She took a deep breath, praying for strength to finish. Somehow she needed to finish, if only to explain how she could marry someone who could let her down so badly. ‘We’d only been going out three months by then—when it came down to it we barely knew each other—but Shayne, to his damn credit and his eternal damnation, got down on his knee and proposed right then and there in front of her and what could I do? What could I say? I knew it was crazy and reckless but how could I say no to someone who wanted a dying woman’s wish to come true? We were married a month later next to her hospital bed. Mum was my matron of honour.’
She dropped her head into her lap, one hand covering her mouth to cover the sobs she could no longer contain. ‘We lost her the next day.’
Grief took her then. Grief for her loss. Grief for a well-intentioned but hasty and ill-conceived marriage. Grief for a lost mother and all those lost years. And then she felt his hand around hers, and this time it wasn’t sparks she felt, but warmth and a jolt of connectivity as his fingers squeezed hers, his thumb stroking the back of her hand until the car jerked to a stop and he hauled her bodily against him. She tried to fight, she tried to push herself away, finally giving in when she knew she had no energy for the fight. No hope.
‘She was the reason I was born at all!’ She turned her head up to him through the curtain of her tears, uncaring of her swollen eyes and the mess she’d made of her face. ‘My scumbag father wanted me aborted to avoid the responsibility of having a child. My grandparents wanted me aborted to avoid the shame of an illegitimate grandchild. My mother refused them all. She left everything and everyone she had once loved to protect me.’
Her sobs racked her slender body and he pulled her closer, surprised how easily, how comfortably, she fitted against him, how right it felt holding her.
She made another futile attempt to push away again but there was no way he was letting her go. ‘I’m making you all wet,’ she protested, and still he clung on.
How could he let her go? Because suddenly he understood. Suddenly it all made sense. He had never understood before why she had taken the stance she had, why she had refused her husband the solution the clinic had offered and that Shayne had demanded.
She herself had been given the opportunity to live.
So she would not take another’s life.
And he didn’t want to let her go.
He thought about the agreement, about the money he’d offered and the way she’d protested every step of the way and he finally realised why she would have done this for nothing. Finally he understood.
She deserved a thousand times more for doing what she was doing but she’d wanted nothing and he hadn’t believed her.
Not completely. Not until now.
He held her while her sobs abated, while her breathing calmed. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘You didn’t need to hear all that.’
‘I think I did,’ he told her, his lips brushing her hair, drinking in her scent. ‘And now I understand. Now I know why you are such a special woman.’
She turned her face up to him and he saw the questions skate across the surface of her liquid eyes. Her face was flushed and tear-swept. There were mascara smudges at both eyes. He brushed a loose strand of hair from her face, stroked the pads of his fingers down her cheek and jaw, till they got to her chin and he could angle her face just the way he wanted. She looked so sad he wanted to kiss away her pain. Wanted to let her know he understood.
For a scant second he wondered at his actions. Once before he’d wanted to kiss her. He’d written off the impulse as an aberration. But it hadn’t been an aberration, he now realised. It had been a necessity. An imperative.
One he wasn’t about to let pass again. ‘You are special,’ he told her, part because he suspected she needed to hear it, part because it was true and another part because he damned well wanted to. ‘You are strong and beautiful and if I may say so, very, very alluring.’
Her gasp told him all he needed to know. She didn’t believe it. Which meant that he would just have to convince her.
‘Believe it,’ he said, his lips coming closer, the first pass no more than a whisper of shared air and coiled expectation. Her lips followed his and he smiled. She wanted him. He wanted her to want him.
He knew this was right. Even here, sitting in a car in the midst of a nursery equipment warehouse car park in the middle of a busy day, he knew this was no aberration. This was right.
And this time his lips hesitated, hovered breathlessly above, until the need became urgent and the lure of her became too great. And then his lips met hers and he came undone.