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“Yes,” she whispered, shakily. “We were.”
“And I ruined it.”
“Because you loved me,” she said softly.
“Yes.”
Silence crackled in the air around them. Portia was still, all the options laid out before her, doubts stopping her from saying anything else.
“I lied to you, you know.”
She blinked across at him.
“When you asked me about ex-girlfriends, and the villa. I’d never taken anyone there before—it’s a very personal place to me. And so I lied, but not just to you. I was lying to myself, because I knew it was significant that I’d taken you there. That I’d cooked with you and shared so much of myself with you, and I didn’t know what it meant. Or maybe I did, and I was scared, so I tried to make it sound normal. But nothing about us has been normal from the start,cara.”
Portia’s heart was jackhammering against her ribs. It made her feel inexplicably happy to know that what they’d shared there had been all their own.
“Portia, about Jack…”
She narrowed her eyes, watching, listening.
“It’s not my place to ask, but I have to know…”
She sipped her wine, then put her hands in her lap, waiting.
“Are you back together?”
She almost choked on her drink. “What?”
“It’s okay. I get it. You were with him a long time.”
“What?” She repeated, incredulous. “Why on earth would you think…”
“Dante saw the two of you together. Hugging.”
“When? Weeks ago?”
“Si.”
She closed her eyes. “He wanted to apologise for the whole fighting you thing. Actually, he told me he was happy for me, to have met someone who so clearly loved me. And I cried, because you and I had broken up, and the bottom had fallen out of my world. He comforted me. That’s what Dante saw, I presume.”
Marco let out a long, slow breath. “You’re not back with him?”
“No.”
“Okay. Good.” He nodded, a tight smile on his lips. “Not that it’s my place to care.”
She furrowed her brow. “Huh?”
“You can do what you want. With your life. It’s your life.”
“Marco,” she shook her head, and couldn’t help smiling now. “For someone so smart, you are incredibly bad at this, did you know that?”
Heat stained his cheeks.
“You just told me you love me.”
“I do love you.”
