Modern Romance March 2015 Collection 2. Jane Porter

to get lost amidst the chit chat?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Okay...’ She looked at him hesitantly, picking up vibes which, for once, he wasn’t bothering to hide. He had sat down at the kitchen table and was nursing his drink, not looking at her—again, a little weird, because it smacked of the sort of indecision not associated with him. She felt in need of a stiff drink as well but instead made do with a glass of juice from the fridge before sitting opposite him at the chrome-and-glass table.

      ‘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.’

      He absently played with her fingers in a way that was thrillingly intimate. ‘You came into my life and you woke me up, Milly of the not-red hair, and my life is nothing without you in it.’

      ‘And I love you,’ Milly said with wrenching earnestness. ‘I never loved Robbie, but you knew that, didn’t you? When I think of what my life could have been if I hadn’t found out the truth...’ She shivered. ‘I didn’t want to fall in love with you either,’ she admitted. ‘I know you think I’m a hopeless romantic...’

      ‘You are and I thank God for that.’

      ‘But I still knew that you weren’t a good bet and I was still fighting my own silly demons; still thought that you were just, well, that you’d never look at someone like me. Even though...’ she dimpled at him ‘...you cured me of that.’

      ‘Would you have felt that if I had continued being a harmless ski instructor?’

      ‘You’re never harmless and why, out of interest, didn’t you tell me your true identity from the start?’

      ‘It was liberating. You had landed there, like someone from a different planet, no airs, no graces and no knowledge of just how wealthy I was. You fascinated me from the very first moment I met you. And now, here we are. You are the love of my life, Milly, and I can’t imagine life without you in it.’

      ‘Okay.’

      Lucas laughed. ‘Is that all you have to say? When you’re usually a woman of so many words?’

      Milly grinned. ‘I’m full of surprises.’

      ‘And I want to be the one to find them all out, every day, for the rest of my life. Will you marry me? I’m asking that on behalf of both me and my mother...’

      Milly laughed and rose, moving to sit on his lap so that she could feel his arms around her, holding her close, never letting her go.

      ‘In that case, since you’ve brought your mother into the equation, what can a girl do but accept?’

      * * * * *

       Read on for an extract from THE SHEIKH’S SINFUL SEDUCTION by Dani Collins.