Page 36 of What Blooms in Barren Lands

“Hot daddy?” Kevin suggested, and Dave elbowed him playfully as I nearly choked on my coffee.

“What do you do then?”

“Close my eyes and think of England,” I deadpanned amidst laughter. “Now, for the last time, can we please talk aboutanythingelse?”

“Fancy an outing, Ren?” Einar found me in the hall after breakfast, and my heart fluttered at hearing his voice.

He touched my shoulder briefly, but just long enough to evoke the sense of closeness we had shared the night before.

“An outing?” I raised my eyebrows at him.

“You promised me something, remember?”

The expression on his face was pleasant enough, but his voice was all let’s-get-down-to-business. I felt almost scorned.

He led me to the deserted hall in the opposite building, the one underneath his lodgings. Four men already waited for us, sitting around one of the tables.

Russell smiled at me, a set of large, crooked teeth partly obscured by his copper beard.

“Hey luv,” he greeted me. “I ’ope this lucky bastard let you get some sleep las’ night.”

They all chuckled, and for about the tenth time that morning, blood bloomed hotly in my cheeks. I felt Einar’s hand stroke my lower back in an unspoken apology.

“Why do you think you need to worry about my sleep and not his?” I retorted feebly, but they all roared with appreciation.

“This is Jean-Luc,” Einar introduced me to the oldest man.

“You are, or were, the manager of this resort, right?” I asked as I shook his hand, recognising his name.

“That is right,” he confirmed in a slight French accent.

He was over fifty, a little, wiry man with a greying buzz cut.

“And this is Finlay.” I shook hands with a tall Scotsman about Einar’s age who had rich dark hair and prominent green eyes.

“Albert.” The man with the unusual, rounded accent took my hand with the least amiable expression of them all. “Right, and now that we’re all friends, you’re going to take us to the bows,” he said harshly in a tone suggesting he considered introductions nothing but irrelevant pleasantries.

He wasn’t much taller than me, the top of his head barely reaching above Einar’s shoulders. He was slender in build and sinewy, but there was speed and quiet aggression in all his movements that made me instinctively wary of him.

“Of course.” I nodded without betraying my discomposure. “How do we get there?”

“We’ll take Jean-Luc’s jeep,” Einar told me. “Russ and Finlay will stay here, the rest of us will go. You’ll come along to help us find the place. You said you left them on a beach. Do you know its name or the name of any towns in its vicinity?”

I scanned the room as if for clues, taking in the vacant tables and a long-abandoned napkin under a chair in the corner.

“Uhm, it was in the Northwest. A camp was nearby, and the sign read something like ...ostrich.”

“L’Ostriconi?” Jean-Luc suggested helpfully, and I nodded without any degree of certainty.

“Good.” Einar pursed his lips with satisfaction, and instantly, my mind exploded with memories of the previous night.

Good girl.

I shivered, and he fixed me with a sinful stare, as if reading my mind.

“Now, will you promise to behave if I let you have your bow back, Ren?” he asked me and crossed his arms while straightening up to his full height.

“No way in hell!” Albert spat out before I had a chance to do anything more than swallow.