Page 82 of The Paris Trip

He nodded. ‘You think I don’t know that? It doesn’t stop me from being in love with you though. If anything, it makes me more determined to find a way through the difficulties.’

‘But you said, you only thought you might be in love with me. Not that you definitely are.’ She shrugged, watching him. ‘I’m just saying…’

He kissed her again, and for a long time there was silence in the vineyard. Then he murmured in her ear, ‘Pedant.’

‘That’s me.’ So many people had called her a pedant over the years, she had become accustomed to it. It was almost a badge of honour. ‘So you agree, what you said doesn’t make sense. Or rather, I shouldn’t take it too seriously.’

‘No, let me rephrase,’ he said briefly, and took a deep breath. ‘Maeve Eden, I’m in love with you. For real and forever. I want to marry you.’ He stuttered the last three words, his voice having started to shake. ‘If you’ll have me, that is.’

She felt as though someone had put a tube down her throat and sucked all the air out of her lungs. Though obviously she would have noticed that happening, so it had to be her own nervous system playing havoc with her head.

‘Now my hearing is going wonky. I'm sorry. Did you just ask me to marry you?’

‘Actually, I merely stated that I would like to marry you.’

‘Pedant,’ she whispered.

‘If the shoe fits…’ He was watching her closely, his hands hovering just above her shoulders but not touching. She sensed he wanted to kiss her again but was giving her a chance to reply to his proposal first.

But which way to swing?

‘Oh. My. Gooodness,’ she mumbled as the realization of what was happening began to sink in properly.

Marriage?

She couldn’t seem to breathe properly. The world blurred to his dark face above her, a mauve-dark halo of night behind his head. Had Leo Rémy, a man whom she had only met, gosh, less than two weeks ago, really just proposed marriage to her? Or suggested it as a possibility, at least. Mentally, she went back through their last few exchanges… Yes, apparently he had. And now her brain was a hot mess of nonsense.

She groped for words that wouldn’t come, and ended up making a strange bleating noise instead.

His brows tugged together. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Meh…’ More bleating.

She’d definitely lost the use of human language. Hopefully, he wasn't against marrying a goat.

‘I’m sensing my proposal may have come as a shock to you,’ he mused, studying her thoughtfully.

A shock?

The man had such a talent for understatement, Maeve was stunned into respectful silence. Which meant no more bleating, mercifully.

He bent his dark head, blotting out the sky. ‘I seem to recall that kissing a woman in shock can be helpful,’ he murmured just before their lips met again.

It was another long kiss. And by the time it was over, she had somehow processed the rapid influx of information – love, marriage, bleating – and come up with a more appropriate, adult response.

‘We can’t get married,’ she told him flatly, pulling back from his lips, though still within the alluring circle of his arms.

‘Why not?’

‘Okay, let’s see… We’ve only just met. We both have intensely complicated lives already without getting tangled up in someone else’s complicated life. Also, you live in France, and I live in England,’ she went on, carefully enunciating all the reasons she had already given herself to explain why this would not work. ‘You’re, like, really arty and a bit of a wild child.’

‘A child?’ His brows shot up.

‘A bohemian, then.’ She struggled to return to her list before he could kiss her again and commonsense fled in a rush of desire. ‘And I’m just a maths teacher. I have equations living in my brain. People call me sensible. Pedant, remember? I’m completely ordinary. While you…’ She sucked in a ragged breath. ‘You’re extraordinary. So this will never work, can’t you see that?’

His smile had grown during her little speech, and now he shook his head. ‘It will work precisely because of those things. Because we’re such opposites. Have you never heard of the saying, opposites attract?’

‘People only say that to explain really strange marriages.’

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