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Tom entered the hut again, and the dogs briefly stirred and then settled back on their blanket.
“You okay?”
I nodded again.
He’d refused to have anything to do with my offer of casual sex with me. Tom had looked so disappointed and something else that day.Sad? Despair?
But had anything changed? After Ainslee, and now knowing what Amanda had done?
“You said I could ask you anything?”
He stopped wiping out our mugs and placed them down. “What’s wrong? Are you more hurt than you thought?”
“I’m not hurt.” I licked my lips, trying to find the right words. “After everything that’s happened, I can’t stop thinking about you. What could have been.”
His breath hitched.
I looked away, about to chicken out.
But Tom cupped my jaw and gently pulled me back to the moment. “Ask.”
His fingers were cold from being outside and then washing them under the tank water, but felt like fire on my skin.
“You can ask anything of me.”
No sadness or despair this time. I gulped. It was something entirely different in his eyes now: desire, along with hope.
My words came out in a desperate whispered rush. “Can you give me one night?”
His mouth fell open. Had I shocked him? Offended him?
I licked my lip, finding more words to explain what I felt, what I needed. “You talked about fantasies of what could have happened to us if we hadn’t been separated. I’m asking to give me that fantasy of what could have been. Please.”
Tom hadn’t let me go. We stood there, our gazes locked, as the fire blazed.
“I never stopped desiring you. No woman I met at uni compared to you. Not even close. I wanted to end my silence and talk to you about my ideas so many times, and it almost broke me that I couldn’t –wouldn’t – because you rejected me. I couldn’t deal with that again.”
He had desired me.But what about now?I wanted to scream.Has it changed? Have I lost you forever?
“I wanted to talk to you, too.” I pressed my cheek into the palm of his hand. “I should have.”
Tom let out a noisy breath. “I wrote you so many letters. Like emails, but I never had the guts to send them. When I saw the guy kiss you at the scholar’s information session, I just thought, ‘why bother?’ You’d moved on. I tried to accept I was too late. Missed my shot.” His eyes dipped. “I won’t lie. I slept with a lot of women at uni. I stupidly thought doing so would help me move on.”
“And Ainslee?” I whispered. I needed to know if she still had a place in his heart.
“Friends. To be honest, it got a little creepy there with her, but it’s settled and sorted now. Rosie, there’s no one else. Not in my bed, or my life, or my heart. I promise you.”
“Right. Okay.”
The fire crackled as the hut creaked and groaned under the gentle weight of the falling snow.
Where did that leave my request?
More than ever, I wanted to touch him, hold him, kiss him.
“You can, if you want to,” Tom murmured.
I spluttered. “Didn’t mean to say that out loud.”
