‘I’ll teach you to drive.’
He watched the smile play on her lips as they headed back out to his car. ‘You think you won there, don’t you?’
‘I think I did.’
He turned the car around and went through a few basics with her, but she just kept turning his radio on. ‘Listen to me, Layla’ he said, turning the music off for the third time. ‘If I say brake then you are to brake—there is to be no arguing.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m in charge here…’ Mikael warned, but he saw the press of her lips and the dark mood that had been building since last night inched towards breaking point. Was she serious about anything? he wondered, though he had enough insight to know he wasn’t talking about driving.
A mini-tornado with black hair and eyes had spun into his life and changed every part of it, and she didn’t even seem aware of the damage she would leave behind.
‘Layla!’ he warned as her fingers moved towards the stereo, and the anger in his voice was more than was merited, perhaps, but it came from within.
‘Can I just remind you that I am a princess…?’
He climbed out of the car with his mounting temper and walked back to his sprawling home. She rushed after him.
‘Don’t walk away from me,’ Layla ordered. ‘Mikael. You do not walk away from me.’
She soon changed her mind when he turned and she saw the look in his eyes as he strode back towards her.
‘Okay, you can go now,’ she said, but he did not stop walking till he was right in her face.
‘Never,’ Mikael said, ‘pull the princess rank on me.’
‘But I am one.’
‘Don’t we all know it?’
‘You’re cross with me.’
‘You—’ Mikael was on the edge of losing his temper; he never did—nothing goaded him, he was the goader ‘—are the limit. Have the keys.’ He tossed them at her. ‘Better yet, I’ll take you back to the hotel and leave you there. Better still, I’ll take you back to the city and leave you on the street. I’m done.’
He bent down to pick up the keys from the ground and headed back to the car. It was better that he was away from her; she’d have his heart otherwise.
‘Come on.’
‘Where?’
‘I just told you.’
‘You can’t leave me in the city.’
‘I am,’ he said.
‘Everyone is looking for me.’
‘You’ll be very easy to find,’ he said, and opened the door for her. ‘In.’
‘No.’
‘In.’
‘No.’
‘Fine,’ he said, ‘then you get to stay at the house. I’m off to the hotel…’
He started the engine and she ran in front of the car.
He sat with the engine idling, in air-conditioned comfort, as Layla stood in the hot Australian sun, and he was a fool to even pretend that he did not love her.
Life, Mikael thought as she came round to his window, had been so much more straightforward without her in it.
She tapped on the window and waited as it slid down.
‘Please don’t go.’ she pleaded, but he said nothing. ‘I was playing and I should have listened.’ Still Mikael stared ahead. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled.
‘For…?’
‘Not listening when you were trying to teach me.’
He went to slide up the window.
‘For being a princess.’
‘You can be a princess, Layla, just not when it’s the two of us. Do you get it?’
‘I think so.’
Even he was having trouble defining it. ‘When I say enough, or stop, or there is danger, you must listen to me without question.’
‘You are just like my brother and father—’
‘Please,’ Mikael dismissed. ‘Do you know, I’m actually starting to lean to their side? If they’ve had to put up with your dramas for the last twenty-four years I’m full of admiration, in fact, that they got you to adulthood alive.’
‘We only have a couple of days and you spoil them by being mean to me,’ she said.
‘You forgot to stamp your foot.’ He saw her tense, frustrated face as still she did not get her way. ‘It won’t work with me, Layla.’
‘It worked before.’
‘It won’t work in the important things. Now, do you want to learn to drive?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who’s in charge when you’re a learner driver in my car?’
‘You are.’
She climbed in, and this time Layla did listen.
Half an hour later they bunny-hopped back into his long drive…
‘More to the left,’ he said, his hand hovering over the handbrake, and wondered if he should take the wheel. But she righted the car—though a fraction too late.
‘What was that noise?’ Layla asked.
‘My paintwork.’
‘Oh.’ She pulled to a halt, actually quite smoothly. ‘How did I do?’
‘Very well,’ Mikael said, wondering why he wasn’t jumping out of his car to inspect the damage; instead he leant his head back on the headrest and gave up fighting it.
Pointless and hopeless, perhaps, but in love was where he was.
She was the important thing.
Which meant that something had to be discussed.
And this time when he raised it he wouldn’t let Layla interrupt him.
THEY UNPACKED HER case and Layla put on her new bikini. They had a swim
