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And yet…she wanted to. She wanted to ignore her long-held sensibilities, her pragmatism and emotional caution and be a part of this group for as long as they’d have her. She wanted to be a part of Gabe’s life most of all. She wanted to wake up with him every morning, she wanted to share meals with him, to laugh with him, to see him coming back to life. She wanted all of him.

The realisation had her head dropping forward, panic and euphoria spreading like wildfire through her blood, so her skin felt blotchy and pink.

As soon as she could politely excuse herself, she slipped from the room and down the corridor, finding a quiet room, where she could lean against a wall, surrounded by darkness, only her rasping breaths punctuating the silence.

She loved him.

She loved him completely, with all of her heart. Relief exploded through her veins, as though her heart was rejoicing that her brain had finally caught up. She loved him! But she couldn’t love him! Not in the sense that ‘to love’ was a verb, an active, doing word, that implied a sense of ongoingness. The idea of being able to continue to love him every day, to wake up beside him, smile at his nearness, run her fingertips over his body as she’d done every morning for this last week – that’s what she wanted. But Gabe?

What did he want?

Her heart was running to a staccato beat now, doubts at war with hope, uncertainty plunging into a river of determination. Isabella didn’t know which way to go, nor what she should do, but she held her love deep in her heart, a touchstone to ground her for the rest of the night. In the morning, she would have to make a decision – to risk everything, and tell him how she felt? Or to ignore her heart’s wishes and accept that all good things really did, eventually come to an end? It was the lesson of her life, but maybe just this once she’d ignore it. Maybe just this once she’d hope for that thing other people seemed to effortlessly believe in: the everlastingness of love.

“Just, let it go,” Gabe muttered, the conversation the last thing he wanted to be having this early on Christmas morning. Thoughts of a quiet run in the gym had dissipated when he’d walked in to find Luca and Max side by side on the rowing machines. He’d nodded at them and jumped onto a treadmill, but Luca had stopped rowing and come to stand right in front of him, one arm leaned nonchalantly across the controls, making it impossible for Gabe to start his exercise.

“We will,” Luca grinned. “When you start making sense.”

Gabe expelled a sigh of irritation. “Cristo, Luca, what do you want me to say?”

“He wants you to say you’re madly in love, just like him,” Max teased.

Gabe swore, something like bright white light blinding him. “You’re ‘in love’ too and you’re not acting like a mad man.”

“I can see why you might think I’d have your back here, but I’m actually with Luca.”

Gabe glared at his cousins. “Why?”

“Because you obviously do love her.”

Gabe nudged Luca’s hand aside and pressed the ‘start’ button on the treadmill. Luca and Max shared a look; Gabe fought an urge to ask them to leave in the rudest terms at his disposal.

Instead, he dialled the speed of the treadmill up until he was running so fast he had to use all his breath for exercise rather than conversation.

“What’s the problem?” Luca asked over the whirr of the treadmill’s mechanism. “She seems like a great woman.”

“Isabella is great,” he had to raise his voice to be heard.

“So what’s the deal then?”

“You’re saying I can’t know a great woman and not be in love with her?”

Luca and Max shared a look. “It just seems…” Max said thoughtfully.

Gabe waited on tenterhooks for him to finish, but Luca wrapped his hand around Max’s arm, shaking his head. “Forget about it, man. We must have got it wrong.”

Max frowned. “I guess so.”

“Enjoy your run. I’m…glad you’re back.”

The parting comment played on Gabe’s mind for the entire six-mile run. I’m glad you’re back was a simple statement and yet he felt the implications with a sense of frustration. It was possible Luca had meant only that Gabe had returned to Villa Fortune, yet he knew his cousin better than that. There was more to the throwaway comment. Enough people had made remarks on his changed mindset for him to feel as though he were being backed into a corner. It was like everyone thought he’d crossed some sort of line and no longer carried a burden of guilt for what he’d done, for Carmen and Avery, for that December night that had brought an end to Carmen’s life and Avery’s as she knew it. And his family was glad and relieved, like finally he was ‘happy Gabe’ and they could stop worrying about him.

Well, he didn’t want their concern – he never had – but he didn’t want their expectations either.

It was undeniable that Isabella had done something to him – he did feel differently about life and love now, but if everyone kept wanting a happy ending for him, they were going to be disappointed. Isabella was a temporary part of his life – a wonderful, beautiful, sensual chapter, but it was coming to an end. It had to end. Because regardless of what everyone in his family obviously wanted, Gabe wasn’t prepared to give away his grief and guilt. He didn’t want to forget what he’d done and lose himself in a shared life – and there was no way he’d risk poisoning Isabella with the darkness of his soul.

A whisper of regret ran through him. Perhaps bringing her here had been a stupid idea after all? But the second he thought that, he knew it was wrong. Seeing her face as she’d opened Yaya’s present had shifted something inside of his chest – he’d never seen someone feel greater happiness and warmth than in that moment. He was glad he could give that to her, just this one Christmas.

14

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