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‘And the rest of that Christmas holiday?’ he pressed her. ‘What happened?’
‘I went back to school,’ Lily told him, her voice muffled as she kept her face pressed to his shoulder, ‘I knew I’d be safe there. There were always some girls there who had to stay at school in the holidays. It was lovely. We had a proper Christmas dinner, and the teachers took us to the theatre and museums. It was like being part of a … a family, and I felt … I knew that I was safe.’
Just as she did now, here with Marco, Lily knew, lifting her head from his shoulder to look at him as she told him, ‘I’m so grateful to you for … for being here for me, and for helping me. Thank you.’
She leaned forward, intending to kiss his cheek, but he turned his head in such a swift recoil that her lips brushed his instead, causing him to recoil even further and step back from her.
Mortified, Lily apologised. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t intend … I shouldn’t have asked you to hold me. It was thoughtless of me when I know that what I told you must have made you think of the girl you were going to marry.’
His response was gruff. ‘I was thinking of her, yes.’ But not as much as I was thinking of you, Marco added to himself privately. Not as much as I shall be thinking about you for ever.
It was her own fault if his answer had hurt her—her own fault because deep inside herself she must have known that she was falling in love with him, Lily castigated herself. She wouldn’t have burned for him in the way that she had if it hadn’t been for that love. The look on his face made her feel as though her heart was being wrung out and weeping in pain. It was time for her to move on.
‘It’s been illogical of me to be so afraid of Anton. I’m an adult now, and he can only intimidate me through my fear if I keep that fear,’ she told him, trying to make sure her voice sounded purposeful and friendly instead of betraying her aching need for him. ‘And what makes that fear even more illogical is that I made sure that I lost my virginity and so removed what it was about me I believed Anton desired the minute I reached my sixteenth birthday.’
Marco bowed his head. He had lost his own virginity at sixteen himself, to an older girl who had seduced him with enthusiasm and what to him at that age had seemed a great deal of expertise, but it had been an emotionless experience.
‘It was a goal I’d set myself—a bridge I had to cross and then burn behind me to keep me safe from Anton,’ Lily continued. ‘As my birthday is in May, it had to be during term-time. At a dance with the boys from a nearby public school a boy asked me to dance who I remembered from the Christmas Dance. I’d liked him because he was quiet and shy. We did the deed with a good deal of fumbling and uncertainty on both sides, more at my instigation than his. It was a practical necessity rather than an … an act of mutual desire, and I have to say that nothing about it has ever made me feel I want to repeat it.’
Marco’s heart jolted. It was wrong, so wrong, that all either of them had known of sexual intimacy was a cold, emotionless coming together—even if in the years since his first encounter he had acquired all the necessary physical skills to please his partners. Together they could share something unique, give one another something that neither of them had experienced with anyone else—something that he now knew he would never want to experience with anyone other than her.
Marco considered himself to be a modern man, and indeed something of a pragmatist, but right now, against any kind of logic, there was something inside him that was asking if it was merely circumstance that had brought them together.
What was he thinking? That they had been fated to meet? That it had been written into their lives from birth—preordained, in fact? Was that what he wanted to believe? Was that what he wanted to trust, to give himself over to? Just as he yearned for Lily to give herself over to him?
The walls within which he had imprisoned his emotions were crashing down around him and there was no place left for him to hide from them. He must confront them and accept what they were telling him about himself—if he dared.
Lily’s hesitant, ‘Can I ask you something personal?’ had him giving her a wary look before nodding his head.
