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Then repeated it when he fell silent.
“Do you love him?” her father asked. He sounded old, for the first time that she could recall. And it made her sad, but it didn’t make her change her mind. “Do you really love him?”
“I think I always have, Papa,” Jenny whispered. “But I tried not to. For your sake.”
“Does he love you?” her father asked, sounding almost severe. As if he couldn’t bear to think about it.
“That’s the thing,” Jenny said with a quiet conviction she hadn’t known, until now, was there inside her. “I think he’s loved me even longer.”
And when her father sighed, she knew she’d won. Or that he would support her, anyway. It felt much like the same thing.
“You don’t have to love him,” she told her father. “I don’t require it.”
“I love you, Jenny,” her father replied gruffly, and she knew those weren’t words that came easily to him. Bringing with them, as they did, the potential for so much loss. So much grief. But she’d never doubted the truth of it, no matter how little he said it. “If this is what you want, I support it. Your mother would have flayed me alive for making you think you couldn’t love the man you wanted to love.”
And Jenny didn’t know when she started crying, but she didn’t stop. Not when she ended the call. Not when she sat there a moment, thinking of the mother she’d lost, the father she still had and all these years she’d tried so hard to keep herself from feeling.
But she couldn’t cry forever, not even if the tears had more to do with the acknowledgement of emotion—and the sheer relief that she was no longer expected to marry a man she hardly knew and didn’t want. She took a deep breath. She wiped at her eyes. She stayed where she was and finally drank her tea.
And then she set off into Sydney to find the love of her life, and convince him that they had never been meant to be friends.
By any means necessary.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DYLANRANTHEcoastal path twice, at a speed and intensity he could only call punishing.
It didn’t help.
He slammed his way into his house, and it was starting already. Ghosts everywhere he looked. Memories like an assault. It was hard to believe he’d been so careless. So astonishingly reckless. So certain that it would be worth it, no matter what shape he’d find himself in when she left.
The door to the guest room mocked him. He pushed his way past it, down the hall, not sure what he was doing but absolutely certain that he didn’t need to go in there. Not yet. He was still too furious about his great bloody sacrifice to tip on over to what waited on the other side of all that black, righteous rage.
He stormed into his kitchen, not afraid to make noise as he rattled his cupboards. He rummaged around in his refrigerator, throwing together the healthy smoothie he normally drank after his runs, barely paying attention to what he was doing.
Because what did it matter?
Congratulations, you pathetic fucker,he growled at himself.You’re a great friend. Lucky you.
He braced himself on the kitchen bench, but when he looked out toward his million-dollar view, stopped short.
Because a woman was standing there with her back to him, staring out at the same sea.
His heart walloped him one. Then another.
But he was dreaming, of course. He was hallucinating. He’d been up all night, putting out fires and kicking asses all over the globe, and his morning hadn’t exactly gone to plan. If he was lucky, he thought sourly, this was actually him in the midst of his death throes. They’d find his body out there on the path somewhere near Coogee, twitching off into eternity.
But she turned around, and the wind picked up the ends of her dark hair. Her eyes were soft and brown; he knew how every inch of her tasted, and it was Jenny.
Of course it was Jenny.
Everything in him lit on fire.
He told himself it was pure rage.
Dylan slammed the glass he was holding down on the countertop, then stormed toward his deck. He flung the glass door open with such force that he was surprised it didn’t shatter.
“What the hell are you doing here,” he growled.
