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The young man shrugged as if to say,not my problem.
‘I can try and get this fixed today for you if you’re prepared to wait?’
Freya folded her arms. ‘How long?’
He pointed at the row of cars in front of hers. ‘Might be a while.’
‘Oh, that’s just great! What are we going to do in the meantime?’
Tarek said, ‘You know, it’s only half an hour back to Cambridge. We could get a taxi back. My father will be coming home soon anyway. We don’t have to make the journey if—’
‘No, I’m still going.’ She looked at Tarek. ‘You can call a taxi and go back, if you want. In fact, why don’t you?’
He eyed her. ‘You don’t want me to come anymore?’
Freya sighed. The trouble was that she didn’t want him to leave. ‘Come if you want.’
Tarek smiled. ‘Of course I want to, if it means spending more time with you.’
A heavy sigh interrupted their conversation. ‘I’ll phone you when the car’s fixed. There’s a truck stop just down the road. You can’t miss it; it’s got the wordDineremblazoned on the roof. If you two lovebirds want some lunch.’
Freya frowned at the mechanic.
Tarek grinned. ‘Yep, sounds good. Be a bit different to our usual lunchtime haunts.’
Freya agreed. ‘I’ll say.’
‘There’s a big shopping outlet next door if you need to kill some time afterwards.’
Freya realised they were going to be there for quite a while. She wasn’t surprised about the shopping outlet. The garage was located on a big industrial retail park. She didn’t plan on clothes shopping, but she guessed it wouldn’t hurt to browse. If they had to kill a couple of hours, there were worse places they could find themselves. She looked at the row of cars in front of hers and smiled sweetly at the mechanic. ‘Any way you could bump my little car up the list, so she gets seen a bit quicker?’
The young mechanic started to shake his head until Tarek stepped in. ‘It would be a huge favour for the lady – and for me.’ He flashed a big grin at the mechanic, large, dark soulful eyes staring at him.
Freya looked from the mechanic to Tarek and back again. She realised why when she had tried to turn on the charm it hadn’t worked. For some reason, she was annoyed with Tarek.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ the mechanic said, smiling at him.
Tarek turned around and caught the expression on her face. ‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Shall we have lunch?’
Freya looked at her watch, surprised that it was midday already. Two wasted hours waiting for the AA man to arrive. She frowned at her car. Who knew how long it would take to fix – if it could be fixed at all? She didn’t want to think of the worst-case scenario. ‘Yeah, let’s get out of here.’
They walked out of the garage, heading down the road that skirted the big retail outlets on the way to the diner.
‘We could go shopping afterwards,’ suggested Tarek. ‘I haven’t been to one of these retail parks before.’
Freya frowned. ‘You’re not missing much.’ She preferred shopping in Cambridge city centre, rather than driving to soulless places like this. But she was there, and there was nothing else to do. ‘Okay.’
‘Do you need to buy anything?’ he asked.
A wedding dress.Freya would rather not think about Theo or her upcoming nuptials. It wasn’t as though anything had been planned, or booked, but wasn’t that the expectation once someone proposed, and you got engaged? She still hadn’t committed to even looking for a dress, let alone starting the ball rolling with planning a wedding.
She knew that the conversation she’d promised Theo before she left was long overdue. It had been festering for some time now, before she’d even set eyes on Tarek; a feeling that she was not ready to take the final step with Theo, and probably never would be. But she was only just starting to acknowledge that.
‘Freya?’
