Iris left the Harpa, the spell broken, and headed in the direction she hoped the fish and chip shop was. If only she could put her feelings about Jay aside, she thought for the millionth time.
Her phone buzzed again and she pulled it out, barely looking at who was calling, assuming Jay had forgotten to tell her something.
‘Yes?’
‘Iris.’ Her brother Finn sounded surprised.
‘Finn! Sorry, I thought it was Jay calling again.’
‘Is this a bad time?’
‘No, I’m wandering around Reykjavik trying to find fish and chips.’
He laughed. ‘Well, I won’t keep you. I just thought since you’re almost in the same time zone for once, I’d try and actually speak to you.’
‘I’ve missed you.’
‘Me too.’
‘How’re Mum and Dad?’
‘They’re good. They’re away with Don and Carol until next week.’ Their parents always went to Tenerife for a few weeks in February and March for some winter sun.
‘And how are you?’
‘I’m okay.’
Iris was used to this from Finn. It was an automatic response, one he was more likely to use when she was away, not wanting her to worry about him. But she did worry because he’d had a lot of ups and downs in his life that he’d struggled to weather.
‘Really? I worry about you when Mum and Dad are away.’
‘Iris. I’m almost forty. I can be left by myself sometimes now,’ he joked.
‘I know,’ she said affectionately. ‘But now I’m on the same side of the world as you, we can talk more often.’
‘I’ll let you go and find your fish and chips. Call me tomorrow when you have chance.’
‘Okay, love you, Finn.’
‘Love you.’
Not for the first time, Iris wondered what price she was paying for the nomadic lifestyle she led. It meant she was always at arm’s length from her family because it was hard to keep in touch enough to be involved in their lives like she would be if she saw them more often. And more recently, she could blame the fact that she’d never had more than a fling with anyone in the past few years on the travelling too. What was the point of letting herself catch feelings for someone she was going to have to leave behind? Because that was what she had chosen. Her career over everything else and most of the time she was happy with that. But deep down, she knew that her career had saved her. She could devote herself to that without fear of rejection and, in fact, the single-minded way she had thrown herself into work after the split with Patrick was the reason why she was about to become the person who could predict volcanos more accurately than anyone else in the world. That had to be worth sacrificing her personal life.
4
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Siggi had opened up the Iceland Adventures office and for once, wished it was one of the days when Jonas couldn’t stay away from the place. He still hadn’t had chance to ask him whether it was okay to accompany Iris after all, now that they’d established her credentials. And he was itching to see for himself how things were developing.
When he’d come back to the office the day before, after taking Iris to the hotel, he picked up googling her where he’d left off. Reading more about her had left him feeling somewhere between impressed and intimidated. Not only was she a volcanologist, she was one of the leading ones in the field of using data for predicting what might happen in the course of an eruption. There was a lot more to it than that, but Siggi had skimmed over the more technical aspects of her career in favour of finding out as much as he could about the rest of her life.
Most of the information available to him online was to do with her work. Papers she’d written, news reports where she’d given a quote, her work history on some random Who’s Who in volcanology website, but hardly anything about the rest of her life. He knew she was thirty-three and came from a place called Cheltenham in the middle of the UK. He found out she went to university in Lancaster and that since then she’d worked at British Geology Labs. She had a Facebook page people tagged her on but that she hardly ever updated, and when she did, it was about a volcano. He certainly didn’t feel the need to contact hisfriend at the IMO to clarify anything. There was no doubt that Iris Bellingham knew more than most people about what she might be getting into by requesting a trip to a volatile part of the country.
Siggi felt a kind of affinity with Iris. He was nowhere near having a work ethic like hers, but he assumed that to travel around the world, she must want to do that regardless of the volcanos involved. She was looking at data, so he wondered why she was the one who had to come out to the Reykjanes peninsula, unless she wanted to.
Thanks to his own wanderlust nature, he had a terrible track record with relationships and he wondered whether that might be the same for Iris. He always began by being super-invested, but when things got more serious, he ended up leaving. It was never how he planned things would go, but that was the way they went. The day before, he’d been amazed by the expression on Embla’s face while she’d checked Iris into the hotel. He understood entirely why Embla was angry with him. He couldn’t give her what she’d wanted, and he’d been honest with her about that, but accepted that from her perspective, the conversations hadn’t been over when he’d upped and left for Thailand. The need to leave sometimes overwhelmed him to the point of almost paralysing him to do anything except flee. And it had never been the wrong choice, even if he felt the choice had been made for him.
Having established that all signs pointed to Iris being a workaholic, Siggi wanted to respond to her email before she turned up on the doorstep as he fully expected she would at any moment. He called Jonas.
‘Jonas, it’s Siggi.’
