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‘Please. Let me just... It’s hard for me; just hear me out. There’s something you probably don’t know about me.... No, there’s something you definitely don’t know about me...’ That standing-on-the-edge-of-a-precipice feeling was back, but he didn’t care whether he fell or not, or whether there would be a safety net to catch him or not. Nothing could have been worse than the past few weeks without her.
‘I was dragged up in foster homes. You told me your story, and maybe I should have repaid the confidence, but confiding is something I’ve never done. I’ve never known how. It’s something that’s sucked out of you when you’re a kid in care. You learn to get tough fast. So, I’ve never told anyone my story.’ He smiled crookedly at her. ‘Until now.’
‘Foster homes?’ She shook her head slowly.
‘Correct. No privileged upbringing. No upbringing to speak of, in actual fact. Just driving ambition and, thankfully, sufficient brainpower to turn that driving ambition into career success. But someone consumed with driving ambition, someone who had to fight to clamber out of a crappy background. What can I say? There was no space left inside me for sharing—I wanted money and everything that comes with it because it made me invincible. And for a long time that was exactly what I was: invincible.’ He looked at her, reading her thoughts, stalling them at the pass. ‘No fancy words, Alice. Just me. Being open.’
‘And then what happened? You were invincible...’ She tried to imagine a youthful, defiant, angry Gabriel and her heart constricted. He had erected the same defences as she had, but his had been made of steel and he had never let them down, and she could understand why. ‘You’re not going to get me back into a non-relationship with you with a sob story,’ she said half-heartedly because she knew that she should still be protecting herself.
‘I don’t want to get you back into a non-relationship.’
‘Oh.’ Disappointment seared through her like a blazing inferno. So he had come to explain himself. That was something—that he had thought enough of her to tell her about his past—but she wanted so much more...
‘I need you to see that for me giving in a relationship had always been a non-starter. I was dependent only on myself, the way I always had been for my entire life, and I had no intention of allowing anyone in to share that space. But you came along, Alice, and bit by bit you chipped away...’
‘You never hinted that you wanted anything more from me than a sexual relationship.’
‘I refused to believe that I did. I’ve been a fool, Alice.’ He dared to reach out and was shaken with relief when she allowed him to twine his fingers through hers. ‘I should have known that you were different, and not just because you were taller than the women I usually dated. Hell, I was that thick.’ Another of those crooked smiles made her toes curl and did all those things to her body that she had become accustomed to whenever she was around him.
‘I went from looking at you, to wondering, to fancying and then to wanting you more than I’d ever wanted any woman in my life before. And somehow, in the mix, came all that other stuff...’
‘What other stuff?’
‘The wanting...the craving...the needing and the loving...’
‘You love me?’
‘And I never even recognised it for what it was.’ His voice was strangely shaky when he next spoke. ‘So I haven’t come here to restart a non-relationship, as you called it. I’ve come here to ask you to marry me so that we can start just the sort of committed, fairy-story, walk-up-the-aisle relationship I never thought I’d have. Because, Alice Morgan, I find that I can’t live without you. And if you can’t give me your answer now—and I’d understand, because I’ve been a hellishly poor excuse of a lover—then you can think about it.’
He stood up and he was already at the kitchen door when her legs did what they had been programmed to do and sprinted after him.
‘Don’t you dare go anywhere,’ she said breathlessly, her eyes shining. She flung her arms around him and held tight. ‘Because I love you, Gabriel Cabrera. So, yes, yes and yes! I want to marry you. I want to be with you for the rest of my life.’ She looked up and her eyes were glistening with unshed tears.
‘No fancy words?’
She laughed and sniffed and laughed again. ‘I had my own barriers,’ she confessed, dragging him back to the kitchen table, but this time when he sat down, she sat on his lap because she just needed his arms around her. ‘You know all about my dad, and I guess I always thought that it was safer never to let go, never to put myself in a position where I could be hurt. I was so determined that you wouldn’t get under my skin. I’d categorised you in my head within days of working for you, and somehow I thought that made me safe.’ She stroked his hair, kissed his dear face and submitted when he kissed her back, tenderly, lingeringly.
