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'I played the coward, Claire.' He interrupted her quick and fervent protest with an upraised hand and a crooked, pained smile that smote at her heart. 'I thought I could get through. I told myself it was not right to inflict my nightmares on you—I still think that. But the fact of the matter is…I am useless without you in my life. I have not slept, eaten; I have been unable to work—and then I realised that I would rather be a coward with you than without you. If you still wanted me, that is. I faced the fact that I might have driven you away for good and sent myself half-mad in the process.'
'You couldn't drive me away,' she said simply. 'Where could I go that I didn't carry you with me in my heart?'
'I do not deserve you, and I will be hell to live with— you understand this? The years of my boyhood, the time with Bianca—I cannot easily express what I feel. I am bound, deep inside.'
'I'll release you.' She moved closer to him now, lifting her arms up round his neck but without any pressure, resting against him as she spoke into his throat. 'Do you hear me? I'll release you.'
'And I will be jealous. I know this. When I saw Attilio with his hands on you—' He stopped abruptly. 'I could have ripped him apart, limb by limb,' he groaned huskily. 'Can you cope with a man like this?'
'All my life.' She nuzzled into his throat now, licking his skin with a delicate, tentative tongue, and immediately his arms came round her and he crushed her to him.
'But I will love you, Claire, this I can promise,' he said hoarsely. 'I will love you for eternity. There will never be anyone else. You will be the air I breathe, my sun, moon and stars, my wife, the mother of my children, the other half of me. I will love you, want you, every day, every moment. Hell, I could eat you alive…'
And as the pigeons flew in a startled arc into the evening air, surprised and not a little shocked at the passions that afflicted these strange human creatures, he gathered her up into his arms, his mouth hot and sensuous on hers as he carried her back to the car, and to the beginning of his walk out of the shadows and into the glorious light of love.
