‘I didn’t need her, though. I was wrong. About her, us, about our future.’ He cupped her face, then, his expression earnest. ‘Just as you’re wrong now.’
‘No,’ she denied, quickly.
‘I’m not the man for you.’
‘How can you say that?’
He ground his jaw. ‘Because I will never be able to give you what you want, what you deserve.’
‘What if all I want is you?’
‘I’m not available.’
‘But you are,’ she said, surprised when a sob burst from her. She hadn’t realised how close she was to crying. ‘Can’t you see that? You have shared yourself with me, ever since we met, and I have loved every single piece of you. Doesn’t that mean anything?’
He shook his head once, his jaw tight. His whole body tight. As if he was holding himself together with the force of iron.
‘Massimiliano?’
‘Fu-u-uck,’he groaned. ‘Stop.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You know how I always said you could ask me to stop, any time? That you needed to have that safe word? That boundary? Well,thisis my boundary. I’m asking you to stop.’
‘Why?’ she pushed, certain she was getting close to something real and raw. Something he didn’t want to express. Something that mattered, deeply.
‘Because you’re asking for the impossible.’
‘Does it feel impossible? Does anything about us seem out of reach? Or is it everything we deserve?’
He ground his jaw. ‘It’s never going to happen.’
‘Why not?’
‘I told you—’
‘Just tell mewhy,’ she pleaded. ‘If you’re going to bloody pack me away like some box, send me back to England, at least have the courtesy of explaining to me why you won’t even give this—us—a chance. A real chance.’
His eyes bored into hers, and she saw the plea in their depths, the visible sign that he was done with this conversation. She loved him. She loved him completely, with all of her heart, so, on the one hand, she was tempted to let him off the hook. To accept his plans without arguing. But she loved their relationship even more, and their future was one worth fighting for.
‘I didn’t have you pegged as a coward.’
His eyes flashed with emotions she didn’t comprehend, and she relished that. She knew she might have been pushing her finger hard into whatever emotional bruises he carried, but she didn’t—couldn’t—care. She had her own bruises, and right now he was hurting each and every one of them.
‘Don’t,’ he said, closing his eyes.
‘What’s wrong? Too scared to have this conversation?’
‘Yes,’ he said, opening his eyes there, surprising her with the intensity of his gaze. ‘You’re right. I’m a coward. Does that make you happy, Amelia? Is that what you want to hear?’
It wasn’t. It hurt her. It hurt her to see him face up to his own vulnerabilities, to cloak himself in that weakness.
‘I need you to go,’ he said, the words ground out, heavy and dark. ‘I will not let you love me. I will not let you stay here, offering me that, all the while knowing that at any point, on a whim, you can take it away again. And I will sure as hell never let myself love you.’
There was so much emotion in his words. So much feeling, and past hurt. She ached for him. For the people he’d once loved, who’d turned their backs on him. His fiancée, the society crowd he’d considered friends, and, worst of all, his own father.
‘I don’t know if there’s anyone else on earth who would understand why you feel that way as perfectly as I do.’ She moved forward again, wrapping her arms around his waist, looking up into his face. ‘There is a specific emptiness that comes from being abandoned by your parents. A hole in your chest that opens up when you have to accept that one of the two people who should have been biologically hard-wired to love you has let you down so catastrophically.’ She lifted one hand to stroke his stubbled jaw. ‘But from the moment I met you, that hole has started to zip closed. Parts of me I thought would be for ever empty are all full up, because of you. Tell me it’s not the same. Tell me you don’t feel that, too.’
