She stared up at him in confusion.
‘You asked me that, without telling me what was going on?’ she demanded, feeling a rush of anger. ‘You asked me…without giving me the context,’ she said slowly, realising what he’d done. ‘You set me up to fail. Because there was no way I could answer that question properly without understanding why you were asking it! You didn’t trust me. You didn’t trust my feelings for you,’ she threw at him, her heart breaking.
It hadn’t been her. All this time, it wasn’t something she’d done. It had been him. He’d always have left. Because he didn’t trust her. He didn’t think he was worthy of her.
‘You’ve wanted this company almost since before you could walk. All you did was tell me the truth. You should take their offer,’ Micha said, breaking her heart. ‘It’s what you’ve always wanted.’
‘You,’ she confessed, her throat raw around the word. ‘You were what I always wanted. From the very beginning. You are the only man I have ever wanted and…you are the only man I’ve ever been with.’
Standing so close, she could see the impact her words had on him. The realisation that she had been a virgin in Paris. His cheeks flushed and his eyes widened. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but she didn’t want to hear it.Couldn’t.
‘But if you’d told me back then,’ she pressed on, ‘if you’dtrustedme, trusted my feelings for you, if you’d explained what you were really asking me, then I would have answered differently. But you didn’t. You didn’t trust me then and you still don’t trust me now.That’swhy you left me. It wasn’t because I chose them, that’s just an excuse,’ she said, repeating Antonio’s accusation from the night before the wedding. ‘One you’ve hidden behind for years.’
At her words, he shut down. As if all feeling had been shoved behind an impenetrable door.
‘That’s the way you see it? That I abandoned you?’ he asked, his tone horribly level compared to the agony in hers.
‘Yes!’
‘And what did you do?’
‘Nothing!’ she cried, unable to call back the hurt that was spilling out of her. Why was he being so cruel? So harsh? So unfeeling!
‘Exactly.’
Wait, what?
She stared at him in confusion.
‘Maria, you have fought for absolutely everything in your life. You fought schoolyard bullies, you stood up to your grandfather before your uncles could even think to do such a thing. You worked harder and more determinedly at work, pushing back every single time they tried to discriminate and intimidate you.’
‘Yes, I did,’ she said with pride, as the distance between them grew smaller and smaller.
He was almost within touching distance now, her heart pounding in her chest, blood rushing in her ears. This argument had been brewing between them foryearsand it was finally here.Hewas finally here. His gaze was stormy, his breath seeming to punch the air between them. He was angry, she realised. Angrier than she’d ever seen him. This was nothing like the back-and-forth they’d had in Paris, where no matter how cutting or cruel, his impartiality had held him in check. But that was gone now. Here was the wild energy he’d had about him when he’d been younger. The passion that had drawn her, the drive.
He raised his hand to gently sweep aside a curling tendril from her face and tuck it behind her ear, the careful gesture seeming painfully at odds with the tension in the room.
‘You fight everything Maria. So why didn’t you fight for us?’
His words were a whisper, with the power of an atomic bomb.
The shock wave cut straight through her, through the years, through the hurts, through the feelings and agonies she’d experienced to the heart of something they’d never dared confront. The devastation of it was made somehow worse by the fact his words weren’t a shout, weren’t a ferocious demand, as if he had long ago surrendered to the belief that he wasn’t worthy of such a thing. As if he’d already given up before she’d begun to see.
To see the part that she played in the past.
He searched her face as if finally, after eleven years, he saw what he needed to. The dawning realisation of what she had done.
Or not done.
‘Why didn’t you fight for me, Maria?’ he asked.
Her soul shivered beneath his question. The truth emerging from the deepest, most sacred part of her childhood hurts. He deserved the truth as much as she deserved to say it.
‘Because if I failed, if you still walked away, there would have been nothing left of me,’ she confessed, her heart shattering into a thousand pieces.
He stared at her, as if understanding her pain, but that it didn’t change a thing.
‘So, who didn’t trust who, Maria?’
