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‘I know that now.’
He heard her swallow. ‘Why did you take it? Why didn’t you call me?’
The air was so still the room felt like a tomb. His heart was a dark thud inside his chest.
‘I didn’t know about the money. He got the account details from Bill. And I don’t know why I didn’t call you. I suppose I didn’t feel there was anything to say.’
He had been in shock. After Oscar Cavendish had slithered out of the bar, he’d been shaking so hard it had been another twenty minutes before he could get to his feet.
‘Nothing to say?’ Her voice had an undertow of misery that made his nails cut into his hands. ‘How could you think I would do something like that?’
Easily, he thought. His self-doubt, his fear of rejection...
They’d been like a trail of breadcrumbs, weaving through their relationship, so that the whole time they were together a part of him had been waiting for it to happen...hoping it wouldn’t, but fearing it would. That at some point Dove would see whatever was in him that had kept his biological mother from wanting him and loving him.
It had just happened sooner than he’d thought it would.
And it had hurt a whole lot more than he could have imagined.
‘I didn’t think I had any reason to doubt him. I mean, he was your father...’
She flinched, and it tore at him again that she should feel this confusion about her father.
He cleared his throat. ‘I was hurt, and angry. I thought you didn’t care and I wanted to show you that I didn’t care either.’
It was the truth, but not the whole truth.
‘I did care—’
Her voice cracked and he reached out for her, but she stumbled backwards, holding her hands in front of her.
‘Just leave me alone!’ Tears were slipping down her face.
‘I can’t leave you like this.’ He didn’t want to leave her.
She tried to push him away, but he wouldn’t budge, and finally she leaned into him and he gathered her against his pounding heart.
‘It’s okay. Shh...it’s okay.’ He sank down on the edge of the bed, pulling her with him. ‘It’s okay,’ he said again, his hand moving in slow, rhythmic circles until finally her sobs subsided.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I should have called you... I should have known—’
He slid his hands into her hair and tilted her face to his. ‘We both made mistakes.’
He felt a sharp stab of guilt. But only he could have put it right at the time. Obviously Dove was going to believe Oscar. He was herfather. But he could have—shouldhave—questioned Oscar’s version. He should have confronted Dove. Demanded an explanation. Had he been a different man...a braver man...he would have done so. Instead, he’d let an old truth swamp love and logic. He’d taken the money and walked away, just as he had done a year earlier.
The hardest choice had also been the easiest.
She shifted against him, her hand pushing into the hard wall of his chest to steady herself, her face lowered. ‘It’s okay. You can leave. You don’t need to stay with me.’
‘Is that what you want?’ His voice sounded different. Not his own. He knew that he was revealing too much, but he couldn’t seem to do anything about it. ‘You want me to leave?’ he said, over the dark, panicky thud of his heart.
There was a long silence.
He stared down at the top of her head, feeling emotions he couldn’t name much less control expanding in all directions.
Moments earlier he had been staggering through the past, dazed and bloodied, hurting and angry. Alone. But somehow they had found their way back to each other, and now the past felt like another world, a distant moon, or a planet far, far away. All that mattered was here and now and the woman in his arms.
As Dove lifted her face to his he could see her pulse beating a wild allegretto against the fragile skin of her throat and he held his breath, knowing that she was feeling it too. And then she was shaking her head, and her soft, ‘No...’ was lost as he pressed his mouth against hers and kissed her, and everything melted, and there was just his body reaching out to hers...
