‘Do you love me, Willow?’
She looked into his eyes—which were the colour of midnight in this candlelit room—and she opened her mouth to tell him no. But a rush of stupid tears filled her own eyes and prevented her from saying anything, and mutely, she found herself shaking her head.
‘Do you?’ he said again. ‘Just tell me, Willow. Say it out loud. That’s all I’m asking. Tell me you don’t love me and I’ll walk out of here and you’ll never see me again.’
She tried. For almost a minute she tried. Tried to force the words out of her mouth in the same way that you sometimes had to prise a stubborn Brazil nut from its shell. But the words wouldn’t come. They just wouldn’t come. At least, not the words she knew she should say. The other ones—the eager, greedy ones—they suddenly came pouring from her lips as if she had no control over them.
‘Yes,’ she burst out. ‘Yes, I love you. Of course I do. I didn’t want to. I still don’t want to. And I’m sorry. I don’t want to mess you around and I certainly don’t want to send out mixed messages. So it’s probably better if you forget everything I’ve just said. Because...because it can’t lead anywhere, Dante—it just can’t.’
His eyes narrowed, like someone who had just been presented with a locked room and was working out how best to open it without a key. ‘Do you want to tell me why?’
‘Because I can’t give you what you want,’ she whispered. ‘You told me you wanted marriage. And babies. Your grandfather told me that he longed for nothing more than to see the next generation of Di Siones.’
‘And?’
‘And I can’t promise you that. I had...’ She swallowed and licked her lips. ‘I had treatment for my illness before I started my periods and they said it’s possible—even likely—that I may not be able to have children.’
‘But you didn’t ever find out for sure?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I know it’s stupid, but I preferred to live in a state of not knowing. I guess I was too scared to confront it and I didn’t want yet another negative thing to define me. It seemed much easier to just bury my head in the sand.’ She shrugged and bit her lip. ‘But I suppose that’s difficult for you to understand.’
She didn’t know what she had expected but it hadn’t been for Dante to pick up her hand—her left hand—and to turn it over and study her palm as if he was able to read her future, before lifting his solemn gaze to hers.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not difficult at all, because all of us are sometimes guilty of not facing a truth which is too hard to take. I did it with my own brother—refused to accept that my reluctance to share him was what lay at the root of our rift. But listen to me very carefully, Willow—because you’re not thinking logically.’
Her blurry gaze fixed on his stern features. ‘What do you mean?’
‘There is always the chance that you or I can’t have a baby. That applies to every couple in the world until they try themselves. Unless you’re advocating putting all prospective brides and grooms through some kind of fertility test before they’re allowed to marry?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘I don’t think even royal families adopt that strategy any more.’
‘Dante...’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’ve had your say and now I’m having mine. Understand?’
Pressing her lips in on themselves, she nodded.
‘I love you,’ he said simply. ‘And the past few weeks have made me realise how much. Time spent away from you has only increased the certainty that I want to spend the rest of my life with you, and only you.’ He placed a warning finger over her lips as they began to open. ‘With or without children of our own. Because children aren’t a deal-breaker. You not loving me would be the only deal-breaker. That’s the only thing which would stop me from wanting to marry you, and I’m afraid you’ve just signed your own fate by telling me that you do love me.’
Dazed, she stared at him. ‘Am I allowed to say anything yet?’
‘Only if you’re prepared to see sense and accept my proposal—unless you want me to go down on one knee in this very public place and ask you all over again, despite the fact that you’ve already auctioned off the first ring I gave you?’
‘No! No, please don’t do that. Don’t you dare do that.’
‘So you will marry me?’
‘It seems I have no choice!’
She was laughing but somehow she seemed to be crying at the same time and Dante was standing up and pulling her into his arms and wiping her tears away with his fingers, before kissing her in a way that made the last of her reservations melt away.
And when the picture of that ecstatic kiss made its way into the gossip columns of next day’s newspapers—with the headline Society Girl to Wed Notorious Playboy—Willow didn’t care. Because now she realised what mattered—the only thing which mattered. She was going to focus on what was truly important, and that was yet another thing Dante had taught her.
He’d taught her that love made you strong enough to overcome anything.
So she threw the newspaper down onto the carpet and turned to look at him, running her fingers over his olive skin and thinking how magnificent he looked in her bed.
Sleepily, he opened his eyes and gave a huge yawn as he glanced down at the bare hand which was currently inching its way up his thigh. ‘I guess we’d better go out and buy you another ring. Would you like that?’
‘I’d like that very much.’