Chapter 18 #3
That was why her parents’ marriage had faded into nothing.
Not because there was no romance but because the love had weakened and died, or maybe it hadn’t been there to begin with.
And why would you want to create the sugar coating of romance if you didn’t have that love to put it on?
Even if her parents had cared about each other, it couldn’t have been anything like what Tilly was feeling for Angus.
And if romance was enough on its own, his father wouldn’t have suffered through heartbreak so distressing it made his son vow he would never go through it himself.
As she’d told him during that picnic they’d had at the lake, the love had to be a balance on both sides and even then, in the end, you still had to take a leap of faith with all the risks that went with it.
Tilly knew she could be setting herself up for the most jarring crash of her life by reaching the end of a street she was desperately hoping might not turn out to be a dead end, but she was well past the point of no return.
She was hopelessly in love with Angus. With a man she’d very recently considered to be the most unromantic man on the planet.
How wrong had she been?
Angus might have presented himself that way because he was so sure that anything deliberately romantic, too clichéd or used as emotional currency was not real or meaningful, but, by her own definition, he had given her more moments that could shine a light for the rest of her life than any man she’d ever met, or seen on screen for that matter – even the original Prince Charming, who’d made her sigh with longing, well before she was old enough to understand why.
That first kiss in the stream with the soundtrack of cicadas and the warmth of the summer sun.
The way he’d scooped her up in his arms to carry her to that four-poster bed in the olive-grove cottage when their physical connection crossed a boundary from sex to making love.
Every kiss, in fact. Every touch of his skin against hers could be a moment of its own. So many beats of eye contact, from no more than a blink to acknowledge a private joke to being locked in for what felt like forever when neither of them had been able – or willing – to break it.
The grand gesture of buying her a dress that made her feel far closer to being a princess than the Cinderella dress she’d been given long ago for a childhood birthday. He’d only seen it as a farewell gift but, for Tilly, it was an unspoken but heartbreakingly romantic gesture.
He didn’t think he was capable of being ‘in love’, but maybe it was more that he was too afraid to acknowledge a depth like that to his feelings because he believed it had broken and perhaps even killed his father – the only family he’d ever known.
He was clinging to safety but he’d been the one to break the rules, hadn’t he?
He hadn’t gone home when he’d had the chance.
He hadn’t ended what was only ever supposed to be temporary.
A few days away from real life. Something that was only going to happen in Provence and then be abandoned to stay there forever.
He was still here.
Still in her life.
And, okay, maybe this was more about Angus discovering who he truly was, but Tilly had been part of that journey and, judging by her thoughts about romance in the last few minutes, she was beginning to discover new things about who she was.
Perhaps it was because they were so different that it had been inevitable that some things they believed about themselves would be challenged.
Could it be that Angus was feeling something shifting in his life, as she was?
Something that felt huge. Precious.
But fragile, too. It would be too easy to find the challenge daunting enough to make them run.
Petits pas…
There was a need to protect what was newborn and still vulnerable. To avoid sudden moves, or declarations that might make a return to emotional safety paramount – for either of them.
And it was still far too early to know whether what was between them could be trusted to last the test of a timeframe that could cover the rest of her life. Or whether that was something that had even crossed Angus’s mind.
It was madness for Tilly to be thinking of it herself. The kind of thing a teenage girl might dream of when she was pulling the petals off a daisy.
Je t’aime à la folie…
But il m’aime?
Yes, she loved him madly, but did he love her?
It might, at times, look and feel like Angus was in love with her but he’d never said the words and she could never say them first because that was a part of the fairy tale she couldn’t bring herself to abandon.
And, if he couldn’t say them, that would be a deal-breaker. Because that would mean that the cake – totally exposed because it had no icing on it at all – was definitely hollow.
She was a beat too late to realise it was time for her to produce the champagne but it didn’t matter because it was easy to look as though she had been so caught up in the romance of the proposal.
With smiles and congratulations, she opened the still icy-cold bottle and poured the wine into two crystal flutes.
The sunset was still glowing strongly enough for the facets of the cut glass to act as prisms and create so many fragments of colour they were like tiny rainbows. Marc was smiling as he captured the moment.
This was going to be a photo that could take pride of place, on a bedside table perhaps, in a sparkly, heart-shaped frame.