Page 50 of One Bridegroom Required!

‘So what happened to change her mind? Your undoubted prowess in bed—or maybe I should say on bolts of pure silk?’

At least he had saved his trump card for exactly this moment; he just prayed that he hadn’t destroyed all her faith in him, because if he had she would never believe him... He drew a deep breath. ‘Actually, I’ve never slept with Caroline. Never.’

‘You’ve never slept with me either,’ she put in pointedly.

It was not the reaction he had wanted—it sounded so unforgiving, and it started him thinking about things he hadn’t planned to think about. Not yet...

Sexual tension crackled through the air as their gazes locked with erotic memories. ‘Okay—let me phrase that a little differently. I’ve never had sex with Caroline,’ he told her baldly. ‘Ever.’

She stared at the wall unseeingly. ‘I’m not sure that I believe you.’

‘Yes, I thought you’d say that. But it’s true, Holly. I haven’t.’

Hope stirred with a Hicker in her heart, but she kept every trace of it from her voice. ‘Why not?’

He hesitated. He had never been disloyal to a woman in his life, and he certainly wasn’t going to start being disloyal to Caroline now, but these past weeks he had been left wondering whether some minor brainstorm might have afflicted him this past year. ‘Because she thought that not having sex until we’d made some kind of commitment would make me respect her more. That’s how some women think.’

Oh, God—so what did that say about her?

‘Holly, let me try to explain to you. Do you want me to?’

A small voice. ‘Yes.’

He forced himself to concentrate on the past; it was the only way he could stop himself from taking her into his arms and just holding her until all the hurt had left her beautiful face. ‘I once told you that my life has been chequered. That I’ve been rootless and wandering for a long time, and working on a game reserve allowed me to carry on living that life legitimately. A kind of paid-up nomad. Do you understand?’

She nodded. ‘I think so.’

‘Until earlier this year, when I looked around at what I had, and it just didn’t seem enough any more—’

‘You mean, money-wise?’

He shook his head. ‘No, not money-wise. I’m talking fundamentals. I asked myself did I want to still be doing what I was doing when I was sixty, and the answer was a very loud no.’

‘And then you inherited?’

‘Then I inherited,’ he echoed. ‘And my relationship with Caroline changed.’ He saw the way she pursed her lips. ‘Oh, I know what you’re thinking, and I agree—that Caroline would never have agreed to marry if I hadn’t inherited. I knew that.’

‘You knew that?’ she asked, outraged. ‘That she was a gold-digger?’

He smiled at the old-fashioned term. ‘Life isn’t as simple as that, Holly. Caroline wouldn’t have been interested in marrying a ranch manager who slept out under the stars. She wanted stability and she offered stability, and for a while there I thought that’s what I wanted, too. And my inheritance gave me the stability that I’d been lacking up until then.

‘We talked of marriage—I didn’t propose, and I bought her no ring—we talked of marriage in an abstract way. The way people used to talk about marriage—as an institutional framework in which to bring up children, and I certainly didn’t want to miss out on having children. Neither did she.

‘But there was no romantic love—that’s one of the reasons I convinced myself it might work. No great passion—but we got along together pretty well. Nothing was definite, but I had to come over to sort out my uncle’s affairs, and we decided to use that space to think it over. To decide whether that was what we both really wanted.’

‘And Caroline certainly decided that the answer was “yes”, didn’t she?’ demanded Holly.

‘Yes, she did. But I had done exactly the opposite. I had started to feel uneasy about the cold-bloodedness of such an arrangement. And I had seen you and it was like a thunderbolt that knocked me right off balance. I fought it because I thought it was simply romantic love, a love which would fade.’ He sighed.

‘And then you came to stay with me, and I realised that it wasn’t going to fade. That this was it. Love. The real thing—and all-consuming. The only thing that mattered any more. I’d denied it and fought it all my life, but now it had finally happened—and how!’

She looked at him in confusion. ‘But why? Why fight it?’

‘Because I was pretty short on female role models when I was growing up, Holly,’ he told her urgently, and it was as though he had lifted a veil from before her eyes. ‘There were none at boarding-school, unless you counted the matron, and no one did. My mother was the only one I had, and she died before I had time to get to know the real woman she was, because as a child your perception is distorted by dependence

‘And after she died, I saw her through my father’s eyes—as feckless and beautiful. Because he was besotted with her and yet he resented feeling that way. She made a fool of him over and over again, and yet he never stopped loving her. And I was determined that the same fate would never befall me.’ He saw the slope of her shoulders relax, and began to let himself cling onto a grain of hope.

‘You had the same kind of bewitching beauty as she did, and it terrified me. It terrified me enough to realise that I couldn’t possibly marry Caroline, not when I felt that way about someone else. So I flew back to Africa, to tell her.’

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