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As if he hadn’t heard a word she’d said, his gaze focused on her eyes with such intensity, she felt them misting.
“Do you know why I’ve stayed away these two weeks?” he asked quietly.
She forced everything in her to go still, refusing to jump to more conclusions, especially ones laden with false hopes. She’d already accepted that he’d streak through her life like a meteor, affording
her a brief blaze of splendor before he disappeared. She should be thankful he’d hurtled on before he’d done more damage. She should cling to the shield of resignation, even if every cell in her body still popped with the electricity of anticipation.
When she said nothing, Antonio answered his own question. “I retreated to give you space, to reassess the damages I caused when I pursued you, besieged you, forced you out of your comfort zone and into what you might come to regret.”
That was why he’d stayed away? Not for the horrible, degrading reasons she’d been torturing herself with?
“But there was another reason, too.”
Her heart hit Pause, dreading his next words.
“I had to rethink everything I’d intended for this lab, to make decisions that would benefit everyone the most, by letting them resume their work or make their own choices, with my adjustments.” He started walking closer, the gaze fixed on her filling with so much she couldn’t bring herself to believe. “I had to prove to you, and to myself, that I can do what you can approve of, can be someone you can truly value and admire. You made me reconsider everything I do, professionally and personally.”
By the time he was close enough for her to reach out and touch him again, she was ready to collapse at his feet. And that was before he made his closing statement.
“And that’s why I’m here now. To tell you I want to hit a restart button with you. At your pace, on your terms.”
* * *
Antonio had never dreaded anything in his life, a life filled with horrors and dangers and catastrophes. Not really.
But he dreaded Liliana’s answer. He didn’t know what he’d do if she rejected him.
Could he just walk away? How, when the thought of losing her sent him straight out of his ordered, controlled mind?
For two weeks he’d forced himself to stay away, until he could provide her with tangible proof of what she meant to him, how she’d changed him. That time apart from her had been almost more than he could bear. He’d spent every moment struggling not to charge after her, to carry her back to his bed and keep her there until he’d branded her, made her unable to walk away from him ever again.
But first he had to prove to her he could become a man she could trust and respect for his ability to change, to do the right thing, not only a man she could admire for his abilities or lust after for his body and the unstoppable chemistry they shared.
Waiting for her verdict as if it would decide his fate, believing it would, he struggled to keep his expression from betraying the upheaval inside him. The last thing he needed was to scare her off with the intensity of his need.
“Why?”
After every scenario he’d played out in his head, she managed to surprise him yet again with that one-word question for an answer. She neither jumped on his offer, nor made him grovel some more, nor rejected him outright.
“You’ll have to help me here, Liliana. Why what exactly?”
“Why me? Really? Now that the element of my surprise, my novelty, is gone, not to mention my resistance? When I never considered those reasons enough for you to pursue me in the first place?”
His heart contracted with an emotion he’d never bothered with. Shame. But also wonder, that she was so attuned to him she’d sensed his early ulterior motive. This was his punishment for harboring those intentions, to have them resonate in her psyche, tainting her view of his motives when they no longer existed. When he now just wanted her.
Those eyes that filled his every waking and sleeping second probed his, filled with the candor and strength and vulnerability he’d become addicted to. “If you don’t have specific reasons why you want me, then just tell me. Tell me what you expect from me, what you wish from being with me. I also want to know all the possible outcomes.”
His head spinning, he blinked. “Outcomes?”
“Yes, like what to expect when you lose interest, how you intend to handle the eventual end of whatever we start.” Her shoulders lifted in a self-conscious shrug. “I told you I can’t handle uncertainty or afford upheavals.”
Her scientific approach to his offer, insisting on analyzing his motives and charting a probable course for their relationship, was at once endearing and stunning. But what oppressed him was her expectation of worst-case scenarios.
“You mean you’d accept being with me even when you expect it to be a limited and finite liaison?”
She gave him such a look, as if he’d just said the most ridiculous thing, as if it was impossible for her to expect anything else, either from him or for herself.
Then she laughed, the sound mirthless. “I think anyone who enters a liaison without such expectation is just courting disaster. But I do want you so intensely that I’d take whatever is being offered, as long as I know what it is. I just need to go in knowing what to expect. That’s all I ask. Total honesty.”
