Chapter 42
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Andrew
I glanced up at the window to the bedroom of Sofia’s flat before pressing the bell.
I wanted to skip this bit and just be married.
We’d only officially been a couple for a few hours, but I was the luckiest man alive and I didn’t want to waste time.
I didn’t want to take things slow for the sake of it.
I’d tried to persuade Sofia to ditch work for the day but she’d refused.
Why did she have to be so bloody professional?
She poked her head around the door as I got to the top of the steps. “You’re early,” she said.
“Where do you want to live?” I asked, following her into the sitting room. She was fiddling with an envelope.
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. My mom is . . . I miss her.”
I’d already done a bit of thinking about Sofia’s mother this afternoon. “I think we have several options. She can come and live over here full or part time. We get her her own place, so she can come and go as she pleases.”
“Wait—”
“Nothing needs to be decided right away.” I needed to be more patient or I was really going to piss her off.
“What is this?” she asked, scanning the piece of paper she had just retrieved from the envelope she’d been playing with. “Did you do this?”
I shifted to look over her shoulder. “Student loans? What’s the problem?”
“My account has been cleared. They’ve all been paid off.” She turned and looked at me.
“Nothing to do with me,” I said. “I didn’t even know you had student loans.”
She handed me the letter. “Maybe I got it wrong. Will you read it? Tell me I’m not going crazy.”
I took the paper from her and read through it. “It shows that the balance was paid off ten days ago.”
“Ten days ago? How? It’s over a hundred thousand dollars. Oh God, do you think it was—no, it can’t have been.”
“Your father?”
“Who else? But he hasn’t said anything.”
“He doesn’t need to. It was his job to pay that money. He’s a wealthy man.”
“How ironic that I was going to pretend I needed help paying off those loans to get money for my mom’s operation, but he’s paid off far more than I ever needed, and I never asked him for a cent.
I should be able to get a personal loan now for the surgery.
I don’t think I’ll need that advance anymore, or certainly not all of it.
” She turned to me. “Can you believe it? My mom is going to get her operation and I didn’t have to ask my father to pay for it. ”
“You’re not going to get a loan. We have plenty of money to cover the operation.
I don’t think you’re getting it. Whatever I have is ours.
Whatever you need, I will provide.” Sofia provoked some kind of primal need in me to provide for her.
To care for her. To make the world a better place for her.
I’d grown up among powerful women, but Sofia’s power over me was on a different scale.
I would do whatever it took to make her happy.
“You’ll never want for anything ever again for as long as I’m alive. ”
She smoothed her palm across my jaw and lifted herself out of her shoes to place a kiss on my cheek. “I want to go to New York to see her and tell her in person about us, and about my father. And about her operation.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do.”
“You’ll come?”
“Absolutely. Let’s go this weekend. We’ll take Friday off and get the red eye back Sunday night.”
“Wow, it’s all so fast. I should call my father, shouldn’t I?”
“You should do whatever you feel is right.”
“I want to call him. I feel hopeful about our relationship. Not because he’s paid off my loans—although it’s very generous of him—but more because of what that represents.
It’s like he wants to make amends. And honestly, I like him and I’d like to know him more.
I probably didn’t tell you but I had an opportunity to ask him for the money.
Something stopped me. Maybe I wanted him to offer it to me willingly. And now he has.”
“So now you can get to know him because you want to. Not because you need to.”
“I’m exhausted,” she confessed. “It’s been a day.”
“We should get married in Italy,” I said, trying to work out what we had to do first to start our lives together. We needed a list. “We should contact a wedding planner. Someone good.”
“You haven’t asked me yet. And I haven’t asked you. No putting the cart before the horse.”
“You see?” I turned to her. “This is why I love you. You challenge me, make me see the world in a different way. Don’t ever stop.”
“You can count on it.”