Page 48 of How To Tempt The Off-Limits Billionaire

Right, they were going to do this. Ro sucked in a breath and held it, suddenly wishing she could backtrack. But Muzi, she knew, didn’t dodge or duck, he faced situations head-on. And she’d shoved theirs into his face.

In a few minutes she’d either be sinking or swimming, dancing or drowning.

“Yes,” Ro whispered.

“You have the same power, Ro. More than anyone I’ve ever known.”

She knew that and was humbled that she could affect this strong resilient man in such an emotional way. “So let’s not hurt each other, Muzi,” she softly suggested. “Let’s promise each other that we won’t.”

She heard the clang of desperation in her voice, the way her voice rose and fell, coated with anxiety.

“I can’t promise that, Roisin. You can’t either.”

Sadness coated his words, and Ro’s heart plummeted to her feet. Her intuition told her that this wasn’t going to end well.

“You are braver than I am, Ro, willing to wade into these dark waters even though you don’t understand them and have no idea how to navigate them, how to protect yourself.”

She held her breath, knew what was coming next.

“But I’m not that brave, not that strong. I don’t trust love to stick around, Ican’ttrust it. I lost my mother when I was three, my grandmother when I was a young kid. I lived under the threat of losing my family my entire life. I will, hopefully not anytime soon, lose Mimi. I survived my childhood, I didn’t let Susan break me and when Mimi’s time comes to move on, I’ll mourn her, and I’ll miss her. But I’ll cope.”

Ro held her breath, waiting for the hammer to fall. “But I can’t survive losing you, Roisin. Like you, I am standing on that knife-edge, ready to fall. But I’m not going to do that. Ican’tand Iwon’t. I’m going to be sensible and back away, while I still can.”

Muzi stood up and dropped a kiss on the top of her head. “I could love you, Ro, we both know that. And yeah, I’m scared of being hurt. But more than that, I can’t bear the thought of doing something to hurt you. I would rip anyone in two who caused you one tear...”

He hesitated, took a breath and forced the words out. “But the hell of it is, I know that I have the power to hurt you the most, to hurt youagain. Nobody gets to do that, Ro, especially not me. I hope you find love, Ro. I hope you find a man who can give you everything you want, everything you need, what you deserve.”

She didn’t want anyone else, she wantedhim. But Ro was old enough, and wise enough, to know her wants and needs didn’t matter. She couldn’t demand him to be brave, to take a chance, to love her as she did him.

Love, not given freely and courageously, wasn’t love at all. So Ro bit her lip and watched him walk away.

And slowly, so very slowly, she started to sink, knowing that she was about to, mentally and emotionally, drown in the sadness enveloping her.

CHAPTER TEN

ROTOSSEDSTAINEDand ratty blankets into the skip, once again dirty and dusty. The cleaning crew had been back yesterday, and they’d swept and vacuumed the inside of the property, mopped the floors and cleaned the windows but she still found ways to get filthy.

Today she was sorting through the piles of linen. The finely embroidered tablecloths, stitched by her great-grandmothers, would be hand-washed and placed into plastic containers to protect them from moths and other vermin, but sheets and duvets and stained tablecloths were all going in the skip.

She wished she could toss out her problems as easily, but life didn’t work that way.

More than a week had passed since that night she couldn’t stop thinking about. The night Muzi left, she’d curled up on a couch in the library and white-knuckled it, thinking that this was true heartbreak. She’d cried until a soft dawn broke over the mountain.

The next day she’d forced herself to swing by Muzi’s place to collect her stuff. He wasn’t there, Greta told her, and the housekeeper had been instructed to pack up Ro’s bags.

Refusing to cry—knowing that if she started again, she might not stop,ever—she went into Franschhoek, picked up food and fresh linens, and organized to have a bed delivered to St. Urban. She hadn’t left her property since.

She wasn’t eating and she wasn’t sleeping, and was, she decided, a walking, talking zombie. She’d been so desperate to sleep last night that, sometime around midnight, she decided to take a long walk through the vineyards, hoping the fresh night air would help her to get some rest.

Leaning against the skip, she remembered her walk through the section of the vines that had been cleared by Muzi’s farm crew, the moonlight so bright she hadn’t needed a torch to navigate her way. When she came to the property boundary she’d video called her mom and was pleasantly surprised to find her dad with her.

She hadn’t spent a lot of time on pleasantries, she’d simply jumped right in and asked them what was happening with their divorce.

“We’re going ahead with it,” her mother told her, “and we expect it to be finalized within a few months.”

“We are good friends, Ro, and we intend to stay that way,” her dad assured her.

“And you will always be our daughter. We’ve just changed, moved on from each other,” her dad added. “Love doesn’t always last forever, pumpkin.”

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