AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“A date,” he clarified.
Georgia’s heart popped and she took a step backwards, a physical manifestation of her inward rejection. “No way.”
His features tightened for a moment, and then he appeared to relax. “Okay. How about tomorrow night?”
“I’m not busy,” she clarified. “But I don’t see the point in going on a date with you.”
“Don’t you?”
“Please don’t do this,” she begged.
“Do what?”
“Don’t make this harder. Don’t pull me close. Not when we both know at some point you’ll push me away again. I can’t bear it. I can’t. I can’t.” She rocked on her heels, her voice growing higher in pitch. He dropped the bag to the footpath, moved closer, pressed his hands to her arms, holding her still.
“I don’t want to push you away.”
“Yes, you do,” she groaned. “That’s what you do. You can’t help it.”
A muscle jerked low in his jaw. “What if I’ve changed?”
“You want me to believe you’ve changed,” she muttered, refusing to let him into her heart again. “Because I’m pregnant, and just weeks away from giving birth to your baby. But that’s not enough for me.”
“No, I want you to see that everything has changed. I want to take you for dinner so I can show you. I want to take you for dinner tonight, tomorrow night, and every night this week, next week, just to sit across a table from you and stare into your eyes and know how lucky I am to have been given a second chance.” He lifted a hand, as if to touch her cheek, then dropped it again when she flinched.
“There is no second chance here, not with me. I can’t do this again, Dante.”
“I have been fighting this, fighting you, every day since we met,” he ground out. “I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to feel this, I didn’t want to care about you, to want you, I sure as hell didn’t want to need you, but I do. I need you.”
She rolled her eyes, anger making her lips tighten. “Yeah? Well, it’s too late. Because I needed you then.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “I needed you months ago. Months.” She pressed a hand to her heart as though that would stop it from hurting. “I needed you to see me, not as someone who was taking Bianca’s place, who you resented, who was unwelcome, but as a woman, a flesh and blood woman who was falling in love with you.”
“I know that,” he agreed, voice deep and husky. “I have messed everything up and you have been so patient, so forgiving. You waited for me to see what was right in front of me and the more I felt for you the harder I ran, until I didn’t need to run anymore because you stopped waiting.” He dragged a hand through his hair, eyes probing hers. “I know,” he groaned. “I know how much I messed this up. I know how wrong I’ve been. I’m not asking you to love me again, I’m not asking you to move in with me. I know I can’t just click my fingers and go back; I get that this will take time to fix. I’m just asking if you’ll give me that—time. Just a little time.”
She shook her head, her heart aching for him, loving him still, but her brain was chasing a happiness that she didn’t know he could provide. Not without too much risk to her. “You can’t fix it,” she whispered. “I can’t trust you not to hurt me.”
“Because you love me that much,” he said quietly.
“Yes.” Why bother hiding it? “And that makes me…I’m vulnerable to you. I need to think with my head, not with my heart.”
“But don’t you get it? That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been thinking how wrong I was to want you, to care about you, to get on with living my life in a way that made me—deep down—deliriously happy. I thought about how wrong that was, and stopped paying attention to how I felt and what I—and my heart—wanted.”
She angled her face away, nostrils flaring as she exhaled a rough, emotional breath. She needed to stay strong but his words were slipping inside of her, swishing around, whispering promises to her, begging her to be brave. To try one last time.
“Are you sure?” She asked eventually, jaw set in a mutinous line.
“Sure?”
“I’ll come to dinner,” she said after a pause, her heart dropping to her toes. “But I am begging you not to do this if you’re going to push me away again. I can’t keep doing this.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “I will hate you forever if you hurt me.”
His eyes flared. “That makes two of us.”
Her heart lifted, fluttering a little, closer to the region of her chest in which it belonged.
“Fine,” she said with a curt nod. “Dinner. But Dante? It’s just a meal. I’m not agreeing to anything. This doesn’t change a thing between us.”
“It changes everything. Dinner is hope, even if just a little, and an hour ago, I didn’t know if there was any.” He leaned closer, his breath warm against her temple, but he didn’t kiss her. “Thank you, cara. From the bottom of my heart, with all of my heart, thank you.”
She nominated a popular, brightly-lit restaurant around the corner from her flat because it wasn’t remotely romantic. She did, however, wear the dress he’d bought for her, because it was too beautiful not to. A silky gold, it hugged her body like a second skin, showing the roundness of her baby bump, the fullness of her breasts, the rich gold of her skin, courtesy of lots of walks in the summer sun.
