Protecting the Desert Princess(58)

                ‘Good.’

                ‘I have had flowers, a whole day in bed…’ She counted things off. ‘A day out sightseeing.’

                ‘What was your best bit?’

                ‘Apart from the orgasms? Then your verdict party,’ she answered immediately. ‘Have you enjoyed it, Mikael?’

                ‘Very much?’

                ‘What was your best part?’

                He paused as he tried to think, but he could not choose a best part, from her biting her teeth at him on the day they met, taking out that ruby—there was not one part that he could list above another.

                ‘It’s all been good,’ he settled for saying. ‘Though I do feel bad about our row.’

                ‘Mikael!’ she scolded. ‘I loved our row. If it wasn’t for our row you wouldn’t have had to calm me down and agree to bring me to your home…’

                Mikael actually laughed. ‘Were you manipulating me then?’ He was impressed rather than annoyed. ‘Do you ever stop?’

                ‘Never.’ She grinned. ‘Every word I say is with the intent to get what I want…’ She looked over to Mikael, still smiling and looking a whole lot happier than he had on the day they’d first met. ‘Can we have sex like the actors do?’

                That was the wish she had made.

                And he would make it come true.

                ‘Yes,’ he said, and decided that for however long they had left he would simply let himself love her.

                ‘You could film it with your phone and then we could watch it together afterwards,’ Layla said as he led her down to the cabin.

                ‘No!’

                ‘It would be fun.’

                ‘Not a chance,’ Mikael said, and he meant it even though he was laughing.

                He would miss her so.

                ‘You are so good to me,’ she said as she sat on the edge of the bath and watched him shave just so that he wouldn’t mark her.

                ‘Why wouldn’t I be good to you, Layla?’

                ‘All the people who think you are a savage bastard…’ she said. ‘They don’t know you.’

                ‘I don’t want them to,’ Mikael said.

                He’d liked living under his lonely rock—a career that consumed nearly all of him and pretty meaningless sex had been enough till now. But tonight, for one last night, he stepped out into the sun.

                ‘You remember what I said back at the car?’ she said as he dried his face. ‘That even if I beg…?’

                ‘Layla, you don’t have to worry about that,’ he said. ‘Right—where do you want me?’

                ‘Sorry?’

                ‘Am I coming home from work, or are we already in bed? What was happening in the episode of that TV programme you saw?’

                She started laughing—on a night she’d thought she never would. It was a side to Mikael she had never seen.