‘Well?’
This when they were outside, heading towards the grass, joining the milling crowds of couples who had made smart choices. She turned to him, shading her eyes from the glare of the sun, and he just looked at her.
‘Come on.’
He reached out, clasped her hand, and her whole body quivered. The feel of his fingers linked with hers was like an electric charge, and under its impact her brain shut down. All those protesting voices were silenced as they found a shady spot close to the Cathedral and sat on the ground.
‘Just say what you’ve come to say, Alessandro, and don’t bother dressing it up with words you don’t mean. You didn’t get involved with me...not in the way that most people think of involvement. You sexually connected with me and you weren’t ready for it to end. You couldn’t produce proper involvement out of a hat, but you still had to show me that it wasn’t over...’
She hugged her knees up to her chest, suddenly drained.
‘How was I to know the difference between involvement and a sexual connection?’ he said, half to himself. ‘How was I supposed to recognize the difference when I had never been presented with the situation before in my life? When we returned to London I figured that I could put you behind me by dipping into someone else...’
‘That’s just horrible.’
‘I’m being as honest as I can. It’s what I’ve always done. I’ve gone from woman to woman, never realizing that the time might come when I would find myself incapable of doing it...’
‘You’re doing it again, Alessandro,’ Kate whispered. ‘You’re confusing me with words.’
‘I’m using words to tell you how I feel... You asked me why I followed you. Well, I followed you because...because I couldn’t stand the thought of you touching another man, seeing another man, laughing with another man...’
‘You were only jealous because you weren’t ready for me to let you go—you would have seen any man as competition—but that’s not real jealousy. Real jealousy has its basis in something bigger...stronger... It’s different.’
But hope flared...
‘In my world there was never a place for jealousy of any kind. It’s not an emotion I’ve ever experienced. But I...I recognized it...’ He smiled crookedly. ‘And you’re right. Real jealousy does have its basis in something bigger—much, much bigger than lust. It wasn’t just imagining you getting into bed with another man...’
He clenched his jaw and shook away the violence of emotion that assailed him when he thought about that.
‘What I felt... I couldn’t even bear the thought of you looking at anyone else...talking to anyone else...’
He risked grazing her cheek with his finger. It was enough to send his libido soaring into overdrive and he wanted nothing so much as to take her hand and place it firmly on his erection, so that she could feel what she did to him. He wondered whether she was feeling it too...the current zipping between them, electric and impossibly alive.
‘I’d never planned to... God, Kate, you have no idea how much I want you right now...’
‘Wanting just isn’t enough for me,’ she whispered, and a wave of misery threatened to engulf the fragile shoots of hope that had been growing.
‘And it’s not enough for me either...’
He tilted her face so that she was gazing at him, locking her in their own private world even though they were surrounded by people.
‘I never planned on losing control of my emotions,’ he told her seriously. ‘I’ve seen what that can do. I watched my parents get lost in each other and I lived through the ramifications. I thought that it was just about money...’ He hesitated.
‘But it wasn’t, was it?’ Kate said softly. ‘It was more than just having feckless parents who encouraged each other to blow their respective fortunes, who had no self-control... It was about being shoved aside, wasn’t it?’
‘They were very good at employing nannies. My parents were so wrapped up in one another that they had no time for a kid. No time for anything. I resolved never to let myself succumb to that kind of emotional excess—and, for me, falling in love with a woman constituted that kind of emotional excess...’
Kate found breathing difficult. She feared that if she exhaled she would somehow blow apart the atmosphere.
‘But I fell in love, my darling... I didn’t plan to, and I don’t know when it happened... I just know that when you walked out on me my world stopped turning...’
‘You hurt me. I know I walked away, but I still waited for you to come—waited for you to just...miss me so much that you couldn’t help yourself. I waited for you to catch up with me, and how I felt about you, but then there was that woman in your office and suddenly it was like my whole stupid world really and truly fell apart.’
‘I thought I could find myself some clever woman who would give me an uncomplicated life...with none of the inconvenient loss of self-control that came with you. It was a knee-jerk reaction. You had me wrapped around your little finger and I knew that the second I saw you in that dress. God, you have no idea what that did to me...’
‘I love you,’ Kate said simply. ‘I fell in love with you and I knew I had to walk away because I would just end up getting more and more hurt. You couldn’t commit and I couldn’t settle for anything else.’
‘You love me?’ Alessandro said shakily, enjoying this loss of self-control with the woman he had given his heart to. ‘I guess your mother is going to be in for the surprise of her life, then, isn’t she?’
Kate chuckled, delirious with happiness, sliding close to him and knowing that he was as aroused as she at their physical contact. ‘I think that she’s already had the surprise of her life—when I confided in her, when I stopped pretending to be an emotional robot and showed her that I was human and fallible and an idiot...’
‘And how do you think she’ll react when we tell her that we’re going to be married? Because I can’t imagine my life without you, Kate. So...will you marry me? Be my wife? Never leave my side? Have lots of babies for me?’
Would she marry him? Try stopping her!
‘Wild horses couldn’t stop me!’ She laughed and flung her arms around him.
Who said that fairy tales couldn’t come true?