She winced and looked away.
“Sicily?”he demanded.
She shook her head.
“Ireland?”he suggested
She stared at him in obvious pain.
“London?”he said desperately.“We won’t have to take a boat!”
She gave another small, miserable shake of her head.
“I can’t,” she whispered.“It reminds me to much of… everything.That was the last time I went anywhere.”
His voice rose in hurt and disbelief.“Only if I agree to never again step foot outside this godforsaken village, only then would you agree to marry me?”
She didn’t answer.She didn’t have to.
His heart thudded in bitter disillusionment.
Thiswas the “forever” she was willing to offer.No adventure.No freedom.Never leaving the radius of a single, tiny village.
It wasn’t a matter of metaphorical leg shackles.If she could imprison them both in place with literal cuffs of iron, she would do it in a trice.
He looked down at the crumpled ball in his hand and unfolded the wrinkled paper back into a ticket.
This was it.
Gloria would never allow a husband to climb on a boat and leave her, and she bloody well had no inclination to board a vessel herself.
The rules were simple.Have his dreams, adventure, the life he’d always wanted… Or stay here, stuck in the same tiny corner with her.
He lifted his gaze to hers.“I can’t just… wallow about playing at snapdragon and caroling for the rest of my life.”
Her eyes were tortured and red.“I know.”
He shoved the ticket back into his pocket and tried one last time.“Is there anything I can do to change your mind?”
Chapter 15
Gloria’s legs shook beneath her as she pushed to her feet.This was even harder than she’d feared.
She hugged her arms about herself and wished more than anything else that their differences were nothing more complex than some device she could take apart and put back together.Find a new pattern that worked for them both.
Christopher was so sweet, so smart, so fearless.He needed to leave, and he deserved to find someone with the same adventurous spirit to journey with him.Her heart ached.
If she hadn’t already loved him to the point of bursting, his presence here today would have done the trick.He wasn’t trying to give her an ultimatum.He was trying to compromise.She was the one destroying her own dreams.
There was no middle ground between yes and no, between here and there, between stay and go.They were planets orbiting a closed system with precisely two states: on or off.Since they couldn’t be on, that left only one choice.
She would have to be the one strong enough to make it.
“I can’t go, and you can’t stay.”She took a scratchy breath.“That’s not a marriage.That’s martyrdom.”
He opened his mouth.
She would not allow him to give up his soul.“Keep your ticket.Travel makes youhappy.I will not be the cause of you forsaking your dreams.”She tried to smile.“Go live them.You deserve it.”
