Sandra Hill by The Last Viking

because he was doing his own gaping at each of the new wonders he encountered; water fountains, ballpoint pens, aquariums. Besides, he was probably used to female adulation, looking as he did.
    As they headed back toward the mall entrance, weighed down with bags, Rolf stopped suddenly.
    Now what?
    “Give me fifty dollars, Merry-Death, and mark it in my book.” Rolf had made her purchase a small notebook to keep track of all his expenses. His male pride again.
    “Why? I thought we got everything.”
    “Not quite,” he said and veered off to the right after she handed him the bills.
    “Oh, no,” she groaned, realizing that he was entering Victoria’s Secret.
    “Rolf,” she hissed, finally catching up, her bags banging against her legs, “what are you doing in here?”
    “All day we have been shopping for me, but naught for you. I want to buy you a gift.” He held up a flame-red, see-through nightie. “What do you think?”
    Her face heated, turning a matching flame red, no doubt. “I don’t wear things like that to bed. I prefer…nightshirts.”
    “I know,” he said dolefully.
    “You know?” she squeaked out.
    He shot her a glower of consternation. “I was tired last night, not dead.”
    Oh, geez, what else did he see? Or remember?
    He put the hooker-style outfit back on the rack, and said idly, “In truth, I prefer you wear no bed garments at all.”
    As her heart started racing, he forged ahead into the store.
    “These would show off those wonderfully long legs of yours.” He stuck a pair of French-cut silk panties in her face. “What are they?”
    “Underwear. Rolf, please,” she whispered, mortified at all the attention they were getting. And, oh, Lord, was that one of her students over there—no, two of her students, Amy Zapalski and Joleen Frank?
    He riffled through the assorted colors till he’d found a flesh-tinted pair edged with white lace, held it out before her as if to judge the size, and then tucked it under his arm. “Just right,” he said with a wink.
    Next, before she could grab his arm and drag him out the door, he said, “Aaaah,” and hightailed it to the teddy section.
    “What purpose do these garments serve?” he was asking a pencil-thin, blond sales clerk who’d appeared like a flash of lightning at his side.
    “Those are teddies, hon. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a teddy before.”
    “Nay, never,” he replied, his mouth dropping practically to the floor with appreciation as she held up one scandalous creation after another.
    “That one,” he said, stopping her at a pink satin, two-piece outfit, with tiny straps. Very simple and very sexy.
    “What do you think, sweetling?” he asked, drawing her to his side with an arm looped over her shoulders. They’d dropped their packages to the floor back by the see-through nighties.
    “I think you’re crazy, that’s what I think,” she muttered, but when he called her sweetling, she felt warm and tingly all over. Like a schoolgirl. Oh, Lord!
    “She loves it,” Rolf told the salesclerk, who was assessing him like a giant cotton candy she’d like to inhale. He squeezed Meredith closer and kissed the top of her head.
    “No, I don’t love it,” she argued. “It’s…it’s pink.”
    “And?”
    “I’m thirty-five years old,” she informed the brute in an undertone. “Thirty-five-year-old women don’t wear pink.”
    “They should,” he proclaimed, but by now his focus was diverted elsewhere. He was gaping at a mannequinin the back of the store wearing the undergarment sensation of the nineties.
    “Bloody hell!” he breathed.
    “That’s it. No way! Never!” she asserted. “I draw the line at a Miracle Bra. Come on.” She tugged on his arm.
    “Miracle Bra,” he said on a sigh, but he followed after her. While paying for his purchases, he remarked to her in an aside, “I have a brother Magnus who would buy a dozen of those, one for each of his mistresses.”
    She glared at him dubiously.
    “He