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She glanced down at her outfit and blinked. From the floppy felt hat to the floaty beige dress, the dressy caramel jacket, ancient multi-coloured scarf and the knee-high ugg boots she only ever wore at home, she looked like the result of a market stall explosion. Whipping off the layers and tossing them at a bar stool, she wondered what she’d been thinking. Oh, that’s right...
“On the subject of men sucking...”
She pulled the card from her bag and tossed it to him. Damn jock snapped it out of the air easy as you please.
“Why?” she asked, and that one word was filled with more emotion than she’d thought any one word could be. Because his response would give her the answer she’d wanted more than any other in her entire life.
“Closure.”
And like a whip across the face she got it. Closure. Of course. Right in the moment she realised she was in love with the guy he was plotting his extrication. The end. Finito.
It was Stu all over again. Only this time he wasn’t making off with her TV while she was out working. He was taking her heart, in broad daylight, right in front of her face.
Knees buckling, she sat on a wooden barstool. Hard.
Nate moved around the bench and slowly slid to the stool beside hers, his knees close enough that she could feel his latent heat.
“Why?” she said, needing more, needing every last skerrick of data to understand fully.
“You’re better than him. Better than any man who needs a restraining order to keep him away from you. Better than every damn bozo you pass on the street. I thought you needed to look Stu in the eye to see that. To know you’re better off without a TV, without a fridge, without a coffee maker if it means not being with a man like him.”
Her eyes flickered to his to find his blue eyes serious. No charm, no pretence, just Nate. And even while everything inside her felt as if it was unravelling her love for him was like a constant warm hum.
“Then you didn’t find him to get your money back.”
His raised eyebrows reminded her he’d met the guy.
“Or in the hopes I’d want to get back together with him?”
This time Nate looked as if he’d been slapped. Better at her at the dissembling thing, he pulled himself together far quicker, his jaw hardly clenching as he said, “Why? Are you?”
“Good God, no!”
He breathed out long and slow, and his voice was a little raw when he said, “You don’t let me get away with anything, and yet you let him get away with what he did. So I wondered if maybe it was because he...he meant more.”
“No,” she said. The warm hum was getting louder, fuelled by a new and faint hope that maybe, just maybe, Nate actually cared. “He didn’t. He doesn’t.”
“Okay, then.”
Only fair he had all the data too, Saskia looked at the hands twisting in her lap. “Stu wrote me a note, you know.”
“Today?”
“Back then. That was why I didn’t chase him down and kick his ass. I didn’t want to have to face that...hatred ever again.”
“What did it say?” Nate asked, his voice now less raw, as if had Stu walked through the door he’d not have got another foot without having his manhood kicked up into his neck.
It helped. It really did. Especially as she made herself remember the words she’d tried so hard to forget. “He called me emasculating. Controlling. He said that I only ever pretended to care.”
“Hell, Saskia—”
“He was right. In his way. I never loved him, and yet I let him move into my home. I do that. I try too hard to be what I think people need me to be. Because what I am has never been enough.”
“Saskia,” Nate said again, his eyes fierce as they roved over every inch of her face, “Stu’s an ass. A petty, sad, small-minded toad. He tried his damnedest to take something away from you—something he knew he’d never have—your fierce spirit. But he failed. Fool only made you shine stronger still.”
She wanted to believe him. She wanted it more than she’d wanted anything in her whole life. To believe not just the words but the sentiment, the tenacity, the possibility... But if the men in her life had taught her anything it was that potential was a pipedream.
Take a man as he is, or don’t take him at all.
“You think I shine?”
“I know you shine.”
“You couldn’t have just said so?”
No, his expression said, he couldn’t. Almost as if he knew she’d read too much into it.
But, hand to his heart, Nate said, “I’m sorry to the tips of my very everything that I forced you to have to see him again.”
