Chapter Ten
L EANING FORWARD TO rest his elbows against the kitchen counter, Trip stared blankly at his laptop screen. It was good news, the best in fact. Winslow had just signed a deal with the world’s biggest fitness tracker. It was his project and it had sent share prices soaring. His email was clogged with congratulatory messages from trustees and shareholders. He had no need of a wife to improve his image.
But there was nobody to share the moment.
His chest felt as if it had been hollowed out with a spoon. He was alone.
Not officially. Not publicly. Not yet.
That would happen tomorrow. If he could find the right words.
It was two hours since he’d walked out of their bedroom, and it felt like a lifetime, but he could hardly rush her. So he was giving her space even though he still couldn’t believe that it had ended this way. That it had ended at all.
It made no sense for her to react as she had. Everything had been going perfectly. There had been a smoothness to every second that he knew logically was beyond her control and yet her being there seemed to give everything a tensile certainty. But, at some point between stepping on and off the punt, it had all fallen apart.
Don’t say my name.
That was what she’d said to him, and it had been a shock, like a physical blow, because he knew how it felt to hear her say his name and he’d thought she felt the same. Only her voice had had that snap of some last thread fraying, as if she’d grown tired of pretending.
And that had hurt, so he’d done what he always did when something pushed him away. He’d pushed back.
He could still see the expression on her face, that mix of shock and hurt, and he knew that was on him. But Lily had caught him off balance talking about separating and then suddenly...
The floor tilted beneath his feet as if he were suffering from vertigo. It was the same feeling as before when she’d told him she loved him in so many words. When she had stripped herself bare of all her protective layers. He knew what it must have cost her to do so, and he had done nothing. Said nothing. Nothing coherent anyway. He had just stood there, watching her try to hold herself together.
His hands clenched into fists and he slammed them against the counter, welcoming the sting of pain because it took the edge off the ache tearing through his chest and splitting his heart.
But what was he supposed to say? Their ‘engagement’ was never about love. Hell, he wasn’t sure he even knew what love was. He understood the concept, but in his family love was expressed primarily through material support. There was financial security on an unimaginable scale but affection, emotional support and that intuitive understanding were absent.
Right up until he’d tricked Lily onto that plane.
She had fought with him, challenged him, comforted him, and been at his side during one of the hardest periods of his entire life. But he hadn’t been prepared for her loving him.
Or for how much he loved her.
And that was when he realised why he was hurting so much. Why he felt sick and split and broken and empty. He loved Lily.
Wanted her, needed her, loved her with an intensity that matched the surge of blood beating from his heart.
Turning, he walked swiftly through the house. The door to the bedroom was open and he strode in, his heart hammering in his throat.
‘Lily, I—’
He stopped. The bedroom was silent and empty. So was the bathroom. So were all the other rooms in the house and the garden. He checked and double-checked, retracing his steps, panic swelling inside him but no amount of searching could change the facts.
Lily was gone. His gaze snagged on something bright and glittering on the bedside table. But she had left the ring.
It was starting to rain. Tugging her jacket around her shoulders, Lily glanced dully up at the clouds, then crossed the street.
She had taken the red-eye from Heathrow to JFK. Nobody had given her a second glance. The steward had come by with the trolley but the effort of choosing, of talking, had overwhelmed her. Instead, she had turned towards the window and wrapped her arms around her waist to stop her from disintegrating and, surprisingly, she had fallen asleep instantly and slept until the early morning light seeped through the window to press against her eyelids.
Waking, she had remembered all of it and her misery had been caustic. In some horrible parody of her flight to Italy, she hadn’t wanted to leave the plane. But she couldn’t stay there for ever, and finally she had got to her feet and made her way down the aisle.
She’d had a momentary wobble as she’d walked through the terminal. It had felt so final, so absolute. The taxi ride back to the city had been a welcome diversion but she’d made the driver drop her off a few streets from her apartment. She’d wanted to set the pace for herself. Not just be driven up and deposited on the pavement.
And it was okay, walking through the quiet, familiar streets with her keys clutched in her hand like a talisman. Just putting one step in front of the other gave her something to focus on, and with each step she was one step closer to home. One step closer to the life she needed to start living now.
As she turned the corner, her feet faltered as she spotted a group of young women weaving their way along the pavement towards her. But they were drunk and, frankly, she was past feeling worried about anyone recognising her. Past feeling anything.
The memory of Trip walking out of the room without so much as a backwards glance made her chest feel as if it were a gaping wound. That love could hurt so much was astonishing, but she couldn’t undo what had been done, and she wouldn’t even if it were an option.
She couldn’t let herself think about that now. It would fade in time, become bearable. And in the meantime she had a career she loved, a family she loved even more, and friends to distract her.
She had reached her street and, picturing her small, cosy apartment, she felt a rush of relief and gratitude. She would be safe there. She could heal and then she would face the world.
‘It’s her—’
‘Lily—’
Glancing up, Lily felt her breath stall. Men with cameras and microphones were uncurling themselves from car seats, staggering to their feet, their eyes hard and flat as they started to run towards her.
Her feet froze and for a moment everything went into slow motion as she stared at them, panic swelling inside her. If she hadn’t been so distracted she might have noticed them, been more prepared, but she wasn’t prepared at all and, before she even had time to think of a Plan B, she found herself surrounded by a pack of paparazzi and reporters shouting questions.
Somewhere beyond the jostling men she heard the roar of an engine and the screech of brakes. Then footsteps, heavy, urgent. There were more of them.
‘No comment,’ she said, holding one hand in front of her face, trying to block out their lenses and their questions as she looked for an exit. But there were too many of them. They were like a dark cloud smothering her.
She blinked into a sudden glare of light. But it wasn’t the flash of a camera, it was sunlight. Breathing out shakily, she saw Trip shouldering his way through the pack. His blue eyes were blazing with a fury that made most of the paparazzi step backwards. Behind him a team of men in dark suits and even darker glasses were creating a human barricade in front of the remaining reporters.
‘Are you okay?’ Trip was by her side, the blaze of anger softening as he stared down at her.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I promised to keep you safe,’ he said, his shoulders rising and falling on a deep breath and, reaching down, he scooped her into his arms and carried her and didn’t stop until they were inside her apartment.
‘You can put me down now,’ she said stiffly. ‘And then you can let yourself back out.’
Trip let go of her and she walked quickly away.
‘I’m sorry I upset you. Again.’
He stared over to where she was looking at her phone, or pretending to look at her phone. There was a tension to her bowed head that made him think that she was seeing nothing on the screen. That her whole body was arrowed in on his position in the room.
‘I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. I never want to upset you.’
The stiffness in her shoulders moved to her spine but she didn’t respond and, for a fraction of a second, he almost turned and left. But then he thought about how she had stayed with him after they’d argued, how she had let him talk. Listened. Comforted him. And so he tried again, because he had to. Because this time he couldn’t leave. He didn’t want to.
‘And I didn’t take you to Oxford so that people would see us together,’ he said quietly. ‘I wouldn’t do that—’
Her shoulders were still rigid but her eyes floated over to his. ‘No, because tricking people, pushing your own agenda—that’s not your way of doing things, is it?’
The tiredness in her voice pierced him. It made her sound so much older than twenty-eight, and yet younger too. Like a frightened child. He took a breath.
‘It was, before. Back in New York. I felt trapped and I was angry and I didn’t think about what you wanted. I was only thinking about myself. But that’s why I asked you to come with me to Oxford. Because I know you loved being there and I thought it would make you happy.’
Her eyes found his. ‘I was happy.’
Was. Past tense. He felt the rush of fear and panic that had swamped him as he walked back downstairs from the empty bedroom, that same sense of being trapped inside a shrinking tomb. ‘Why did you leave? I thought you were upstairs, but you were gone. And you didn’t take the plane.’
‘You don’t get to tell me what to do.’ Lily wrapped her arms in front of her chest like a shield, walling herself off, shutting him out.
‘You could have been hurt.’
‘I already have been,’ she said slowly. ‘I think we’re done here, Trip.’
‘I’m not finished.’ He looked at her impatiently. She was as stubborn as she was beautiful.
‘Well, I am. I have nothing to say to you, Trip,’ she managed to say, ‘and you said everything you needed to say yesterday—’
‘But that’s just it. I didn’t.’ Trip stared at her. His heart was still beating out of time from seeing her surrounded by reporters like a deer cornered by hounds. ‘I didn’t know what I thought. One minute you were saying all this stuff about wanting to separate and the next you were saying you loved me.’
‘That was yesterday.’
‘Lily, please.’
The tightness in his voice made everything inside her roll sideways like a capsizing boat. But this was what Trip did. He rushed headlong in where angels feared to tread. To Ecuador or into a pack of baying paparazzi.
‘What? I know you. I know how you think. How you react, how you overreact because that’s who you are. It’s what you do, it’s what you did before. Only instead of going to Ecuador, you turn up with a bunch of bodyguards and make out that it’s because of a promise you’re keeping.’
‘I did make you a promise. And yes, you’re right, this is what I do, but I’m not that person any more, Lily. You changed me. You made me look at myself, look at the person I was.’
He took a step closer. ‘I’ve been so angry for so long. Angry with myself, but mostly angry with my father. When I found those letters I didn’t deal with how it made me feel, I just ran away. You made me realise that I needed to deal with that anger. Or I’d ruin the future.’
‘You don’t need to worry about that. I saw the headlines. Congratulations. I’m sure the shareholders are more than happy for you to run the business now.’
‘I’m not talking about Winslow, Lily.’ The fierceness in his voice made her flinch. ‘I’m talking about our future.’
‘We don’t have a future.’ Her chest squeezed tight. ‘I told you, I’m not going to marry a man who doesn’t love me.’
‘No, you’re not. You’re going to marry a man who’s madly, helplessly, completely and utterly in love with you.’ His voice was choked with tears. ‘Because I love you, Lily Dempsey. I love you, and I need you in my life, not just in my heart, but by my side.’
She watched in astonishment as he dropped to one knee and took her hands in his.
‘So will you be my wife? Will you marry me?’
‘You’re proposing.’
Trip nodded. ‘Say yes, please.’
‘Yes,’ she said softly, her tears falling freely now because they were tears of happiness, and then he was pulling her down and his mouth was on hers. They kissed hungrily, kissed until the pain of parting was forgotten.
‘You know nobody will know the difference,’ Lily said shakily, searching his face, seeing the love there, feeling it radiating through his body to hers.
His hands slid down over her body, holding her steady, steadying himself. ‘We will,’ he said softly. ‘We’ll know. And I wanted, I want , to give you a new ring to show you how different it is for me now. But I didn’t want to rush into anything. And I don’t have to. Not when we have forever together.’
And he pulled her against him, breathing in her scent, the scent of this woman who was everything he needed in the world.