Valhalla Cupcakes Read Online Free Page B

comfortable around him by the minute, and while he seemed plenty dangerous, she didn’t think he was dangerous to her. He’d picked her up and carried her down the stairs like a sack of grain, but he was a Viking from five hundred years ago after all, and he did put her down quickly enough. He’d pulled out a chair for her when she thought her legs would give way, and knelt down, presumably to comfort her, before she flipped out and ran for cupcakes. And now he sat across from her, quite civilly carrying on a conversation. If he wanted her neck snapped, it would have been snapped by now.
    She didn’t think he could have possibly done anything close to warranting being trapped in a painting for five centuries. He was probably just a victim of unlucky circumstance. Witches be crazy, after all.
    “These cakes of yours are really quite good,” he said, taking another and licking the frosting.
    The sight of his tongue sliding across the pink fluff made her go cross-eyed for a second. And he was smiling again, which didn’t help her equilibrium. Now that he was three dimensional, he was sinfully, outrageously handsome, all rugged planes and chiseled muscles.
    “Go ahead and eat them all,” she urged, always delighted to see someone enjoying her baking.
    He groaned and tipped his head back as if beseeching the heavens, but took yet another cupcake, downing it in three bites.
    “How are you here now?” she asked. “Do you know what broke the curse?”
    He nodded around a mouthful and laboriously swallowed, looking close to tortured as he ate another cupcake before answering.
    “I think it’s because you wished it,” he said. “Might I have something to drink?”
    “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry.” She raced for a pitcher of ice water.
    He drained an entire glass and looked hatefully at the last cupcake, but pulled the paper off and crammed it into his mouth. He drank another glass and settled back in his chair, looking slightly ill, but triumphant.
    “You’re here because I wished it?” she asked, positive she had done no such thing. “That can’t be right. My friend is the one who bought the painting.”
    He shook his head. “I heard you say it. You fell on top of me at the time.” He leered suggestively. “I didn’t mind it.”
    She blushed, remembering her sobfest before she gave up and took a nap to clear her mind. She eyed Erik Agnarsson up and down and blushed harder. His answer was too easy to possibly be the real reason he’d got out of the painting.
    “I’m surprised I was the first woman in five hundred years to wish you were real,” she said, wanting to crawl in a hole when she saw his amused reaction. She really had to stop thinking out loud.
    His smug look told her she probably hadn’t been the first woman to wish that, but he turned serious. “I think it was the tears that made it work. You were crying, yes?”
    “Yes.” She turned in a circle to encompass everything she owned. Which she really didn’t, since the mobsters would be coming around again to collect. When she didn’t have the money, who knew what they would do? “This is all I’ve got in the world,” she sighed. “I’m supposed to open tomorrow.”
    He looked around and nodded. “This does not seem a credible depiction of the Valhalla as I’ve always imagined it, but it’s a nice place. And your skills with those small cakes are excellent. You should have much success.”
    “I guess you didn’t hear the part where the loan sharks came in and told me I have a month to pay them back a hundred grand or scary things will happen?”
    “Why did you borrow money from such people?”
    “I didn’t,” she wailed.
    As she explained, he moved closer to her, almost protectively, and she began to think he was at least partly right about why he’d been freed from his curse. She needed someone like him right now, someone who was bigger and more menacing than those thugs.
    Oh, she would have loved it if he had already popped out