“You can stay at the pub, if you want, but I think you should say whatever you came to say now. I’m a big girl; I can handle it.”
She saw his torment, his uncertainty, and she understood it, because she understood him. He’d never been in love before. He’d never let himself! And for Raf, loving someone had built up to be an enormous personal liability, that he thought might one day destroy him.
While she needed him to be brave, and admit what he felt, in order for them to move forward, she also wanted to tell him how she felt. To say the words that had been burning their way through her for months, tormenting her with the fact she hadn’t spoken them.
“You were right, about me. How I felt, about you. I think I probably fell in love with you that night at the bar. I’d never met anyone like you.” She couldn’t help the smile that spread across her face, as she recalled the way seeing him had shifted something inside of her. “But I was still hurting, after Aaron. So, like you, I lied to myself. I said it was just sex, a one night thing. And it didn’t matter how much I thought of you again afterwards, I was not going to go back to you. Until I found out about this,” she said, hand on stomach. “And I knew, deep down, that the reason I went straight to your house was because I’d been aching to see you again, ever since that night.”
“And then I treated you like that,” he muttered, shaking his head.
“You didn’t treat me like anything.”
He shook his head once. “If it helps, I think there was a part of me, not that I recognized it at the time, that needed to know, for certain, that it was really happening with you, because you were all of my dreams come true. As much as that terrified me, I was still looking for guarantees.”
Her heart shifted hard into her ribs.
“I was scared too,” she admitted. “That’s why I tried to come up with limitations around what we were doing—I was trying to protect my heart in the same way you were yours.” She bit into her lower lip, eyes locked to his. “But on the yacht, and then with your family, I couldn’t fight it anymore. Everything with you and me just felt so…right. And I know that, because I spent almost ten years of my life with a perfectly nice guy, and would have had a perfectly nice life with him, probably, but it wasn’t like this. It wasn’t a case of everything just clicking together.”
A car drove past, reminding Elodie that they were still standing at her parents’ front door. She took a small step backwards, a silent entreaty for him to enter. But he stood his ground, eyes roaming her face.
“I need to say this, first,” he muttered, more to himself than her. “I know you know how I feel—it must be obvious. But I need to say what I wish I had said months ago, to save us both from this. I have been in agony, Elodie.” She closed her eyes, his admission something she both needed yet hated hearing at the same time. To imagine him suffering as she had been suffering, when all she wanted was for Raf to be happy. “You have no idea how much I was counting on seeing you today. Every part of me was living for that moment, and when you didn’t arrive, the disappointment almost cut me in half.Mi amore, cara, bellaElodie, my heart, my everything, all that I am, all that I have, these things belong to you. You are my other half in ways I hadn’t even realized possible or necessary; you are in every breath I take, all the goodness I see in the world. You made me realise that thereisgoodness in the world. You made me love, you made me whole, you made me the man I should always have been.”
She sobbed then, pressing a hand to her mouth.
“I love you.” Such simple words. Followed by, “Ti amo,”the Italian version.
Her heart burst, like a glitter bomb, exploding throughout her whole body, making the whole world take on a sparkly sheen.
It was everything she’d wanted to hear from him, everything her soul and heart had been craving, since Italy, she guessed, when she’d first started to understand that her own feelings were so much more heavily involved than she realized.
“And I am so sorry for taking so long to understand myself,” he added, evidently taking her lack of reaction as cause for concern. Perhaps thinking he still had work to do, to convince her to give him another chance, when Elodie was, instead, rendered speechless by the sheer delirium of this moment.
“I am torn, my darling, between wanting to draw you into my arms and hold you to my heart, or leaving, to find somewhere nearby to stay, to give you space to come to terms with this, to know your own heart and feelings…”
It galvanized her into action. “I already know my heart, Raf. Love, like I feel for you, doesn’t change just because it’s not returned. Iloveyou.”
He didn’t move though. He just stood there, staring at her, as though it was the last thing he’d expected. She could see the wheels of his brain turning, making sense of her statement. Trying to believe her.
“You love me,” he repeated, after a beat. “Even now?”
She laughed. “Didn’t you hear me? My love isn’t going anywhere. And nor am I.”
Then, finally, he stepped forward, pulling her against his chest and just holding her in a huge bear hug, wrapping his arms around her, his chest moving rapidly with the force of his breathing, his whole body merging with hers. He hugged her as though he never intended to let go, and just the thought of that made her smile.
But when she tilted her face to his, and he looked down at her, the same sparks that always ignited between them flared to life, so he was kissing her then. Slowly, at first, gently—a kiss laced with so much love that it filled up her heart completely, and then, with so much passion she was panting and aching with needs she’d thought she’d never have met again.
“I have missed you so much,” he said, against her mouth, so she smiled and nodded. “You have no idea.”
“I really do.”
“Okay, maybe you do,” he conceded.
“Promise we’ll never do anything stupid like leave each other again?”
He pulled away, so his eyes could more fully roam her face.
“I promise.” And then, after a flicker of a frown, “Elodie, when we came here, last time, and I proposed, that was such a jackass thing to do. You were right to refuse me. I should have known then, because of how much your refusal hurt, that I wanted so much more from you. I should have known that I wanted to marry you for the sake of being your husband, your other half. For the sake of declaring to the whole entire world what you mean to me, and that you are my future.” He grimaced, shook his head, as if to dispel the past. “And you,cara bella,you were so right to shut me down and explain that you were holding out for something better than what I was offering.”
“Not better than you,” she interrupted.
