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It was like a jump scare and an unexpected kiss all rolled into one. Emily’s heart raced and hope inflated inside her like a balloon. She couldn’t suppress those feelings as they welled up and took over. But at the same time, an anxiety settled like a weight on her chest. What could he possibly want?
He stepped forward, and it was only then that she registered the fact that he was holding a huge bouquet of flowers.
“Hey, Emily,” he said quietly.
“What is this?” she asked.
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“What about?”
He held out the flowers to her.
She didn’t move.
“Please take them,” he said.
“I don’t want anything from you.”
“Emily, please, I…” He sighed and raked his hand through his hair. She was reminded by the gesture how much she loved thosehands, and it made her feel ill. Those hands would never touch her again.
She reached out and took the flowers, mindful of how close their fingertips came to one another — and mindful, too, of the fact that they never actually touched.
“I was awful to you,” Dominic murmured.
She said nothing. It wasn’t as if she was going to disagree with that.
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it,” he said. “The way you must have felt when I walked out of the blood lab like that. I’m ashamed of myself.”
He had never spoken so openly about his feelings — at least, not to her. She waited to see what he would say next. Even though she wasn’t ready to forgive him, he had, at the very least, earned her attention. She was ready to listen to him.
“I wanted to come back the moment I had done it,” he said. “But I was too ashamed. Too embarrassed. I didn’t know what I would say to you. I’m still not sure what to say to you, but I was lying in my bed last night and it occurred to me that not knowing what to say isn’t an excuse for not trying to say it. You deserve to hear something from me.”
“What is it you’re trying to say?” Emily asked him.
“I’m trying to tell you that I love you.”
It was so frank, and so unexpected, that she was hard pressed not to laugh. “You don’t love me.”
“I do,” he countered. “I’ve been falling for you for a while now, Emily. I was trying to fight it, because falling in love was nevera part of my plan. But now that it’s happened — I can’t pretend that it isn’t what I want. Thatyouaren’t what I want.”
“We weren’t even in a relationship,” she said.
“I think we should be.”
“No, you don’t.” Her eyes filled with tears. “You don’t want a relationship. You don’t think doctors should have relationships.”
“I’m going to have to figure that out, because I’ve fallen in love,” he said. “I don’t want to live without you now that I’ve found you.”
“Are you just saying all this because of the baby?”
“No,” he said. “I think the baby made me think about it. I was letting myself off the hook when it came to figuring out my feelings, and now that there’s a baby in the picture, I can’t do that anymore. I shouldn’t have been doing it in the first place. It was self-indulgent of me, and you always deserved better. And my love for you has always been real. But now — now we have this baby to think of, and I need to get my act together. I need to figure out what I want. And it turned out that there wasn’t much figuring to be done at all.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to marry me.”
To Emily’s astonishment, she realized that he was pulling a ring box out of his pocket. She stared. “When did you get aring?”
