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She bit hard into her quivering lower lip. ‘I do not need it spelling out that I can’t compete, and I don’t want to!’ She looked at the ring on his finger. ‘I just pity the woman you do marry one day because she won’t stand a chance, will she?’
He didn’t deny it, why would he? He never had. He’d offered her no-strings sex and she had accepted the terms. This was always going to happen. There had always been a moment when she was going to find herself standing there saying goodbye to the man she loved. Leaving her heart behind and putting on a happy face.
To hell with happy faces, she decided, feeding her growing resentment.
‘True, which is part of the reason I think...’
She looked at him blankly, jolted free of her dark self-pitying thoughts. ‘You think?’
‘I think why wait, to get married?’
She went quite pale with reaction as his meaning sank in. ‘You’re getting married—should I ask who the lucky lady is?’
‘There is no one,’ he said, sounding impatient. ‘It will take me months to vet a candidate.’
She let out a whistling sound of mockery. ‘And they say romance is dead!’
His lips thinned with annoyance at her flippancy. ‘People search for love, but love causes more pain than anything else in a marriage. My mother and father were in love and look how that ended. Belle loved me and...’
‘What happened to you was tragic,’ she said quietly, her empathy for his pain almost unbearable. ‘But you can’t blame love.’
‘Ithappenedto Belle, not me.’
‘This fixation you have on a loveless marriage to stay faithful to Belle... I don’t see how it will work. What are you going to do? Get your bride to pass a lie-detector test? That was irony, by the way, not a suggestion.’
‘I have no fixation. Marriage is a contract. I can get sex anywhere!’ She winced and he grimaced. ‘I did not mean you.’
‘You didn’t mean that I’m easy? You know, Marco, not everyone in the world conflates love and sex.’
‘They do, you have no idea how rare your attitude is.’
Kate could only stare. To think she had worried that he would see through her facade. ‘My attitude, really?’
‘Absolutely, a healthy attitude. Why look for a woman who won’t fall in love when she is standing here?’
Kate resisted the temptation to look over her shoulder.
‘You must see the pluses. It would be the ideal solution,’ he added, warming to his theme. ‘Freya loves you, we have great sex, you probably know me better than anyone...’ He paused, the furrow between his dark brows deepening. Sometimes it felt as if they had known one another for years not weeks. ‘And there would never be the worry that you have unrealistic expectations.’
‘Like love you mean?’ He acted as if he were offering her some perfect solution, not a nightmare life of lies.
Her tone made him frown. ‘Don’t make up your mind now. Think about it.’
‘Have you any idea how much I hate yourreasonabletone?’ she asked him, delivering a rot-in-hell glare. ‘I don’t need time. The answer is a big fat no. I resent being considered the marriage equivalent of convenience food. What about what I want from life? I don’t think love is fiction. I think it is a real, breathing reality!
‘Your parents married for love. And,’ she added, cutting off his interruption with a wave of her hand, ‘it turned out badly.Youmarried for love and it turned out tragically, but you think I should be denied that opportunity and settle—for what?You?’
His jaw quivered as he fought to make allowances for her attitude, her irrational response. She had just had bad news so it was probably not the best timing.
‘So let’s bring this spectacularly awful proposal to an end. I’ve made up my mind. I’m not coming back.’
His features froze over. ‘If you think I’m going to beg you to stay...’
The idea had genuinely never crossed her mind. ‘I think you will have forgotten I even existed before I walk, or actuallyrun, through that door.’
He didn’t say no so she took it as given.
‘You know something, Marco, the next time you think your analytical brain is so bloody brilliant that you are tempted to believe your own PR machine, remember this—you just proposed to a woman who loves you...’ She pressed her clenched fists against her chest and pushed out passionately. ‘I love you, you stupid man, now get lost and think what a lucky escape you’ve had.’
