Chapter Thirteen #4
He ran faster than he’d ever run before, his legs burning, his eyes filling with stars, because the cab driver had dropped him at the wrong end of the street and he’d been too distracted to notice at first. And now that he knew what he wanted to say to Charlotte, he had to say it then.
And there. It was a long, straight street, and he picked up speed quickly, so he saw her emerge from her front door, hail a cab and slip into it.
Saw the cab slide away from the kerb and drive away from him.
He swore, his lungs burning from the exertion of running like this, but there was no way he was going to let her go. No way in hell. Not now, when he finally understood himself.
Finally, there was an intersection, and blessedly, a slow-moving learner driver was paused hesitantly at it. Dante put on an extra burst of speed, reaching the cab and thumping the driver’s window with his open palm.
The guy pressed a button, so the glass dropped. ‘Y’alright, sir?’
‘I need a moment with your passenger.’
The driver flicked a glance to Charlotte in the rear-vision mirror.
Dante turned his attention to her and through the still closed glass of her window said, ‘It’s important.’
She’d been crying, he realised. Her pinched face was still pale but it was tear streaked now and her lips were a bright pink, like she’d been biting them incessantly.
‘Charlotte,’ he said, the word like a desperate, anguished plea.
The car behind them honked, jolting her into action. She said something inaudible to the driver, then pushed out of the car, so the driver was free to move forward into the intersection.
The driver of the car behind gave them a rude gesture as he passed.
Dante didn’t care.
‘When I told Jamie about us, I was still clinging to what we’d agreed our marriage would be.
I didn’t even feel bad telling her, because it was something you and I said frequently to one another.
While I had no intention of broadcasting it to all and sundry, I truly didn’t see any harm in one person knowing the truth. ’
Charlotte’s jaw clamped. ‘I don’t need to know.’
‘And then, as soon as I said it, I regretted it,’ he insisted. ‘I felt like I’d betrayed you.’
‘You did betray me,’ she whispered, eyes blinking furiously now. ‘Our relationship is our business.’
‘But don’t you see, Charlotte? I’ve spent more than six months furiously denying, even to myself, that we even have a relationship.’
She closed her eyes. ‘I know.’
‘I think you and I are both guilty of that. How many times did we proclaim that this is “just sex” when it hasn’t been that since our first night. And maybe it wasn’t even then?’
Charlotte wasn’t saying anything back, but she wasn’t storming off either.
He grabbed her arms and held her. God, how he loved her. How he needed her to understand that.
‘When you suggested this marriage, I ran a mile, because I was so terrified of admitting to myself how much I wanted to say “yes”. And then, I saw you with someone else and realised what I was in danger of losing. I knew I had to put my fears aside and go through with it. But even then, I was pretending it was just about your company and my grandmother. I pretended our marriage would be a means to an end. A pleasurable one, but certainly not a marriage with the power to destroy me. Not a marriage that could make me wither away, like my first marriage did.’
She made a sound—a groan or a soft, aching plea.
‘All along, you’ve been so different. Different to anyone I’ve ever known.
I can’t get enough of you. I can’t walk away from you.
Hell, I haven’t been able to stop thinking of you since the first moment I met you.
Charlotte Shaw, without me realising it, without me intending it, you have become the most important person in my world.
You have become my absolute everything. There is no one else I want to marry more than I do you and not for any reason other than the fact I am completely, unquestionably, unfathomably in love with you. All of you. Every part.’
Her lips parted in surprised, and her eyes looked at him as if to say, ‘do you mean this?’
It was something. Not enough, but a start.
He grabbed her hands, lifting them towards his lips.
‘In Italy, all that pretence fell away. We could no longer spin the lie that we were just sex. There was nowhere to hide. No way to disguise what we were feeling. At least, that’s my interpretation of it.’
She bit into her lip and suddenly, Dante felt as if he might have sprinted so far out on a limb that couldn’t actually support him.
It was entirely possible that she didn’t feel the same way about him.
That he’d been wrong about everything. But that didn’t matter.
He still needed her to know how he felt.
Because Charlotte deserved to know that she was loved.
That to someone, she was the most important, vital, necessary person in the entire universe and always would be.
No matter what happened, he needed her to be free of the misconception that she was unlovable. If he didn’t give her that, at least, he would always, always regret it.
‘You are the sum total of everything. Everything I want in life. You are my love, my beating heart, my burning breath, my waking thought, my dreams, my need, my all.’
She closed her eyes as she let out a small sob and somehow, without her saying or doing anything to signal that she was agreeing with him, he just knew. In that way one knows how their other half is feeling. He dropped to his knees, right there on the sidewalk, clutching her hands.
‘Charlotte, what I would like, more than anything, is for you to marry me. Not for your father’s business, not for my grandmother’s sake, but because you feel exactly as I do.
As though there is no life you want to lead that doesn’t have me in it.
Because you want to be my wife, as much as I want to be your husband.
Because we’re made for each other, my darling, and always will be. ’
Her tears splashed against the back of his hand and he laughed softly, because she was nodding and laughing then, through the tears, and saying something that he was pretty sure was, ‘Yes, Dante, yes. Of course I’ll marry you. Of course I love you.’
He stood up and wrapped his arms around her waist, lifting her into the sky and kissing her then.
Kissing her hard and fast and with all the love that was throbbing through his body.
And then, he lifted her, cradled her against his chest and began to walk back to their home.
Kissing her. Holding her. Knowing that he would never, ever let her go now.
They were utterly, perfectly. Finally just as they were supposed to be and Dante wouldn’t have changed a single damned thing about it.