AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And now she loved him, but she didn’t know if she loved him enough to give the emotion freely without expectation of its return. If she couldn’t, would their marriage work? Could it work? Was she strong enough to love unrequited and not grow bitter? And if she wasn’t, howreal was her love?
The answer to many of her questions lay in her response to her dad. She looked inside herself and felt a measure of peace steal over her. Because while she got frustrated with her dad and sometimes the pain of not being loved like she needed hurt more than she wanted to admit, she’d never, ever hated him. She didn’t hate him now. She never would.
And for all their similarities, Sandor was not a carbon copy of her dad. He paid her more attention than her dad ever had. He also showed tolerance for family priorities with his mom. That was something. Because Ellie wasn’t going to raise her children alone, a work-widow. She got the feeling that Sandor would think it was doubly important for him to be there as a dad for his children. Because his own father had not been there for him.
She couldn’t help wondering how he was going to react to learning she’d guaranteed herself more than a weekend to make her decision. She’d taken the week off from work, managed to fool her security detail into thinking she was still in her apartment and flown to Barcelona. She hadn’t had any real destination in mind when she arrived at the airport; she’d simply taken the first international flight available.
That had landed her in Barcelona, where again she’d made her travel plans based on availability and hopped the first outbound bus with an empty seat. That had brought her to this small coastal town. She’d never ridden a bus before and it had been kind of neat.
She’d checked into an older hotel, the kind that still used high ceiling fans instead of air-conditioning to control the heat. Her room was small, but clean and the decor was old world with a charm often missing in the upscale hotels she stayed at when traveling under her father’s aegis. She liked it, too.
Just as she enjoyed sitting on the beach for this short moment in time as if she was just anyone, not the daughter of a super wealthy businessman. But it couldn’t last. She had to go back to her life eventually.
When she left Boston, she’d been running, she freely admitted. From Sandor. From her own feelings. From the decision she fatalistically realized was a foregone conclusion. Especially since allowing Sandor into her body. He’d been right. She’d been arguing semantics. Once she’d given herself to him, there had been no hope.
Not for a future without him if he wanted to share hers.
Remembering back to just before they first made love, she’d had that moment of lucidity…the point at which she’d realized the outcome if she gave in. Stupidly…or courageously? Or simply unavoidably…she’d given in anyway.
She knew that sex didn’t mean the same to women that it did to men. She didn’t need her own painful past to learn that, the media screamed the message in every medium. But that sure knowledge had not saved her. Simplybecause sex meant something so different to her, she’d had no chance. If it was only her body she was holding back, she could have done it, but once her heart was involved, she was lost.
She was going to marry Sandor. The alternative…life without him and life without the mother’s love she would be gifted with in Hera, was an untenable choice.
Her heart beat a rhythm of hope as she accepted the decision. Sandor wasn’t her father. He loved his mother, which meant he was capable of the emotion. And he cared about Ellie. He was afraid of love as surely as she feared the emptiness of a life without it. She would teach him that love did not always hurt, that it could be the biggest blessing in a person’s life. She’d seen it in the lives of others and she had known in that place all certain knowledge is born, not learned, that it would be the same for her if she had it.
He had reasons for his fear, just as she had reasons for hers, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t learn something new. She was taking a chance.
She refused to believe he had any less courage than she.
Ellie stayed in Spain for the rest of the week, missing Sandor, but reveling in the freedom. The security team didn’t catch up with her until Thursday. After a very different return trip to Barcelona, this one in a chauffeured car, she flew home, this time first-class, Friday afternoon.
Sandor flipped open his cell while he clicked the send button on an e-mail to a subordinate in Taiwan. “Christofides here.”
“Sandor, it’s Hawk.”
“Have you found her?”
