The Real Romero(78)

                ‘I could have told her but...I needed time.’

                ‘Time for what?’

                ‘Time to come to terms with the fact that we were really no longer an item.’ He looked at her with serious intent and swallowed a mouthful of the whisky, not taking his eyes from her flushed face. ‘I thought...when you told me that you loved me...’

                ‘I don’t want to go there.’

                ‘We don’t have a choice.’

                ‘We do!’ she cried. ‘I said what I said and there’s no point going over it!’

                ‘I’ve never believed in love.’

                ‘I told you—I get that.’

                ‘You don’t. You don’t because, as you said, I let one crappy experience dictate my future where you, my optimistic Milly, would never have allowed that to happen. So, no, you didn’t understand. Not really.’

                He shot her a crooked, hesitant smile.

                ‘Do you know that you were the first person I ever told about Betina and my youthful error of judgement? And I knew that every time you raised the subject, which was often, you were trying to come to terms with the way I thought, because it was so unlike the way you would think. I should have been enraged at having that one confidence thrown back in my face time and again. I wasn’t.’

                He looked at his glass, circled the rim with his finger.

                ‘We’re all creatures of habit to some extent. My habit lay in the way I thought, the way I conditioned myself to think. For me, marriage would be about something that made sense because love made no sense. My head told me that you made no sense. You were just so damned young, you wore your heart on your sleeve, you were looking for the same happy-ever-after ending my mother believed in—the same happy ever ending I had no time for. I had built my box and I had no intention of stepping out of it, even though I knew you wanted me to. Am I losing you?’

                He shot her the ghost of a fleeting smile that made her world tilt on its axis.

                ‘I’m following you and you’re right—I didn’t understand, not really. Plus I was, well, I’ve never been that secure about my looks and I was...’

                ‘Jealous?’

                ‘No. Yes. Maybe.’

                ‘Just maybe? Because I’ve been eaten up with jealousy thinking about all those men you might have been seeing behind my back in the last week or two.’

                Milly’s heart soared. She wondered whether she was hearing correctly. She half-leaned forward just in case she missed something and that devastating smile broadened as he read her mind.

                ‘You can’t let go, and I’m sorry about that, but...but you don’t have to explain.’

                ‘I do, my Milly, because I find that I let go a long time ago. I never realised it because I was just waiting in a holding bay for the right woman to come along and mess with my heart.’

                The silence stretched between them. When she finally extended her hand along the table and he linked his fingers through hers, she experienced a rush of so many emotions, all vying for prominence, that she felt faint.

                ‘I ran scared when you told me how you felt. I didn’t know how to deal with it, Milly. And yet, I couldn’t bring myself to tell my mother that it was over between us. I had the strangest feeling that if I said it out loud, if I vocalised it, then I would find myself in a place of no return. I couldn’t face the thought of losing you but I didn’t know how to make it right between us. My head was still waging war with my heart. The fact is, I love you. I was falling in love and I didn’t even recognise the symptoms because I was so stubbornly and arrogantly convinced that I was immune.’