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Her relief seemed to please him. But it didn’t please herself. God, but she was hopeless. She might as well just serve herself up to him on a silver platter if she meant to go on like this, with an attached note which said, ‘To be used and disposed of as you please!’
Love and pride were bad bedfellows, she decided unhappily. They made fools of each other.
‘Would you like to come up for some coffee? Vanessa’s going to put on the kettle.’
‘I’d rather not, Angie. I’d like to talk to you alone,’ he said, with a seriousness that sent those doubts and fears churning in her stomach again. ‘Is there somewhere we could drive to? Some nearby park?’
‘I... I suppose so. Let me just run upstairs and tell Vanessa, or she’ll think I’m terribly rude.’
She returned to find Lance already behind the wheel of his car. Under her directions they drove to a small reserve down on McMahon’s Point, where there were several park benches on a grassy verge overlooking the harbour. It was a chilly spot during the winter months, but on a warm summer’s afternoon it was a delight, with a cooling breeze and a view to soothe even the most troubled heart.
And Angie’s heart was troubled—so troubled that she found it hard to keep silent while they walked together towards the only vacant bench. When they finally sank down upon the rather hard wooden slats she immediately turned to face Lance.
‘Lance, I... I’m not sure that I... that I—’
‘Don’t go on, Angie,’ he cut in abruptly. ‘Listen to what I have to say first. Then you can have your say.’
‘All right.’ She just knew she wasn’t going to like what he had to say.
‘I haven’t been strictly truthful with you.’
Angie’s heart fell.
‘I made a proposal to you that I had no intention of going through with.’
Her heart fell even further.
‘I just wanted to find out if you still loved me. Once I did, believe me when I say I had no intention of letting you become my mistress. I had no intention of letting you become anything but my wife and the mother of my children.’
Angie’s eyes flew up from where they’d dropped to the ground.
Lance reached out to touch her cheek gently, and her heart flipped over. ‘I love you, Angie. I’ve always loved you... ever since that summer...’
‘But...but you never came back for me,’ she cried. ‘And you married someone else!’
He shook his head, his hand falling from her cheek down into his lap. ‘I foolishly allowed other forces to shape the course of my life. I thought I was being cruel to be kind. I thought I was unworthy of you.’
‘How could you think that?’ she groaned.
‘Oh, Angie, Angie, have you any idea how different your family is from mine? That summer... I was given a taste of something so alien to everything I had ever known, something so damned wonderful that it ate me up with longing and envy.
‘I’d already had an advance taste of the Browns with Bud, who was more openly honest and full of the love of life than any person I had ever met before. He was his own man, and I liked that. There were no pretensions about him, or airs and graces, as your mother would have said. He took me for what I was, not for what my parents owned. He liked nothing better than to bring me down a peg or two—a tendency he’s perhaps taken too far over the years,’ he added with a touch of acid.
‘But truthfully,’ Lance went on, reaching over to take her two hands in his, ‘I could understand Bud’s outrage where you were concerned. What brother would have wanted the man I was then for his fifteen-year-old sister? Hell, I wasn’t really a man— I was nothing but a spoiled, arrogant, sex-crazed idiot, whose only feelings for girls up till then had resided firmly between my legs.
‘It was so easy after I left the farm to tell myself I’d imagined those other feelings you engendered in me, to confuse the beginnings of a real love with the stirrings of lust, to excuse your feelings as little more than a schoolgirl crush which would fade in time.’
‘I tried telling myself that as well,’ Angie said, a sob catching in her throat. ‘But I simply could not forget you.’
