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‘Rosalind, it’s not you.’
‘Where the hell’s the damn cab?’ She paced to the bottom of the stairs. He followed.
‘Rosalind, I need you to hear me out.’ He knew it was manipulative, but in order for her not to leave feeling hurt and angry he needed her to hear what he had to say, so he said it anyway. ‘Please.’
At the ‘please’, she turned back to him. Her jaw was tight, her eyes wild with emotion. But at least she stopped walking away.
Having to ground himself if he was really going to say this, Cameron parked his backside against a corner of the lounge and looked out across the city view.
‘I was in the eleventh grade when I saw my father come out of a city hotel with a woman who wasn’t my mother. As I stood on the opposite side of the street, on my way to meet him at his office after school, he kissed her. Right there on the footpath, in front of peak-hour traffic—my father, who the whole city knew by sight. No thought for discretion or propriety or the woman the world thought he’d been blissfully married to for the previous thirty years…or anyone but himself.’
He blinked, dragged his eyes from the city view and looked to her. She stood still as a statue, those grey eyes simply giving him the space to keep going. Deeper. To places he’d never let himself go before.
‘My mother…She had to put up with a lot, being married to a man like my father. The long hours, the ego, having to raise his four headstrong children in public. She did so with grace, humility, and love. So the fact that he could show such contempt towards her, to all of us…’
His fingernails bit into his palms as he fought down the same old desire to take a swing at his father the next time he laid eyes on the man.
‘Why I am telling you this, what I’d like you to take from this,’ he said, ‘Is that I won’t be like him. I’d rather see you walk away now—right at the very moment I can barely think straight for how much I want to continue what we started back there in the kitchen—if that means not hurting you by giving you false hope that I might one day offer you anything more. I can’t. Not when I know that even the most solid relationships ultimately fail beneath the weight of secrets and lies.’
He came to an end and needed to breathe deep to press out the sudden tightness in his lungs. His eyes locked onto hers, her strength keeping him amazingly steady.
‘Cameron,’ she said on a release of breath, ‘You expect far too much of people.’
‘Only what I expect of myself.’
‘I was including you too.’
He shifted on his seat. ‘You think loyalty and good faith are too much to expect, even after how your father treated you and your mother?’
A muscle in her cheek twitched but her steady gaze didn’t falter. ‘For some people they are too much.’
He shook his head hard. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t accept that.’
‘Then that’s a real shame.’
Cameron shot to his feet and ran a hard hand across the back of his neck. This wasn’t how this had been meant to go. He’d hoped that by being forthright and upfront with her he’d feel justified in slowing things down, like he’d done right by her. Instead she was somehow making him feel like he hadn’t done right by himself.
She tugged her poncho over her head, flicking her hair out at the end and running fingers through it until it fell in messy waves over her shoulders.
His response was chemical. His insides tightened and burned with a need to have her lose layers, not put them back on.
The doorbell rang; her taxi. She slipped her feet back into her shoes then looked back at him.
Her eyes said, ask me to stay.
But her tilted chin and tense neck said, let me go.
He went back to her eyes. Those beautiful, sad, grey eyes, so wide open he felt himself falling in, wanting more than he knew he could give. He pulled himself back from the brink just in time to say, ‘I’ll call you.’
She nodded, gave a short smile that held none of the mischief and humour he was so used to seeing therein, and jogged up the stairs without looking back.
CHAPTER TEN
ROSIE was exhausted. Which was naturally manifesting itself in a complete inability to sleep.
The minute the clock beside her bed clicked over to a quarter to three, she dragged herself out of bed.
She wouldn’t be able to see Venus until about an hour before sunrise, but it had to be better outside than staring at the low ceiling of her caravan, wondering how on earth she’d let herself get to the point where she’d decided she might be able to allow Cameron deeper into her life at the precise moment when he had decided he wasn’t sure that he wanted her in his.
