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His stomach snapped tight. He felt vulnerable, panicky. This was always the worst part to remember—that and the bit that had followed. Usually whenever he got there he couldn’t seem to make the room stay still. The first time it had happened at work he’d had to hold on to the desk to stop it moving. Mostly he had a whisky to get past it. Or he went for a run and kept on running until his lungs screamed and his muscles ached more than his chest and it was as if it had never happened.
Only Dove’s questions were like a crack in a dam, and the truth was a swell of water pushing against it. It was impossible to hold it back, but somehow that made it easier for his words to flow.
‘She had—has,’ he corrected himself, ‘a life. A husband. A daughter. A s-son. He’s three years younger than me.’ He heard his own voice, the stammer, clumsy and stupid like a child, and he didn’t know what hurt more. That she had gone on to have another family so soon after she’d discarded him or that it hadn’t made her think about him.
‘Oh—and her family has a property company.’ He felt his mouth twist into something like a smile, but not, because smiles shouldn’t hurt.
‘Basically, the gist of it was that she didn’t want everything good in her life ruined because of a drunken one night stand on a Portuguese beach.’
In the past, when he’d thought about shining a light into the dark corners of his life, what had stopped him was the certainty that nobody else would want to look. But now the sun was streaming into the room, turning everything gold, and Dove was still there.
He stared at her, feeling lightheaded.
‘I was a mistake. A secret, unwanted mistake. And that’s why she gave me up for adoption. So that I would stay a secret. She wasn’t looking for a second chance. There was no place for me in her life, and nothing would change.’
It sounded ugly. Itwasugly. But Dove didn’t flinch or look away, as if he too was ugly. Instead, she reached out and took his hand.
He stared down at her soft fingers, feeling not just their softness but their strength, and he took that strength and said, ‘Then Charles Lambton took out an envelope and pushed it across the table. He told me that his cilent wanted to give me something to compensate for any distress I might have felt.’
Dove stared at him in silence. Her throat was so tight she could hardly breathe. ‘Oh, Gabriel...’
‘I thought it would be different. I mean, I can see why having a baby on your own when you were nineteen would be difficult, but she didn’t even want to meet me—’
The skin on his face was stretched taut across the bones, and without thinking she stepped forward and slid her arms around him. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered.
No wonder he had been so devastated when her father had walked into that hotel bar. No wonder he had taken the money and left. It would have felt likedéjà vu—or ratherdéjà vecu. And now she knew why he hadn’t told her any of this before. She knew because telling people things that were hard to hear, to know, to accept, was almost impossible.
She knew because she had spent her lifenottelling people those things.
But he had done it.
Her arms tightened around his body and it was then, holding his body tightly, feeling Gabriel’s heart beating against hers, or maybe her heart beating against his, that Dove understood that she loved him. He was in her heart and he had never not been—no matter how much she had tried to forget about him.
For a moment she couldn’t do anything but lean into him. She was shaking inside with shock. And yet a part of her had always known. That was why she hadn’t called his bluff back in London. And why, before that, she had found it so easy to stay single. For her, there had never been any other man but Gabriel. She just couldn’t imagine anyone but him kissing her, touching her, holding her.
Her pulse shivered and her hands trembled against his shoulders. The urge to tell him the truth was overwhelming. But there were other truths in the tense way he held his body.
She looked up into his face, seeing the boy beneath the man. Right from the start she had questioned why he wanted Fairlight Holdings so badly. The business had some plus points, but there were far better investments. None, though, as owned by the family of his birth mother, and that was the reason he was doing all this. To prove himself to Fenella Ogilvy and perhaps finally forge a connection with her.
‘That’s what this is about, isn’t it?’ she said softly. ‘You want to give her another chance.’
‘Another chance?’
He was staring at her, his blue eyes narrow on her face as he stepped back out of her embrace. His mood had changed. The anger was back.
‘I don’t want to give her anotherchance. I don’t want anything to do with her. When the acquisition is signed off, and her family’s business is mine, then I’ll send someone to meet her in a hotel of my choosing—just to let her know that everything her family once owned now belongs tome. The son she gave up. The son who wasn’t good enough.’
Dove held her breath. She had been wrong. The anger had never left him. It was always there...like his shadow. Her stomach knotted and her heart was beating very hard. She knew first-hand the consequences of living with anger and resentment day in and day out. It was corrosive and crushing. Even her father, who had seemed outwardly to thrive on it, had not been a happy man.
The thought of Gabriel turning into her father made her stomach cave in on itself.
‘And then what?’ she said quietly.
He frowned, his anger still there. ‘I walk away and get on with my life.’
Dove stared at him, feeling his words chafing beneath her skin, seeing her own life. The arguments...her father’s inexplicable cold anger. Her mother’s equally inexplicable refusal to leave, trapped, fused with her father in some baffling mix of money and manners and fear and loathing and helplessness.
She shook her head. ‘Walking away isn’t closure, Gabriel. We both know that. Because if it was you and I wouldn’t be here now, having this conversation.’
