Page 56 of The Billionaire's Seduction Revenge

She flinched. “Yes.” Her lips compressed. “But clearly I was wrong.”

“No!” It was an explosive denial, flooded with urgency. “You wereright.Completely right. Youknewme. You knew why I was pushing you away, and what was at the heart of it. You knew all the parts of me that were broken by grief and loss and death and all the parts of me that you could heal if I was brave enough to let you. But I wasn’t, Emma. I was terrified. Because I knew that every loss I had ever felt would be nothing compared to what it would be like to love, and then have to lose, you.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, as if rejecting everything about his protestation.

“So I pushed you away first. I pushed you away in an attempt to control the potential risks of this, without realising I was already in too deep.” He shook his head. “I thought it would be okay. That you’d leave, and I’d get on with my life, and forget about you, and everything we’d shared, and instead, you have become all I can think of. You are like a fever in my blood and my brain and all I can think is that I can’t fight this anymore. I can’t fight you.” He moved his hand, placing it lightly over hers, drawing her attention to his face. Her eyes, as frightened as his heart, met his gaze, and he forced himself to keep talking.

“Today, I listened to the words Costa had written for you, about death, and the importance of living a good life, and I realised that nothing in my life will ever matter, will ever truly be good, if you are not a part of it. This is how it’s meant to be, isn’t it? This is why fate brought us together?”

“Fate?” She whispered, her brow furrowed.

“What else can it be? We’ve both known loss, death, the trauma and pain of that, we’re both scared to hurt again, scared to heal, and yet together, none of that matters. I love you. Everything that had seemed complicated and scary is now ridiculously simple. I love you, with every cell in my body, and I want to be with you. I want to be with you even when we both know life comes with a horrifying lack of guarantees. Because I’ve come to understand that over the last month too,cara…and especially over the last few hours, that the thing I am now most scared of, is wasting my life because I am afraid to live it. Of losing you by choice. How stupid I was to think that shoving you out of my life would be any less painful than running the risk of losing you another way.”

A tear slid down her cheek, but her lips were quirking in a half-smile that gave him more hope than any man had ever known.

“There was nothing convenient about this,” he said quietly, squeezing her hand again. “Nothing convenient about how you made me feel in spite of myself, about what I came to want from you. I was wrong to speak about our relationship like that, wrong to make you think we were nothing special. That you were nothing special, when the truth is, you are all the light of my world.”

She sucked in a breath. “I didn’t believe you,” she whispered, moving closer, though the bench stood between them. “I knew it wasn’t true. That doesn’t mean I didn’t hate you for what you were trying to make me think, but I knew it wasn’t possible for me to have been so wrong about everything. How I felt about you wasn’t one-sided.”

“No,” he agreed gently, then moved closer, tilting her chin a little. “How you felt about me?”

She hesitated, met his eyes unflinchingly, then shook her head and whispered, “I’m scared.”

“But you’re also brave,” he said truthfully. “You were ready to face what this is, what you wanted from me. You have more courage than anyone I know.”

Her smile was wistful.

“I miss you,” he said, honestly, and then, because he knew she needed to understand how much he realised his mistakes, he said, “And I’m sorry. I cannot change what I said to you that day, nor how I acted, but I can promise never to say or do anything that will make you doubt how I feel about you. You are someone I have been waiting for all my life; please tell me I have not ruined things with you forever.”

She groaned, shook her head. “Of course you haven’t.” And then, after a beat, “Though you got damned close.” He came around the bench, but waited, hesitating, because he still couldn’t believe he’d been so lucky as to have earned her forgiveness. “I’ve missed you, too. Everything about you. I really wasn’t planning on falling in love, you know. It’s kind of the last thing I wanted, actually, but the truth is, I’ve been thinking the same thing, about fate, and destiny, and how meeting you wasn’t so much about falling in love but rather meeting the person I was born to love. I know it sounds crazy, and a month ago I would have said it wasn’t possible but—,”

“It is not crazy to me, it’s exactly how I feel too, my love.”

And then, she smiled, a dazzlingly beautiful, perfect smile that made his heart lock into place once more. Now he really believed it: everything was going to be alright, forever more.

* * *

Her tears fell freely as Vasilios read out the section of the will that related to Emma. “I don’t want money,” she said with a shake of her head, brushing that aside. “But I will treasure these words, and particularly the effect they had on you, for the rest of my life.”

“As will I,” he responded. “He was a wise man, in the end.”

“Yes.” She sighed, snuggling into Vasilios, pleased to be home, here in Puglia, in the place where they’d first fallen in love.

The next morning, Vasilios brought a large silver box to the table. “My grandmother’s jewels,” he explained, twisting the numbers until the door popped open to reveal several pouches of velvet.

“Vasilios, I told you, I don’t want anything material.”

“I know. But this is different.” He reached into the box and removed the items one by one. “These things were my grandmother’s and I believe it brought Costa pleasure and relief in the end to imagine you keeping them.”

Her cheeks flushed.

“In fact, I have been wondering if he didn’t know, in bequeathing these things to you, that they would remain in the family.”

Emma’s brow lifted.

“He was an astute man, and his intellect was not dulled by age. I think he suspected what was happening between us. There was a comment he made once, that I barely noticed at the time, but now, I’ve been thinking back, and yes, I’m certain of it. He knew about us, and I think it brought him great comfort. He would have liked this, Emma. He would have loved to know we were together.”

Emma’s smile was like the sun. “I know he would have.”

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