Page 49 of How To Tempt The Off-Limits Billionaire

“But it should, I want it to! I need to believe that love can last forever!” she’d shouted, tears on her cheeks. “I want to love someone and toknowthat it will last forever. Look, I know that I am being overly romantic and highly unrealistic,” she continued. “I know that having a relationship that lasts a lifetime is something rare and wonderful and the chances of it happening to me are extremely unlikely.”

“You and Kelvin—”

“Kelvin and I are over.” Ro sat down between the vines and watched the moonlight dance across the leaves. After taking a deep breath, she told her parents that she was the biological daughter of two of the most dysfunctional people the world had ever seen and that she’d inherited their fortune.

She told them she was obscenely rich, that they had to keep her identity a secret and that she’d decide, when the time was right, to reveal to the world that she was the long-lost Tempest-Vane heir. Or she might not. She’d see what worked best for her sometime in the future.

Oh, and that she’d fallen for another man. Her explanations took time, and it was over twenty minutes before she could return to her point about relationships.

“If my decent, lovely parents can’t make their relationship work, what chance do I have? My parents, my real parents, the two people who made me believe that happily ever after in love is possible, are splitting up. My birth parents routinely cheated on each other but stayed married. My fiancé cheated on me two weeks after I left home, and I’ve fallen in love with a man who’s everything I want but he’s commitment-phobic and has abandonment issues.”

She could see the long look her parents exchanged—saw the love in their eyes—and a few of the many knots in her stomach eased.

“We loved each other wildly, intensely, wonderfully,” her dad said, emotion coating every word. “Do I regret that? Not for a second. Your mom has given me so much pleasure and I’ve loved every moment with her. And you were a gift from heaven above.”

“We loved each other, Roisin, and we still do. It’s just...changed,” her mom said, resting her temple on her dad’s shoulder. “Will that happen to you? With this man or someone else? I don’t know, life and love don’t come with any guarantees. But do we think you should walk away from love, now or in the future, because we’re getting divorced and your birth parents were lunatics? No, that’s...nuts.”

“You decide your future, who you love and how you love that person,” her dad told her, sounding a little cross. “You don’t get to walk away from love because of something that might or might not happen in the future.”

Shocked by her normally easygoing father’s harsh words, she’d nodded. Growing up, her mom was the whip-cracker but when her dad waded in, she never argued. “That’s all very well, Dad, but he won’t let himself love me.”

And that’s what it came down to: she might be prepared to take the risk of loving him, to see where this went but a relationship needed two people to be courageous, to take a chance, to make it work.

Muzi wasn’t prepared to put any skin in the game and she couldn’t force him to. Love wasn’t love when it was demanded or coerced.

Muzi wouldn’t allow himself to love her and she needed to accept that. But, God, ithurt.

When they disconnected, Ro remained seated on the damp grass, thinking of her dream to be the center of a man’s world, the glue that held a family together. But the only man she could see herself being with was Muzi. And he didn’t want her...

Feeling the burn of tears—she’d never cried so much in her life—Ro climbed to her feet, her attention caught by the sheen of moonlight on the leaves of the vines. She touched a leaf on her left, smiled, and looked right...

The moonlight looked different on those leaves. Ro frowned, thinking that she was going mad. Rubbing her eyes, she inspected the vines again and stepped away to look at them from another angle. The vines on her right definitely didn’t reflect the moonlight in the same way the vines on the left did.

And were the vines on the right a little bigger, with bigger veins running through them? In the moonlight, they looked dissimilar.

Ro decided that they were...

Could these subtle differences mean that she’d found Muzi’s precious cultivar? She didn’t want to get his, or her, hopes up but...

Maybe. Just maybe.

If she couldn’t give him her love, at least she’d be able to give him the gift of securing his position in Clos du Cadieux. It was something, she supposed.

Nine long-ass days after last seeing Ro, Muzi strolled into Pasco’s at lunchtime and found an empty seat at the bar, wondering if noon was too early to get slammed.

He lifted his hand to his head and remembered that he’d just managed to get rid of remnants of last night’s hangover and he didn’t know if his poor head could take another beating. Tomorrow was Monday, and he had a board meeting, where he expected to take flak for leasing land comprised of Merlot vines.

He planned to tell the board that, according to his research, he was convinced a good portion of those vines weren’t Merlot, and in a few years, Clos du Cadieux would launch an exceptionally rare, award-winning wine on the market.

They’d be excited to hear that, and pretty damn pleased with him. And as soon as their excitement bubbled down, he’d make another announcement...

They needed to choose between him or Susan. If they wanted him to run Clos du Cadieux and to bring a new wine to the market—an expensive, rare, hugely profitable wine and one only he could produce—Susan needed to step down.

Or else he would resign. And, as per the contract he’d signed with Ro, the St. Urban vines went with him. Thank God that she’d insisted on including that clause in the agreement—she’d only wanted to deal with him and nobody else—it gave him a safety net. If they did choose Susan over him, he’d still have the vines and could still bring a wine made from the C’Artegan cultivar to the market.

He held all the cards to get Susan out of his life and Ro had given him most of them.

And that just pissed him off.

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