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She looked down again. “You developed an ‘inappropriate attachment’?” she asked incredulously. “That’s all?”
“Aye.”
As far as grand romantic declarations went, it would have left the readers of Quill & Corset Monthly quite unimpressed.
“Where’s the next page?” she asked.
“There’s nothing more.”
“You wrote ‘The fact is’—What’s the rest of the sentence? What is the fact?”
Something entirely unfamiliar flashed across John’s face . . . an anxiety that alerted her to the prospect of an extraordinary discovery.
“There’s no fact,” he said.
“I want to see what you wrote,” she protested.
He turned positively mulish, responding only with a shake of his head.
They faced each other with an invisible chasm between them. Deep, but narrow. All it would take to cross was a determined leap.
“John,” she said carefully, “your presence in this house started as a deception. But I think . . . it became real in ways you didn’t expect. I think you’ve been trying to show me who you really are, and I . . .” She paused, groping for the right words, the difficult words. “I want to know all of you. I’m not asking you to humble yourself. I’m humbling myself by asking you to give me that next page.”
John looked away from her, rubbing the bristled lower half of his face.
“Please,” she added, her heart pounding wildly.
Stillness.
The coal on the grate collapsed with a rustle, sparks rising in a glitter of red and gold.
With a quiet curse, John turned and went to the desk.
Oh, please don’t let this turn out badly.
The suspense of wondering whether she was about to be hurt or disappointed was agonizing. For some people, love seemed to come easily, but for her it had always been out of reach.
So few men understood how to love a strong woman. Domination had no part in it. A man had to be secure in his own worth. Willing to stand his ground but also willing to listen; interested in her complexity and contradictions. He had to understand that even a strong woman sometimes needed a pair of sheltering arms around her, and a shoulder to cry on. But most of all, she needed a partner who would stand beside her, not in front of her.
And so few men understood that most women were strong.
John returned with the page and gave it to her with the enthusiasm of someone handing his own death warrant to the executioner.
Reina tried to keep her hands steady as she looked down at a paragraph that had been crossed out with two slashing lines.
I’m in love were the first words she saw, before it all dissolved in a blur of tears.
She’d come to the edge of a cliff, but instead of a long fall, a sea of joy had risen to catch her.
“Read it to me,” she said, blindly holding out the page.
“You want me to—no.”
“Yes—read it aloud.”
“Christ, Reina,” he muttered. “I never meant for you to see the damn thing—”
“I know. I’m sorry.” She blotted her eyes with the sleeves of her gown. “But read it. For me.”
