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She didn’t know that, and couldn’t have been more shocked. The silence lengthened, and she was glad she was sitting down. This was the last thing she had expected. Her heart seemed to have stopped beating. Her throat had dried. In spite of the blazing fire she felt chilled and uncertain. Everything she had built her belief on when it came to Luc had turned out to be wrong. Lucas Marcelos, the man she thought she knew, was just a construct of her over-fertile imagination. ‘Married.’ Now she said the word, she didn’t know why the possibility of Luc being married at one time hadn’t occurred to her before.
‘My wife is dead.’
For the second time in as many minutes, she felt the world tilt on its axis. ‘How?’
‘She was killed with her lover in a freak accident,’ Luc explained in a voice that held no emotion.
Her lover? Luc’s wife had had a lover? That seemed incredible—unbelievable, to Emma.
‘I was very young,’ he explained. ‘She was too. We moved with the same fast set. I should have kept my baby sister away from them. That’s what crucifies me. Karina was just a little girl, wrapped up in the glamour of an aunt who was beautiful and exciting, and whose lover was careless and daring. The accident that killed my wife and my lover almost killed my sister too. He was showing off and ran his car off the road with my wife and Karina in it. Karina escaped with just cuts and bruises, but my wife and her lover were killed outright.’
The bitterness in Luc’s voice didn’t surprise her, and when he stopped telling her the story she could imagine him running it scene by scene in front of his eyes, and the true facts would only be embellished by his imagination. When the police had told her about her parents’ accident, it hadn’t been what they or the emergency services had told her, but what she’d pictured in her mind that still haunted her.
‘I will never forgive myself for exposing my sister to danger like that.’
‘But it wasn’t your fault, Luc.’
‘It was my fault,’ he insisted, pulling away from the wall. ‘I didn’t have to be at the scene of the accident for it to be my fault. I pushed my wife into the arms of her lover. If I had spent more time with her, instead of playing polo and building a business, she might not have taken a lover in the first place, but I was full of the arrogance of youth, and I neglected her. She was young and beautiful, and she wanted a life. She didn’t want to be sitting at home, waiting for me to come back. And why should she? I was in the wrong, Emma. I treated my wife like just another possession—as I treated you when we first met.’
‘But at some point you have to forgive yourself, Luc.’
‘As you have forgiven yourself for your parents’ deaths?’
She couldn’t answer that without admitting that she was always looking for something she’d missed—something that could have saved them long before they’d gone on that drug-fuelled journey to disaster.
‘Guilt isn’t easy to shift. I just don’t want to do that to anyone else, and I almost did...with you. And with you it’s worse.’ Luc’s gaze steadied on her face. ‘I thought I loved my wife, and I felt betrayed when she took a lover, but now I know that I didn’t love her, and that what I felt was an adolescent emotion so very different from what I feel for you.’
‘I’m sorry for her death,’ Emma said quietly, reeling as she tried to take in what Luc had just said.
The silence that followed was absolute.
‘We can’t decide the path that others take,’ Luc said at last, ‘But actions have consequences, as I have proved yet again. And I’m frightened, of losing you, frightened of making the same mistake again. I’ve never been frightened like this in my life before.’ His eyes searched out her gaze.
Standing, she took hold of his hands and held them firmly in hers. ‘Love is terrifying. You feel so much, and then there’s this point where you’re totally committed to that one person, but you’re not sure that they feel the same. That’s frightening. That’s walking a tightrope without a safety net. But you have to take that risk or you’ll never know.’ She paused for breath. ‘I love you with all my heart. There. I’ve said it. I can’t help myself. I can’t stop myself—’
‘Agrade?o a Deus por você!’
Luc’s voice was muffled in her shoulder. Winding her fingers through his hair, she held him close, and for a few moments they stood together, breathing in harmony as they accepted that maybe they didn’t have to go on alone from here.
