“If I’d arrive an hour later, you’d have been gone. Right?”
Heat flashed her cheeks. She’d felt bad about running out on him, but really, what was the point of staying and having yet another conversation? Or worse, pretending she didn’t feel as she did?
“Tell me, is there a nice Dear John letter for me, waiting upstairs?”
She bit down on her lip, shaking her head slowly from side to side.
“So no note, huh? No explanation?”
“I figure I said all there is to say.”
He leaned forward in his seat. “But I didn’t.”
“Oh.” Her heart stammered.
“And now I have thirty minutes with you as my captive audience; you’ll have to hear me out.”
She lifted a brow, her pulse going haywire. In the close confines of the car, she wanted to stop time, to draw him to her, to pretend none of this was happening. She wanted to undo the decision she’d made the night before, to get a refund for the flight she’d booked. She wanted—impossible, out of reach things.
“The stuff with Clare really messed me up, Skye.”
She bit down on her lip, not sure if she had the fortitude to hear him discuss his ex-fiancé. But he was talking, and she had to listen, because maybe, just maybe, he was going to explain why her idea of their relationship being real was so impossible.
“I know now that I didn’t really love her, but I trusted her. She was a friend. Her betrayal just confirmed everything I’d felt ever since my parents’ divorce. I’ve been wondering if I didn’t propose to Clare because I thought she was a ‘safe’ option, owing to our friendship. And then she cheated on me and it blew my life to pieces. I thought she was the one person who’d never let me down and yet she did.”
“It must have hurt,” she said with a gentle nod.
“That’s the thing,” he frowned. “It hurt my pride. It hurt my sense of masculinity,” he added with a wry grimace. “Hence I went out and got laid the next night, to prove to myself I could.”
Sympathy and disbelief flooded Skye. The idea of Matthieu ever doubting his sexual prowess was ridiculous. “But I realized last night, that Clare never really had the power to hurt me.” His eyes pushed to hers, his lips a grim line in his face. “No one does, except you.”
She sucked in a deep, uneven breath.
“When I watched you walk away, it was like my world was being shaken off its foundations. I have fought the very idea of love and relationships for so long, it’s become second nature, and the closer we got, the more I fought you, the more I told myself that it was okay, because you were leaving and then things would go back to normal. But when you really did leave, when I could no longer reach for you, touch you, kiss you, make you laugh, hear you sing, it forced me to admit to myself that I can’t fight you. This is so much bigger.”
Her throat felt like it had swollen to the size of Uluru, but she pushed him, anyway. “What’s so much bigger?”
He reached out, running his thumb over her cheek as if to convince himself she was real. “I love you,” he said, simply.
It was so simple, and so achingly perfect, that her heart twisted hard in her chest. But Matthieu wasn’t finished. It was as though having kept a lid on his feelings for so long, he was finally able to voice them properly, and he didn’t want to stop.
“I love you in a thousand ways and for a million reasons. You are all that is good and kind, but more than that, when I’m with you, I feel like I’m truly myself. Everything is better when you’re in my life. If you really love me, if my stupid behavior hasn’t ruined things forever, then please, don’t leave me, Skye. Not today, not ever. I love you, in a way that is so different and new to me, I want to spend the rest of my life understanding it, and you.”
Her eyes lifted to his. “Last night—,”
“I was an idiot,” he groaned. “I was clinging to a deal I made with myself after Clare, without realizing that it was jeopardizing the most important thing in my life.”
She closed her eyes on the perfection of that.
“I know this isn’t easy,” he said, surprising her, because Skye’s mind was filled with rainbows and shooting stars and all things happy and perfect. “I can move to Australia. I can get one of those Akubra hats and become a farmhand. I don’t care, Skye,” he laughed, a deep, happy sound. “So long as we’re together.”
“Oh, Matthieu. I’d already decided that my life is on a different path to that. I wanted to buy that property to feel close to my dad, but he’s in here, in my heart, and always will be. I have to live my own life—he’d want that for me.”
Matthieu tilted his head to the side, eyes swirling with emotion. “And what is your path, cherie?”
Goosebumps covered her skin because it was the first time he’d used that name and she’d known he meant it. “Honestly? I don’t know. But, as you say, if we’re together, I know I’ll work it out.”
He leaned forward, kissing her again. “I love you so much, I can’t find words to explain it. I just know that my heart is yours, that all I am belongs to you, and always will.”