Chapter 36
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Beck
I’d had the builders work overnight to make sure everything was ready. I’d never had to talk about my feelings, and I wasn’t convinced that me just talking was going to change her mind. I wanted something tangible I could show Stella—to demonstrate how I felt.
Stella was a once-in-a-lifetime woman and this was my one chance to convince her I was the man for her. I had to get it right.
“Dinner was nice,” Stella said from the passenger seat. “Henry’s so charming.” I was so on edge, so amped up over what I was going to say that I’d almost forgotten she was next to me.
“Yes. Nice.”
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I wasn’t sure I was. My palms were sweaty.
I couldn’t sit still. I thought I’d wanted Henry’s signature on the contract for the Dawnay building badly, but it didn’t compare to the need that coursed through me knowing Stella wasn’t mine.
“Fine,” I replied. I’d feel better when we got to my office and I showed her what I’d done.
“You’re heading east,” she said. “I can get the tube home if—”
“I’ll take you. Just need to pick up something from the office.” Wooing women, as Dexter put it, wasn’t something I was practiced in. I’d never had to convince a woman to give me a chance. Never had to explain how I felt. And now, without any experience, I had my one shot.
I’d make it work. I had to.
I drew up outside my building.
“The City’s always so quiet at the weekend,” she said, glancing around. The streetlights highlighted her cheekbones and her full, soft lips. It had been too long since I’d been able to properly touch her.
“Will you come up?” I asked.
“To your office?” She raised her eyebrows as if she didn’t understand, but without further questions, she unclicked her seatbelt and opened the door.
That was the thing with Stella—yes, her ex had left her mistrustful, but underneath that, when the people unworthy of her were cleaned away, there was an open, beautiful woman who would do anything to please someone she cared about.
She just needed the right man to care about.
I took her hand as I joined her on the pavement, and she tipped her head back and smiled.
“We are due a conversation,” she said. “I have things I need to say and you said you did, too.”
I led her through the sliding doors and inside toward the lifts.
“You’re right,” I replied. “I’d like to go first if you don’t mind.”
She nodded, and I squeezed her hand, silently thanking her for her patience.
“It seems like an age since I was last here,” she said as the lift doors opened onto my office floor.
It felt like a different lifetime to me. I led her toward the glass wall with the view of St. Paul’s.
“It looks great lit up at night,” she said, gazing up at the cathedral that had stood there for nearly four hundred years.
“Did you know that in order to get such an audacious design built, Sir Christopher Wren pretended he was building a more modest church and then he whipped off the scaffolds and surprised everyone?”
I grinned. Perhaps subconsciously I’d taken inspiration from the architect of St. Paul’s. I’d gotten Stella up to my office under false pretenses. “Is that right? There must be something in the air around here,” I replied.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
Without answering her, I headed away from my office to the other side of the floor and came to a standstill outside the second glass office on the floor that I’d just had created.
“What?” Stella asked.
I nodded toward the pink neon sign behind the desk. “I think your new business needs an office.”
She stepped closer and peered inside, her nose almost pressed up against the glass.
“We can go in—I kinda own the building.” I pulled open the door and led her inside.
“I don’t get it. The sign says London Designs.” She let my hand drop and made her way toward the desk.
Jesus, I knew I’d be bad at this. “Yeah. I didn’t know how else to—I wanted to show you how—I need you to know . . .”
Bollocks. Dexter said I had charm, but it had all escaped me now.
“Stella, I know you’re worried about us working together and mixing business with pleasure—but we’ve done that from the start. And we do it so well together.”
“I don’t get it. You want me to work from your office?” she asked.
“I want us to be partners.”
“Business partners?” she asked.
“No.” Christ. How could I be so bad at this? “When we made our deal, I had no idea that pretending to be your boyfriend would result in what we have—what I feel for you. It might have started off as pretend but what I feel for you is as real as it gets.”
She blushed and leaned against the desk I hoped she would accept as hers. My heartbeat thumped in my chest like a clenched fist pounding on a door, waiting for her response.
She didn’t speak. Had it been enough?
“If you still have to work through your feelings for Matt, I’m prepared to be patient.
To win you over. To make you see that he never deserved you.
If you have doubts about us being able to work and be together then I’ll erase them for you.
Give me a chance and I’ll prove to you how much I’m in love with you. ”
Stella gasped as the strength of my feelings hit me like a fist to my throat.
I loved her.
She was all I wanted.
She stepped toward me. Close enough for me to touch her but somehow, I held back. I wanted to hear clearly, and I wasn’t sure I could concentrate if I was touching her.
“I don’t have feelings for Matt that I need to work through. And yes, I’m a little nervous about working together if we’re in a relationship. But really, most of all, I’m scared.”
“Of me?”
She pressed her hand to my chest and I relaxed instantly. Her warmth was like coming home—it was belonging. Wherever she was, I was meant to be.
“I’m terrified of being hurt,” she replied.
“Of being made a fool of. But most of all I’m afraid of how I feel about you.
It’s so powerful that even after a few weeks, I know you could devastate me forever.
You’re capable of hurting me far more than Matt ever could have because of what I feel for you.
I wouldn’t be able to live through you breaking my heart. ”
I slid my hands around her waist. “You won’t ever have to.”
“But after Scotland, you didn’t seem bothered if we saw each other again—I said about us working together and you sort of shrugged as if it didn’t matter.”
“Stella, I was floored. I’d assumed that things would continue between us and when you seemed so unsure, I was on the back foot. Unprepared.”
She nodded, fiddling with the button on my shirt. “I thought you’d convince me. I’d seen you when you want something, and you gave in so easily I thought I wasn’t important. And after what’s happened—I need to be important to someone.”
Of course she needed that—deserved it. She needed me to have fought for her—and I hadn’t. I just hoped it wasn’t too late. “No one’s ever been more important to me,” I said.
She looked up at me as if she was trying to gauge if I was telling the truth.
A thousand words clambered up my throat, fighting to get out. “It’s why I brought you here,” I said. “I want us to be together—whether we’re at home or in the office. I want you to do what you love—to be happy—and if I can help then I’ll do whatever I can. I want to support you and your business.”
She glanced around. “Twenty-four hours a day?” She giggled, and it was such a delicious sound, I knew I’d be working to hear it as often as I could for as long as I lived.
“You don’t realize how different you are for me.
I’ve never felt . . . The idea of losing you causes me actual, physical pain.
I didn’t realize that was a thing, but I’ve been walking around with a tightness in my jaw and a headache that won’t go away but disappeared the moment I laid eyes on you tonight.
” She reached up for my face. “I want to wake up with you every morning, not just when we’re in some castle in Scotland.
I want us to work together so we don’t have to spend the day apart.
We can talk all day. Discuss business projects.
Jesus, I want to know what color underwear you’re wearing every morning and why you’re pissed off after a phone call.
“I want it all.
“I want to love you. If you’ll let me.”
I took a breath. It was all I had. I just hoped it was enough.
She paused and it was as if every nanosecond was strung out and had become an hour. Finally she spoke. “Being with you in Scotland shifted things for me,” she said. “I came back, and I knew what I wanted. I handed my notice in, put the flat on the market—I just knew.”
“And do you know about us?” I asked, impatient as ever. But she was so resolute about everything, why hadn’t she reached out? I’d not heard from her at all since Scotland.
“That’s the final piece of the puzzle. You say you want me, and I know I want you. I came here to give you a speech about how I wasn’t prepared to be just some girl you’re dating.”
“You’ll never be just some girl I’m dating.
You’re the woman I want to spend every waking hour with, want to tell every thought in my head to.
You’re the only person I’ll take sartorial advice from and the only human being on this planet I’d let share my office.
You’ll never be some girl. You’re my woman.
Fuck Matt, fuck every other man on the planet. ”
She placed her finger over my lips. “I need to be clear with you now—I was hurt by what Matt did. Devastated even. But he never made me feel like you do. I feel strong, not weak, with you, like my opinion matters, like I’m smart and sexy and cared for when I’m with you.
Don’t ever compare yourself to anyone and especially not Matt. ”
The tension in my muscles eased. I’d needed to hear that from her more than I’d let myself believe.
For me it was simple—I’d never had a relationship with a woman worth mentioning—but she’d thought she would spend the rest of her life with Matt.
I hated him for having that part of her before I could, but I also wanted to shake the prick’s hand for being stupid enough to let her go. Because that meant I got her.
“You’re incomparable to anyone,” I said.
“So, we’re doing this?” she asked.
I chuckled. “We are. But you might need to use your pumice stone on me as we go on our journey. I have some rough edges and I’m pretty sure I’m going to fuck up left and right. You’ll have to tell me.”
“Oh, I will, don’t worry.”
I cupped her face in my hands. “I know you will.” And I’d enjoy every second of her setting me straight and explaining exactly how I should love her.
I’d love her any way she needed and every way I could.