She gritted her teeth. ‘That’s just sex. And frankly, we’re using it to paper over the cracks in this arrangement.’
‘We what?’ He dragged in a sharp breath. Then another. ‘You’re complaining about our sex life?’
‘You use it to avoid emotional intimacy.’
He froze. ‘And what do you use it for?’
She couldn’t answer that. She just couldn’t.
He stared at her. ‘You read too much into everything. You attach meaning to memories that don’t actually matter.’
‘Don’t they matter? Don’t you think they impact how we both choose to live?’ She stepped closer, suddenly shaking with emotion, with how important it was to cut through to what was vitally important. And honest.
‘Yes, I’ve been hurt before and I don’t want to be hurt again,’ she admitted. ‘And if I stay with you, I will be. I’ve tried to treat this like an arrangement, but I can’t. I’m not like you, I can’t keep my emotions “under control”, and I don’t want to.’ She inhaled a deep breath and forced herself to finish. ‘We’ll work together to take care of the baby, but being together in an empty relationship isn’t right. I can’t keep sleeping with you, Leon. It’s destroying me.’ It hurt her so much to say it, but it had to be done. ‘You deserve more than this...facade. You deserve love. And so do I.’
She wanted him to find love. He deserved it after everything he’d missed out on. And she wanted to find real love for herself too. To be loved. While she could be everything but the one he truly wanted, that wasn’t enough for her. She wasn’t going to put herself through the heartache of being with a man who didn’t really want her. Her child needed to see both its mother and its father, loved and loving. If not to each other, then to significant others when and if they appeared.
She’d tried, but she couldn’t be like him. Nor was she the one for him. Because if she was he’d have recognised it already—he would have felt it. He would have known he didn’t need that contract to bind her to him. He was a smart guy, not slow.
‘Love?’ he scoffed. ‘There’s no such thing as love. That’s the rubbish of fairy tales and films. There’s just reality and practicality. There’s lust and there are contracts.’
And that just proved her point completely. Because for her there was love. She felt it for him. She ached to give him everything she possibly could, but he didn’t feel that way for her. She braced tightly against the painful intensity of rejection.
This is the right decision, Ettie. Right, right, right.
Leon stared at Ettie’s expression in the silence that followed his outburst. Dread surged in his belly, a hideous whirlpool of horror and regret. He shouldn’t have said that. He shouldn’t have crushed her dreams with his icy reality. She hadn’t deserved that. Yet he’d had to be honest with her.
He cleared his throat. ‘We can make this work, Ettie. We will make it work.’
‘Yes,’ she nodded curtly, ‘but not the way you want it to.’
He glared, waiting for her to explain.
‘You might be prepared to settle, but I’m not.’ She straightened. In a blink the distress was gone from her eyes. There was only determination there now.
‘Settle?’ The chill spread from his gut to his limbs and then—blessedly—up to his brain. Finally he could think clearly.
‘I do believe in that kind of love, Leon.’ She looked up at him. Emotion shadowed her eyes, but dignity shone clearly from within them. There were no tears, only resolution. ‘I’ve fallen in love with you,’ she said. ‘That’s why I can’t stay and why I won’t marry you.’
He stared, dumbstruck, as his brain short-circuited. She what?
‘How can that possibly surprise you?’ she asked with a shake of her head. ‘How could I not...? But you don’t love me and that’s okay.’
‘You’re not in love with me,’ he blurted mechanically.
She was confusing it with gratitude. He was the first person to do things for her. Not betray her. Not abandon her. Not take and take and take. And she had such little experience with sex, she didn’t realise it was just physical pleasure. He’d rubbed her up the right way, that was all.
‘It’s the lifestyle,’ he said roughly.
Now her expressive eyes flashed—all anger. ‘I don’t fall in love with things, Leon. You insult me. Your contract insulted me. I’d still love you even if you were poor and lived in a cardboard box. That you felt I needed some reward for staying with you...’ She shook her head.
That feeling inside roiled and burned but still he rejected what she was saying.
Her expression hardened in the face of his silence. ‘You don’t get to deny my feelings or my wishes. You don’t get to make all the decisions.’ She drew in a deep breath. ‘You’ve found out all my other secrets—you might as well know everything. I fell in love with you probably that very first night. But you don’t feel the same. You’re trying to do the right thing, but it’s too much to ask of you—it’s obvious you don’t really want to when you can’t bear to reveal anything of yourself and you can’t trust me for more than five minutes. And I get why, I do. You shouldn’t have to open up to someone you don’t care about. But don’t deny what’s true for me. It’s painful enough. You don’t want emotional intimacy with me. Fine, don’t have it. But you don’t get physical either. You don’t get to have the cake and eat it too. You want too much from me. I can’t separate it the way you do.’
She did not love him. He could deny that and he would. ‘You barely know me.’
‘I know all I need to know. Who you are is what you do. And you do loyal. Kind. Funny. Determined. Stubborn to the point of—’ She broke off as her breathing hitched.
Yet it wasn’t enough, was it? He’d given her everything he could and it still wasn’t enough.
‘You don’t have to feel bad,’ she added, her clear-eyed gaze narrowing on him. ‘You don’t have to pretend any more. You can find someone else.’
Is that what she wanted?
‘How bloody generous of you, Ettie,’ he said scathingly. ‘You haven’t even given this a chance. You say you love me but you can walk out just like that?’ He snapped his fingers as his anger flared. ‘Not much of a love really.’
Her face whitened. ‘I also love myself. I am worthy of that job promotion. I deserve the great sex life you’ve shown me is possible. You’re the one who’s taught me I deserve more. Not to expect less or settle for worse. And thank you for that. But now I have to protect myself.’ She lifted her chin. ‘You don’t love me.’
‘That’s not the point.’ He dismissed the statement.
‘It is.’
He was so furious he couldn’t look at her any more. Wildly he glanced around and saw the herbs on the windowsill had become little more than a collection of musty leaves in the pots. Without her presence and care they hadn’t taken long to wither and die. So typical. He felt his grip on himself slip as that monstrous crushing inside threatened to kill every last brain cell he had and render him only capable of...what?
Oh, his body knew what it wanted—to prove to her that she couldn’t resist him again. Hell, he needed to get away before he totally lost it.
She’d completely rejected everything he’d offered. She’d rejected him.
‘At the very least I can house you,’ he said icily. ‘Not here.’ He retrieved the ring from the table. It burned his palm and he shoved it into his pocket. He stalked to the door, needing to leave before he said or did something he’d regret. ‘I’ll be in touch to make new arrangements.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LOVE? SHE WANTED LOVE?
Leon was living in a perpetual state of frustration. With every breath he whipped from fury to wrath and back again.
Let her go. Let her stay in her horrible, small apartment. Let her be alone and miserable if that was what she was determined to do. He was happy to have his house bac
k to himself, right? He’d found it hard sharing with someone for the first time in his life. He’d go back to how it had been—how he liked it. Alone, independent, strong, easy.
But he paced the vast, empty space until the puppy got too tired to follow his every step. He sank onto the sofa and scooped the little guy up. The pup immediately curled into a ball on his stomach and began to snooze.