This was right, coming here, stifling doubts that had been bred over a lifetime, doubts about trusting instinct and emotion and not being scared of them. Rocco sucked in a deep breath and stared at her. Even after she’d gone, he still hadn’t quite believed it. He would have blamed his parents, but that would have been the easy way out, because he knew his parents for what they were. They were manacled to a belief system that he had always taken for granted, a belief system that might have worked for them but didn’t work for him.
Had he ever thought for himself when it came to love and giving himself to someone else without restraint and with trust? No. Never. In every other area of his life, he had been high performing, brutally ambitious and fiercely proactive. But with his emotional life he had been lazy, and only when she’d walked away from him had he faced the truth about himself.
He’d met her and she had kick-started a process of self-discovery that had changed him. Maybe he’d just learned how toaccess what had always been there. She’d given him the chance to take off the clothes he had worn all his life, an outer shell wrapped up in duty, formality and the acceptance that throwing caution to the wind and loving someone utterly and completely wasn’t for him.
He’d assumed that the lesson had been a two-week anomaly, but then she’d left him, and slowly he’d realised just how much he’d changed and just how much he’d found the way to love.
He needed to tell her all that but the green eyes inspecting him were narrowed and suspicious. As soon as he was in, and before he could divest himself of his coat, she stood back to the wall, her hands pressed together in front of her.
Ella knew that, however devastated she was by his rejection of her, she still had to communicate with him and accept the situation without bitterness or regret. She’d chosen to speak her mind and it wouldn’t be fair to make him pay the price for not being on the same page as her.
Her father appeared in the doorway and Rocco turned round.
‘Mind if I have a few words with your daughter, sir?’
‘Nothing you couldn’t say to her by post, young man?’
‘No one uses the post any more, Dad.’
Ella couldn’t manage to raise a smile when her father made a snort of disapproval under his breath but then he vanished back into the kitchen.
‘If you need me to sign more stuff, then you could have let me know by email.’
‘Can we sit down to have this conversation? Please?’
Rocco hesitated, for once not daring to presume that he wouldn’t be thrown out by her.
‘Why? What have you got to say? If it’s not about practicalities, then it’s because you want to try and convince me to marry you and to forget everything that went before.’
‘I wouldn’t do that, and that’s not why I came.’
‘You’d better come through and say your piece, Rocco. And I can tell you that the only reason I’m being hospitable is because we’re going to be in one another’s lives and we have to be able to communicate.’
‘Understood.’ He followed her into the sitting room and then looked around him at the familiar sight that had struck such a chord in him. ‘Being here feels more like home than my own home did.’
‘It’s not going to work, Rocco. You can’t just waltz in here and start playing more games to try and win me over.’
‘The only thing I’m here to do is to ask you to listen to me. No game playing, Ella, not that I ever thought I played games with you.’
‘What would you call “stringing me along”? Making me believe that you were Mr Perfect, when in fact you were just Mr Doing All He Can To Get Exactly What He Wants?’
‘Will you listen to me? I won’t be long but there are things I finally realise I need to say to you. Things I never thought about until I found I couldn’t stop thinking about them.’
Ella stared at him narrowly. Her heart was still beating fast and her pulse was racing. She wanted him out of the house, and yet she couldn’t bear the thought of him leaving now that he was here, because his presence fed her love and that feeling was consuming.
Plus she wanted to hear what he had to say. He looked tired and hesitant, two things she’d never associated with him. If this was going to be another ploy to get her back to the place she’d walked away from, then who wouldn’t be curious to find out what his tactics were going to be?
But no tea or coffee. No getting comfy. No feet under the table. She didn’t care how long it would have taken him to get here in poor weather.
‘You have fifteen minutes,’ she said flatly.
It was lovely and warm from the fire crackling in the stone hearth and the only light came from two table lamps and the standing lamp by the door. The air was scented by the Christmas tree, a fragrant pine smell that was all about the festive season. It made her think of when he’d last been here, when they’d decorated the tree together, when all her hopes had begun to bloom.
‘When we met, Ella…that first time when you thought I was someone else… How do I explain this?’ He leant forward, elbows resting on his thighs and his fingers clasped loosely together. ‘I’ve spent the past week sifting through everything in my head, trying to work out how it was that I never realised…’
‘Never realisedwhat?’ As her curiosity grew with dangerous speed, so did the sharpness of her voice, because she was determined to deny any more entries by him into her heart.
‘That the man you made me feel like that first time—a man who was free and unweighted, and for the first time happy, really happy, in an unencumbered type of way—wasn’t a flash in the pan because I was pretending to be someone else. That man was who I was always supposed to be. You unlocked the potential for joy inside me and left me wanting more.’
