‘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.
They were drunk on lust and enjoying it.
‘We’re on a boat and sailing for ever,’ Layla said as he took her face in his hands. ‘Tomorrow never comes.’
They had shared many, many kisses, but she had never tasted him so tender as his hand traced her spine and then unhooked her bra. She felt her breasts naked against his skin; it made her ache from the inside.
It was Layla who went for his belt but then changed her mind. Her hand held him through the fabric, growing him, holding him, stroking him, till Mikael pushed her hand away and led her to the bed.
Layla lay there, watching him undress, and she slid under the sheet as a naked Mikael joined her.
He kissed not her mouth but the breasts he had never tasted, and Layla relished the gentle licks and soft sucks, looking down at his lips as he blew her nipple to a painful peak and then kissed down her stomach and then back upwards.
‘Take them off,’ she said as his fingers stroked her through her bikini bottom; she wanted to feel him there.
But Mikael would not.
And so she did.
She undid the sides as he kissed her, and they wrestled just a little with each other, and with self-control—and then Layla’s hand went where it must not, and she held him with no barrier this time.
Mikael rose to his knees and Layla looked at him.