He took one more frustrated look at the computer and paced over to the door. The landing lights were lit, so he walked out of the office toward Taina. She sat with her dark glasses on but she looked up as he approached. He didn’t say anything, simply took the seat opposite her and clicked on the belt. He rubbed his stubbly chin and gazed stubbornly out the window.
She leaned over toward him. “Is this how it’s going to be, Daidan? You ignoring me? Christ, just look at me.”
He looked then. All he could see was her pale face and her sunglasses. “What’s the point, eh, Taina?”
Mistaking his words, she pushed up her sunglasses onto the top of her head.
He shook his head. “That’s not going to help. Even without your sunglasses I don’t see you. I thought I did. But I don’t. You’ve a shield between you and the rest of the world. You might have set it up as a protection growing up but it’s become a part of you now. Something to hide your true self behind so that no one can know you.” He sat back with a sigh and looked out the window again. “And that includes me.”
“I’ve obviously spent too much time with you then, haven’t I? Because you’ve turned self-protection into an art form.” Taina let the glasses drop onto her nose and turned away.
Taina sank back into the leather-lined seats of Daidan’s Porsche convertible and looked moodily out the window.
“I don’t know why you decided to get rid of Papa’s old Daimler.”
Daidan flexed his hands around the steering wheel and gripped it more tightly as he negotiated the rush-hour traffic of central Helsinki. “Precisely because of those three things: it was your father’s, it was old, and it was a Daimler.”
“Nothing wrong with a Daimler,” she muttered, unable to argue on the first two points.
She’d begun the flight back from Ma’in distressed by Daidan’s reaction, but with each passing hour she was beginning to get more and more annoyed. Yes, she could see why he’d be so angry—he’d always been jealous and possessive—but there was no way she was going to open up that part of her life to him. She simply couldn’t. It had been destructive then and had the potential to be even more so now. She’d told him it was a brief relationship—it had nearly killed her simply using that word—and that it had been a mistake, a mistake with long-standing consequences. Everyone made mistakes, she thought miserably as she continued to look out the window. Didn’t they?
She looked at him once more. She could tell by the flicker of his lids that he was aware of her gaze but he didn’t glance at her or speak.
“We can’t continue like this.”
He grunted.
“Apart from anything else we have to work together.”
He still didn’t meet her gaze, just continued to stare straight ahead, even though the traffic was stationary. “Since when have you been so concerned about work?”
“Since I accepted your counter proposal.”
He turned to her then, eyeing her coolly. “Ah yes, the proposal that would see you work for the company from which you derive your wealth, and replace your baby with a new one.”
She glared at him. “My baby died from complications a few weeks after she was born. She made me realize I want to have more children but there’s no way that she’ll ever be replaced, she was her own person. I’d never imagined you could be so insensitive.”
“Then we’re both learning things about each other, aren’t we? I’m insensitive and you’re unfaithful. What a great team we make.”
“It didn’t have to be like this, Daidan. Not if you and my father had treated me like a person, rather than a chattel.”
“That’s ridiculous. I never treated you like a chattel.”
“What would you call negotiating the terms of our marriage as a business deal?”
“Sensible.”
She turned aside and looked out the window. She frowned. “Hey, where are we going? This isn’t the way to the apartment, or the business.”
“We’re going to be based on the island from now on.”
“What? Why?”
“The risk is too great for us to continue to work in the city.”
“For the plans, or for me?”
He glared at her. “Both. I’ve had everything moved over to the island. We can work from there.”
“You see!” she said angrily. “That’s precisely what I mean. You take these unilateral decisions, without even discussing them with me.”
“There’s nothing to discuss.”
“Then there’s no hope for us. If we can’t even discuss the simplest of things, there’s no future.”