Page 64 of Surrender to the Ruthless Billionaire

She shook her head. She was breathing too fast and the ache inside her chest was building.

‘You just don’t get it, do you? I could wait one hundred years and it wouldn’t change the way he feels about me.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Luis said quietly. ‘You came here to face your past, Cristina, not to run away from it.’

She threw his hand off hers, her eyes blazing with anger and hurt. ‘How dare you?’

Her words were barely above a whisper, but he could feel the force of them as though she were shouting.

‘I was upset—’

‘And you were right to be.’ Reaching out, he grasped her hands in his. ‘Totally and justifiably right. But that doesn’t change the fact that if you walk away now all this will have been for nothing.’

He took a step towards her, keeping his grey gaze steady on her face.

‘I know you don’t want to hear it, but trust me, cariño. You can’t run away from this. I know because I tried.’

She stared at him mutely, the truth of his words silencing her. He was right, but knowing that didn’t seem to make any difference. She still felt sick with fear.

Trust me. It was so easy for him to say, but a virtual impossibility for her to do. She had loved her father, trusted him unconditionally. He had helped her with her homework, dug sandcastles with her on the beach, taught her to ride a bike, and none of it had mattered. When it came to it he had simply turned his back on her.

Her body began to tremble. The first time she had been a child. It had been out of her control, and the same had been true about their meeting at the hotel. But what had happened today at the hospital was different. She was different—older and in control of her life. She was an adult now, and if she let this happen again—if she let him reject her again—then it would not be bad luck, or a mistake. It would be a choice.

A choice she was not willing to make.

‘I know you’re trying to help, but it’s not the same,’ she said flatly. ‘You and I are not the same.’

Her heart began to beat faster as she remembered how she had allowed herself to imagine being not just in Luis’s bed but in his life. Maybe if Luis had been a different man from a different background, and they had met under different circumstances, she might have let herself be swept away by his tenderness and support, given in to some kind of romantic fantasy.

But there was no point in reading anything into his gesture. Luis might be loyal and strong and handsome like a prince, but he was also wealthy like a prince too. Wealthy, privileged, and with all the expectations of his birth.

Her mouth tightened. Expectations that would never include her. This wouldn’t last. It couldn’t. Not just because they came from opposite ends of the social spectrum, or even because she was illegitimate. It had to do with her, and what she knew deep down to be true and immutable about herself.

That beneath all her bravado she was a let-down.

‘I’m not going back to see my father. There’s no point. I’m done with that part of my life now. It’s time to move on and…’ She hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘And I’m not going back to the island with you either.’

It had been hard enough saying the words inside her head. Speaking them out loud made her stomach turn inside out with misery. But that was nothing to the pain she would feel if she went back with him and waited for him to end it—as he surely would.

Luis stared at her in shock, his hands tightening on hers involuntarily. She had stilled, her body tensing, and he could sense that already she was retreating—just as she had before.

The breath in his throat felt thick and cloying, and panic rose up inside him as he imagined the island without her—his life without her.

He’d seen the doubt and fear in her eyes when he’d asked her to trust him, and he knew that he needed to do something, say something to calm her, to stop her closing off and withdrawing from him. To make her trust him.

‘I know how much your father’s hurt you, Cristina. He’s hurt you and that’s why you don’t want to go and see him again. You don’t trust him not to hurt you more.’

He paused, the doubt and fear on her face staying his words for a moment, and then he breathed out slowly.

‘I know you don’t trust me either, and you think I’m going to hurt you too. But I could never hurt you, cariño.’ Heart thumping, he held her gaze. ‘I love you, Cristina.’

Her brows drew together and she looked up at him uncertainly.

It wasn’t that he was lying. She knew with absolute certainty that he believed what he was saying. Just as her father had believed it when he’d stood in front of a room full of witnesses and told her mother that he’d love and cherish her for ever.

But the problem was that she didn’t believe it.

Worse, she knew how it would play out, for she’d been in this exact place before, with previous boyfriends. Only she had never felt like this before, and that was what was scaring her the most.

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