapt away, crashing into my arms.

Sayan growled and plucked him away from me, lifting him off his feet and setting him back down a good two yards away. Then he positioned himself behind me, curling one arm low over my belly and the other high at the base of my throat.

Ral’s cheeks darkened when Sayan ducked his head and kissed my neck, opening his mouth over my skin and finishing up with a possessive nip.

I just knew that he was staring the poor boy down when he did it.

“All right,” I said briskly. “Ral, would you like to come in?”

His enormous brown eyes went from Sayan to me and back again. “Yes. Please. Yes, please.”

Sayan grunted and released me without being asked. He vanished into the cabin, and I watched with amusement as Ral’s attention fixed helplessly on the high, round arse bouncing its way into the shadows of the house behind me.

I stepped back and ushered Ral in, guiding him towards the kitchen only to bump into him when he stuttered to a dead halt as we reached the open doorway of the bedchamber.

Sayan had, predictably, draped himself over the bed.

It wasn’t even a seductive pose. Gods knew he had more than a few of those in his repertoire, and he wasn’t shy about using them.

He’d spread himself out until his long limbs covered as much of the bed as possible, giving us an unambiguous shot right between his legs. He stared as if unconcerned at the ceiling.

“Ral,” I prompted.

“Yes!” He strode ahead of me into the kitchen. “Sorry, Mr Arnesson. I didn’t mean to be nosy.”

“No need to apologise.” I gestured at the kitchen table. “Take a seat and I’ll make us some tea. And please, call me Erik.”

He picked a chair with its back to the door, and thus no line of sight to the shameless naiad all a-sprawl over the rumpled silk bedclothes. “I am sorry, though,” he said. “It’s just…I wasn’t prepared to see your naiad here in your house, and he is…he’s… you know.”

“Beautiful,” I said with a smile, setting the kettle on the stovetop.

“Yes. I’ll do my very best not to make an idiot of myself about it, though. Again. I was less overwhelmed by it today. He startled me, is all.”

The first time Ral had seen Sayan was back when Henrik had been attempting to entice me into courting one of his nephews, and had brought Mikko and Ral along for a surprise visit.

The three of them had caught us in a compromising position. Sayan had me on the ground as he often did before I’d coaxed him into my house and taught him about beds and sofas and soft rugs, and neither of the Jonasson boys had even given me a second look.

Of course they hadn’t.

Sayan had been designed by the gods to dazzle and seduce all who laid eyes on him, to draw them to him, wanting and ready to be showered with the pleasure that would, in exchange, sustain Sayan’s immortal life.

It worked.

Ral, utterly mesmerised, had walked into the lake fully clothed to get to him. Mikko had been as bad.

The happily married Henrik, however, had admired Sayan’s beauty but was otherwise unaffected. Knowing Henrik as I did now, I could only imagine that he’d teased his nephews quite horribly over how they’d lost their heads.

I made the tea and pulled out the chair across from Ral.

“I appreciate you giving up your free time to teach me,” I said, passing him one of the sturdy earthenware mugs I favoured.

It was a far cry from the delicate tea service of finest porcelain that had graced the breakfast table in my mansion in Hallevalt, and much more to my personal taste.

“Happy to help. I am very much capable of fulfilling your needs, and am at your disposal for as long as it takes,” he said. “Whenever I’m not working, consider me all yours.”

I held his gaze.

He grinned at me, flashing a small dimple, before taking an innocent sip of his tea.

He didn’t break eye contact.

“Hopefully this won’t take too long,” I said. “With any luck, I’ll only inconvenience you for an hour or two today.”

“Uh…it might take a bit longer than that,” he said carefully.

“Really?”

“Or a lot. Henrik said you’ve never swum before?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re old, of course, which means it will take longer. Oh! No, no. Not too old. Certainly not. You’re mature, not old. No one would call you old. You’re a perfect example of a very fine, mature man.” He grimaced. “Sorry. Anyway. Where was I?”

“I’m not sure.”

He puffed out a short, laughing breath. “Me neither.”

“Something about me being old?”

“ Mature ,” he corrected at once. “What I was trying to say is that something like learning how to swim is much easier when you’re young. Young people tend to be more fearless, mostly because they’re less aware of consequences. Such as drowning. But don’t worry. I won’t let you drown.”

“That’s comforting to hear.”

“We’ll have you swimming by the end of summer, no problem,” he said.

The end of summer?

It was late spring.

“You think it will take that long?” I couldn’t keep the dismay out of my voice.

“I’ll have you splashing about in a couple of lessons, but to get you to a point where you can swim any distance with confidence, unsupervised? Yes, end of summer.”

“I honestly had no idea it was such an undertaking. I’d never have asked if I’d known I’d be taking up so much of your time. Perhaps I should find a professional instructor?”

I wondered if there was such a thing as a professional swimming instructor.

If there was, I doubted that I’d find one here in this lakeside town, where the water seemed to be a part of life for everyone other than me.

Ral waved this off. “As I said, I’m happy to help. What else would I be doing in my time off work? I have a small garden but a man can only weed for so long, and almost everyone else my age is either courting or already married and setting up house.”

I remembered what Henrik had said—Ral was young, hearty, and restless.

Still, there must be fewer opportunities for entertainment in Laskeld than I’d imagined, if walking two hours on his days off to swim in a freezing lake with a ‘mature’ man was the best of the leisure activities available to him.

“Besides,” he said, “I’m sure that you’ll pick it up quick as anything.”

“I suppose we’ll have a fairer idea after today.”

He nodded and drained his tea, setting the mug back on the table with a gentle click. “Who knows? You could be a natural.”

I was not a natural.

Ral, fortunately, turned out to be a natural teacher, as patient as he was cheerful.

Sayan walked with us down to the lake, circling us relentlessly and alternately bumping into Ral then resting a hand at the back of my neck before breaking away for more circling and a repeat of the whole performance, until we came out of the trees and the lake was in sight.

As soon as it was, he broke into a run and flung himself into the water without leaving even a ripple.

The sight was athletic and erotic in equal measure.

“How do you manage it?” Ral asked, adjusting himself discreetly. “Gods, how do you not get completely overwhelmed by him, all the time?”

“Well, as you said, Ral, I’m old?—”

He gave me a friendly nudge. “Mature.”

“—and with age comes experience.”

“You mean experience with naiads and the like? Have you seen any dryads?” He turned to walk backwards, fascinated gaze going from my face to the tangled forest behind me.

“No one around here has seen a dryad for at least two hundred years, the way I hear it. Before you, the last person to see even the naiad was Gil Olsson, and he’s ninety-five. Now that’s old.”

“Sorry to disappoint, but I haven’t seen any dryads. Though Sayan tells me that they are here.”

Or they had been. When I first arrived, a few of them regularly roamed through the forest near my cabin. Once Sayan had claimed me and the area around me as his territory, however, he’d scared them all off. Again, so Sayan told me.

All apart from one curious little one, who lingered despite Sayan’s warnings.

He was an endless source of irritation to my beloved.

“In any case,” I said, “it was experience with relationships and attraction I was talking about, not experience with immortals.”

“Ah.” Ral stopped walking backwards and faced front again. “Can’t say I’ve had much of that first-hand, either.”

“No one you have your eye on?” I asked thoughtlessly as we reached the waterline.

He stopped and gave me a level look. “No one available.”

We stared at each other for a charged moment. I was oddly wrong-footed, and the first to look away.

Then Ral gasped, ducking his head and hunching his shoulders as a great splash of water slapped him in the side of the face.

Sayan stood in the shallows, glaring.