‘Can I tell you about something that happened to me, when I was a little girl?’
He sent her a stiff nod.
‘When I was a baby my father walked out on me and Darcy and my mum. Like your father, he was selfish and shallow and he only ever thought about himself. I was so young when it happened I didn’t even remember him, but I’d built up a picture in my head of this ideal guy. Then one day my mum told us we were going to meet him. I was so excited. But when he opened the door that day he didn’t even make eye contact with Darcy and me. He told my mother he’d “moved on”, he told us to go away, and so we did. And that was the last time I saw him.’
‘That bastard.’
She forced a breath past constricted lungs, the fury in Lukas’s expression all the courage she needed to continue. ‘I was devastated, but I buried that hurt and that unhappiness. I told myself not to care, not to love, not to want that kind of commitment from anyone, to protect myself from ever feeling that devastated, that rejected again.’
How foolish not to realise much sooner that Lukas had been doing exactly the same thing with her and Nico.
‘But can’t you see,’ Lukas said, ‘I’m damaged the same way he was, the way my father was. You need to protect yourself from me. Loving me will only lead to more of...’
‘Shh.’ She touched his cheek to silence him. The scar tensed, but the devastation, the guilt in his eyes was like a benediction.
‘What I wanted to say, to explain, was that I’ve realised something very important in the last few weeks and months knowing you, seeing you with Nico and being with you.’ She blushed. ‘Both in bed and out of it. Something I didn’t realise fully until I said those vows on the beach today and I wanted so much for them to be real.’
He sighed, shook his head. ‘They can’t ever be real. I...’
‘Lukas...’ She touched her fingertip to his lips. ‘I’m not finished.’ She smiled at his frown—the evidence that he was very rarely interrupted somehow endearing. ‘What I wanted to say was that for months after that day I relived that moment on my father’s doorstep hundreds of times in my head. I would imagine that he looked at me and Darcy and he told us he loved us and he always would. Eventually I had to kill that dream because it was only making me more unhappy, more insecure. But you know what I’ve realised since meeting you?’
Lukas shook his head, his frown deepening.
‘I’ve realised that it wouldn’t have made a difference what he did or said that day. Because during all the years of my childhood, before that day and after that day, he’d never once shown me he loved me. He wasn’t there for birthdays and Christmases... He wasn’t there for my first day of school or my last. He wasn’t there for all the times when I was scared or lonely or needed comfort and reassurance. For all the times I needed to know I was cherished and important. He wasn’t there, because he’d chosen not to be. But ever since I met you, Lukas, you have been there. You’ve shown me, and Nico, in so many little ways, and some pretty enormous ones—bone marrow donations and twenty-eight-point-five-million-pound palaces most definitely included—that you do care, that we matter. And that’s what love is.’
‘The bone marrow was a trick of genetics,’ he said, still frowning. ‘And the house was just money.’
‘Well, thank goodness for that trick of genetics,’ she said, knowing it had been much more than that. ‘And it’s not the amount the house cost that’s important,’ she said. Even though in some ways it was, because he’d bought that place for two people he didn’t even know, whereas his own father had refused to pay twenty-eight-point-five times less than that to make his own son safe. ‘What’s important is why you bought it for us. You wanted us to be safe. To be secure. And that matters. Just like when you came round three days ago to show Nico how to play ball, or when you spent hours building a Lego house for an explorer you’d never heard of the first time you came to see him. You showed Nico he matters to you, even though you were scared of making that commitment. And every time you tried to seduce me into staying the night at your penthouse because you were worried I was too tired to go home, or rang me up in a panic because I had gone out without my bodyguards, you showed me that I mattered to you too.’
‘I only did what any person would do; you’re settling for too little, Bronte.’
‘Any person?’ she said, raising her eyebrows at him. ‘Like your father? Like mine?’
‘They were damaged people.’
‘And you’re not. That’s the point.’
‘Even if that were true,’ he said, ‘and that’s a very big if, it still doesn’t mean I can give you and Nico what you need. Emotionally speaking.’
Yes, it did, she thought. But she didn’t have to convince him of that yet. He would discover it in time. All the goodness, the tenderness, the sensitivity inside him, the huge capacity for love he had denied existed for so long, would be self-evident to him too, eventually. All she had to do now was give them the chance to explore all those possibilities.
‘You don’t have to worry about giving us anything, Lukas.’ Although the fact he did worry totally proved her point. ‘All you need to worry about is whether you want this marriage to be more than a convenience. More than a contract between two business associates. More than a means of giving your child your name. And keeping all the very nice people here employed and this resort a success. Because if you do, I do too.’
* * *
‘Yes, damn it.’ The words shuddered out of Lukas on an anguished breath.
He grasped her waist, unable to hold himself back from touching her a moment longer. He pressed into her body, banded his hands around her slender waist as she lifted up on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his. He could taste the salt of her tears
and feel the urgency of his own arousal. He let his hand drop, to grasp her hips and pull her against the straining heat of his erection.
‘But what if this is all I can give you?’ he said, the words wrenched from him. ‘What if this is all I’ve got?’
‘It’s not,’ she said with a certainty that humbled him, her face full of love and acceptance. And complete and utter faith.
It scared him to death.
He should draw back, should stop touching her. He couldn’t have sex with her under these circumstances. But all those dark desires, all those driving needs—to be wanted, to be loved—broke over him and he found himself lifting her into his arms.