‘I know.’
She sipped her coffee and then turned away, walking with her spine straight and shoulders squared to the lounge. She sat on one of the dining chairs, though mistakenly chose the one with his jacket on it, so a very faint hint of him reached her, making her crave him so badly she felt as if she’d been punched low in the abdomen.
She cradled her coffee, taking warmth from it.
‘I had thought love to be a construct, and then I met you and I lost myself completely. Discovering that it had all been an act of pretence for you...’ He pulled a face. ‘My pride was hurt. I lashed out.’
She swallowed. ‘You had every right to be angry,’ she murmured softly. ‘I never thought I would meet you. I certainly didn’t plan to...to feel like that. I wanted not to. I wanted to be able to ignore it.’
‘Neither of us could ignore it,’ he said with grim honesty.
‘It doesn’t matter now.’ Her mouth lifted in what she seemed to remember was a smile. It felt incredibly strange on her face: heavy and tight.
‘It matters to me,’ he said, the lines of his body rigid. ‘I came here today to apologise, Matilda.’
She closed her eyes. Her name—her real name—on his lips was heaven. But the knowledge that all this was coming to an end was an answering degree of agony.
‘What for?’
‘Take your pick,’ he said, with a rueful smile that was belied by the self-disgust in his eyes. ‘Suggesting you prostitute yourself to me. Telling you that all we’d shared was sex. Forcing you off my island even when every bone in my body wanted me to beg you to stay.’
Her eyes lifted to his, clashing with their grey depths in confusion.
He moved towards her now, and finally crouched at her feet. ‘For telling you I loved you and then proving myself unworthy of your love in every way.’
He didn’t touch her, but he was close, and just having him near her was sending goosebumps over her flesh.
‘For leaving you to face all this alone, when I should have been standing beside you? For showing that I didn’t support you even after I’d promised you with every kiss and every moment that I would?’
Her heart was racing but it was agony, each beat like a tiny blade pressing into her ribs. She felt it scratch and her breath burned in her lungs.
‘You were angry,’ she said again. ‘But you need to know that the woman you met on the island...the one you said you loved...that was me. All I lied about was my name.’
He nodded. ‘I know that.’
She froze. The three words brought her an exquisite sense of confusion. He knew that? What did that mean?
‘I think I knew it even as I was telling you to go.’
He lifted a hand and rubbed it over her knee, as though he could scarcely believe it possible.
‘I went to Prim’amore to deal with my own demons. I thought I had. But then there was so much anger—anger about my mother, my father, their choices and their lives—and I took it out on you. That was wrong of me.’
She flashed her eyes to his, bu
t looked back at her coffee instantly.
His voice was insistent. ‘Because you, Matilda Morgan, are the love of my life, and you deserved so much better than that. I should have stood shoulder to shoulder with you, listened to you and told you that I didn’t care. That nothing you could do would change the facts. That I’d fallen in love with a coffee-addicted, clumsy, teetotal book-lover, and that I wanted to love her for ever. I want to love you for ever.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I will anyway, regardless of what you say. But, cara, I beg you to let me love you.’ He groaned. ‘Give me another chance to love you as you deserve.’
The words didn’t make sense.
Nothing about this did.
She shook her head, her eyes huge in her face.
Was she hallucinating? Heaven knew she’d been sick enough and Rio-obsessed enough to be imagining this.
‘I had no way of contacting you,’ he admitted, the words gravelly. ‘And I fought with myself for a long time. I stayed on the island and told myself again and again that I was glad you were gone. But every night I would reach for you, needing you.’