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“I wasn’t sure what time the plane would be returning us to Johannesburg so I thought I’d be ready to leave.”
“I told them noon.”
Harper checked her watch. If they left in the next fifteen minutes, they would be right on time. She reached out her hand and placed it over his, calling his attention back to her.
“Thank you for coming to Africa to help me. I’ve really appreciated having you here.”
“No need to thank me.”
His short replies were starting to irritate her. She needed to get to the bottom of it before they started the long journey home.
“So this is it then?”
“What do you mean?”
“The end of the road for us. It was a fun week, but now it’s over.”
“Is that what you want?”
“No.” Her throat tightened, but she’d taken too many emotional risks to let fear dominate her now. “I want for us to be together.” For the first time she understood Violet’s decision to put her marriage before her ambition. “It would be nice to hear that you feel the same.”
“Are you sure you really know what you want? A few days ago you couldn’t wait to run off to Africa to meet your biological father. What would you have done if he’d wanted to have a relationship with you? Would you have stayed in Africa? Made a new life here?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”
“Then last night you decided you weren’t going to let anything stand in the way of your becoming CEO. You claim you want to know who you are, yet instead of pushing forward and doing what you want for a change, you fall back into old patterns.”
Was Ashton asking her to quit the hotel business and spend the rest of her life...doing what?
She still didn’t know her true passion. Damn him for being right. And for being the practical one for a change. She needed the old Ashton, the impulsive one, to sweep her into adventure. She was sick of planning her future. She’d come to Africa because she wanted to be bold and daring. But obviously that wasn’t her nature. It had taken less than a week before she regressed to comfortable patterns. What she needed to do was take a risk and keep taking them until she felt completely free.
“I love you,” she said, captured by a yearning that grew stronger the more time she spent with Ashton. “I can’t imagine my days without you. I’m ready to give up everything and be with you. Just tell me you want me.”
Ashton closed his eyes. “I don’t want you to give up anything.”
“Then what do you want?”
“Don’t use me as an excuse to avoid admitting who you are and what you truly want.”
“I already told you, I want you.”
“Because it’s easier to explain to your grandfather that you want to be with the man you love than disappoint him by revealing you’re not actually his granddaughter?”
“That’s unfair.”
“Is it?”
She couldn’t answer him truthfully so she traded him question for question. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Would you give up the new show and go back to doing The Culinary Wanderer again?” It wasn’t fair to ask him to set aside his goals. So what if she didn’t think he would be happy. They’d been lovers for little more than a week. Who was she to judge what was best for him?
“I already quit and I don’t want to go backward.”
Her heart sank. “Then you’re going to do whatever it takes to make the new network want you.”
“That’s the plan.”
