Her heart turned over in her chest. “You’re wrong.” She shrugged, forcing herself to remain strong. “You loved me, but only so long as I fitted in perfectly with what you wanted.” Dark colour slashed his face. “And I loved you, but only so long as you fitted in with what I wanted.” She turned around, and it brought their bodies back together. “We both needed more from one another than we were willing to give. You needed me to be someone different. Someone who would pack up and travel, and live without the security and permanence I crave.”
He didn’t speak. She was right, only he hadn’t realised it would be such a burden to her. For Cristiano, who lived to explore, it had never occurred to him that anyone could view the notion with anything other than pleasure.
“And I wanted you to stay.” She swallowed and again that delicate throat of hers knotted visibly. “I wanted you to forget the world. No.” She shook her head sadly. “I wanted to be your world.” Her eyes were darkened by memory. “I wanted to be enough for you. I wanted to be the continents you explored and the excitement you craved. I wanted to be the adventure you needed. But I never would have been.” She lifted a hand and curled it around his cheeks.
Her statements were launching questions in his brain that he alone needed to answer. He would attend to them later, in the solace and privacy of the middle of the night. “And so you married Edwards.”
She gripped the vanity behind her for strength. “Yes.”
“When you loved me.”
Her expression was pale. “Yes.”
“You think you have any right to lecture me about what we each deserved, when you acted in such a manner? You behaved like a selfish bitch, Ava. To marry him when you loved me. To marry him, when you should have been with me. And now to stand there as though I wounded you …” He welcomed rage in the face of anything else he could have felt. Regret. Self-recrimination. Pain. Despair. Anger was the best of all those emotions. He gripped it and fanned it. He embraced it to the extent that he didn’t feel anything else. He didn’t notice the way she recoiled in pain. He focussed only on his own indignation. “You were a child. Only twenty one years old, and you married him as though your life depended on it. I offered you the world. I wanted to explore the world, yes, but with you.”
“And yet when I said no, you went anyway,” she interjected with silent stoicism.
“You didn’t say no to travelling with me, Ava. You said no to me. You told me you had a life here. That you wanted to marry Angus.”
She blinked. Had she said that? The argument had been awful. She had been on the edge of a wobbling precipice, and the fall had scared her into speaking without thinking. She had spoken from a haze of sentiment, and she could never accurately recall what she’d thrown at him in those miserable moments. Though his words were emblazoned on her soul.
“I was scared,” she said quietly. “I knew that even if you did stay, it would mean breaking your heart as well as Angus’s.”
“You cheated on him,” he ground out angrily. “You cheated on him with me. You let me fall in love with you before I even knew you had promised yourself to another man. You let me take your virginity, Ava, and then you married him.”
She spun away from him, the crude recollection of the bare facts stripping away so much of the background emotion that justified her actions. But her reflection confronted her in the mirror; she couldn’t escape the blame.
“It all happened so fast,” she said quietly. She braced her palms on the cool counter, trying to take comfort from its smooth top. “I loved Angus. I have loved him forever.” She forced herself to meet his eyes. “You know that.” She got no pleasure from his obvious reaction of betrayal. “But I didn’t realise, until I met you, that it was a different kind of love. Nothing had prepared me for how you’d make me feel.” She lifted a hand and toyed with the ends of her hair nervously. “I should never have let it happen. Apart from anything, I had agreed to marry him. He deserved the courtesy of my faithfulness.”
“The courtesy of your … Jesus, Ava, you speak as though life is some kind of … Victorian romance novel. You live life like it’s a sterile equation.” She jerked at his harsh indictment. “With me, you feel passion, and it scares you. I understand that now, and I understood it then. I make you feel that life is terrifying and unpredictable, which it is. I never offered you something so bland as marriage. I never said we would love one another forever. Nor that I wanted to be with you forever. Only that what we shared deserved more. More time. More togetherness.”
“I know,” she pushed aside the familiar pain. For his lack of assurances hurt now as much as ever. “You can’t understand what it’s like to have lived with that kind of romantic insecurity all your life. You and I are different people, Cris. Too different.”
A muscle flexed in his jaw. “Yes. You’re damned right we are.”
“It never would have worked.”
“Perhaps not.”
He was fuming! Though he spoke with a measured sense of patience, she understood the dark emotions that were his undercurrent. “We should just forget about this.” She gestured to the shower and felt her skin warm as the memories slammed into her.
“We are not finished.”
Ava blinked up at him, and clarity was a much-needed boost of assurance. “We are.” Her smile was lukewarm. “We’re so fi
nished, Cris.” She stepped away from him but he clamped a hand around her wrist.
“Fuck, Ava. Tell me what happened.”
Her eyes were enormous in her pale face. “What do you mean?”
“Your marriage. I came here expecting you to be married to him. I braced myself for that.” In the back of her mind, she heard his confession. He had inadvertently revealed a need to brace for seeing her again. Even now, years after what they’d shared, he was as affected by it as she. “I deserve to know what happened.”
She was pulling away from him in every way. She yanked her hand free and rubbed her wrist. “You didn’t like that I cheated on him with you. You didn’t like that I had an affair?” Her eyes clashed with his. “Neither did Angus.”
A swarm of emotion, a lot like relief, flooded his system. “He knew about me. About us.”
Ava was cool now. She was remembering herself. And her life. She was remembering what she owed not only to herself but to Milly. She was remembering how this man had disappointed her. And she was remembering that she’d sworn she would put herself first forever more. Herself, and Milly. “Yes. You might think the worst of me, but even I couldn’t have married Angus knowing what I’d done. Knowing how I felt about you.”