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Things had to get better. She had to get better. And she had to get over Jay. She had to stop loving him and wanting him. She had to.
‘Hello, Keira.’
Jay! She stood up, and then had to sit down again as her legs refused to support her.
He looked thinner, with lines running from his nose to his mouth that were surely new—unless they were a trick of the light.
‘I apologise for tricking you into coming here, but I couldn’t think of any other way to get you to see me.’ He put down the briefcase he was carrying. ‘I’ve brought some press cuttings to show you, just in case you haven’t already seen them. Your work on the houses has attracted rave reviews.’
‘I’m glad the development has been a success.’ How wooden and stilted her voice sounded—nothing like the voice in which she had told him of the pleasure he was giving her, the pleasure she had wanted him to go on giving her when they had been in bed together. The pain breaking inside her was unbearable, but it had to be borne. She could not escape from it.
‘I owe you an apology.’
Could this really be Jay, actually sounding almost humble, actually attempting to be a penitent? Or was she simply imagining it?
‘I’ve missed you, Keira.’
Now she knew she was imagining things.
Never in a hundred lifetimes would the Jay she knew have admitted to missing her.
He was looking at her patiently, waiting for her to say something.
‘If you are trying to say that you want me back—’ she began, only to have him shake his head.
‘No, that isn’t what I’m trying to say,’ he told her crisply.
The hopes she had tried to pretend she didn’t have crashed in on her. Why, why, why had she let herself hope so stupidly? Because she was a fool and she loved him, that was why.
‘What I’m trying to say is that what I thought I wanted from life is not what I want at all. I’ve changed, Keira. You have changed me. From being a man who didn’t want to commit to a woman at any price, I’ve become a man who would give every penny he possessed for the chance to make a commitment to one very special woman. And that woman is you. I’ve come to ask if you will give me a chance to show you how special what we’ve already shared is, and how much more special it can be. I want you—not just in my bed, Keira, but in my life, as my partner, my love, my one and only for all time. I want you to marry me.’
It was a dream. It had to be. This could not be Jay standing here saying these things to her. But it was.
‘You can’t mean it,’ was all she could say.
‘I do mean it. Perhaps the blow to my head that concussed me brought me to my senses—I don’t know. I only know that when I came round in hospital all I wanted was to have you there with me.’
‘Hospital? You’ve been hurt?’
Jay shrugged dismissively.
‘A minor car collision—nothing serious. I was driving too fast, trying to escape the demons who were telling me I had just ruined my life, having driven away the one thing that made it worth living.’
The bitter-sweetness of it all tore at Keira’s heart. Would it be so very wrong to allow herself the joy of playing make-believe for a few precious minutes before she told him the truth and had to watch him recoil from her? Why not? She had nothing left to lose, after all.
‘If you’re trying to tell me you love me…’ she suggested, with great daring.
‘Yes?’
‘It might be easier to convince me if you showed me instead.’
It was just a game, just make-believe. And that was the reason, the only reason, she was able to make such a provocative appeal.
‘Like this, you mean?’
He had crossed the room in a few strides to take her in his arms.
‘You’ll never know how much I’ve missed you,’ he told her emotionally, before he kissed her.
This was heaven and hell all rolled into one—pleasure and pain, joy and guilt—and she could not bear to relinquish either Jay or her make-believe dream that somehow there could be a happy-ever-after for them. But she knew that she must. She could not live a lie. She could not and would not deceive him a second time.
‘I love you, Keira. I never thought I’d ever want to say those words to any woman, but now not only do I want to say them to you, I want to go on saying them, and not just saying them but living them. I want to hear you saying them to me. Is there any chance that you might do that, do you think?’
