Last-Minute Proposal

handkerchief. ‘I should have found out more before I panicked.’

Too tired to think what to do next, Tilly dropped back down on to the bench seating under a framed print of some anonymous seaside scene. Someone had done their best, but it was a depressing place. A selection of tired- looking magazines lay on the low table with a couple of discarded plastic cups of coffee from the vending machine down the hall. At this hour of the night, the wards around them were quiet, the lighting dim.

After a moment, Campbell sat down beside her. ‘You needed to be here,’ he said, ‘and I needed to be with you.’

‘You had much more important things to do,’ she said, balling the handkerchief between her hands, but Campbell shook his head.

‘No,’ he said, his voice quiet and firm. ‘Nothing could be more important than this.’

Tilly looked at him then, her eyes dark and blue and puzzled, and something she read in his expression made her heart begin to thud.

He was tall and solid and close beside her and, despite her exhaustion, the receding anxiety about Seb was being replaced by a breathless awareness of Campbell, who had driven through the night for her, who had been there for her when she’d needed him.

She looked around the waiting area, at the discarded cups and uncomfortable seats. Her dress was creased and crumpled and there was a stain down the front where she must have spilt some coffee in the car. The champagne she had drunk what seemed like a lifetime ago had left her with a dull headache. Wiping the handkerchief under her eyes once more, Tilly sighed.

‘This wasn’t how I imagined tonight.’

‘What did you think it would be like?’ Campbell asked her quietly. He wasn’t touching her, but she could feel his eyes on her face.

‘I thought we’d be drinking champagne with a lot of glamorous people,’ she said, not looking at him. ‘I bought this dress specially.’ She rubbed at the stain with a rueful expression. ‘I wanted to look nice. I imagined us listening for the winners to be announced together, hearing our names and going up to collect the cheque for the hospice.’ She smiled wistfully. ‘I thought it would be great.’

‘It would have been,’ Campbell agreed.

Tilly nodded slowly. ‘And then I imagined us celebrating together,’ she went on, and she turned her head to look straight into his eyes while she told him the truth.

‘I was going to suggest we go to my room so we could be alone,’ she told him. ‘I was going to tell you I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the night before you left. I was going to ask if we could spend one last night together.’

Campbell was sitting very still, staring at her, and she bit her lip. She might as well know the truth. ‘What would you have said?’

A smile had started at the back of his eyes, giving her hope, so she wasn’t expecting his answer. ‘I would have said no,’ he said. ‘Oh.’

Tilly looked blindly away, a stricken expression in her dark blue eyes.

Very gently, Campbell reached out and laid his fingers along her jaw, turning her head back to make her face him again.

‘I would have said no, I didn’t want it to be a last night,’ he told her softly. ‘I’d have said I didn’t want to say goodbye the next morning, the way we did before. If we were going to spend the night together, Tilly-and you have no idea how much I wanted that!-I wanted it to be a beginning for us, not an ending.’

Unable to speak, still reeling from that ‘no’, Tilly could only stare uncomprehendingly at him, and he smiled crookedly.

‘This isn’t how I imagined this evening either, Tilly,’ he said. ‘The reason I wasn’t drinking earlier was because I was nervous.’

She found her voice at that. ‘You? Nervous? I don’t believe it!’

‘It’s true. But it wasn’t about whether we won or not. I didn’t fly all this way to hear whether the viewers thought my cake was worth more than Roger’s GPS. I came to tell you that I’ve missed you.’

His voice was very deep as he released her face, tossed the handkerchief she was still clutching aside and took both her hands in his warm grasp.

‘I came to tell you that I’ve thought about you every day. There I was in New York, living in a penthouse, surrounded by everything I could possibly want, and all I could think about was you, and how I wished you were there with me.

‘I thought about that last night we had, too, Tilly,’ he went on. ‘I kept remembering what you said about it just being a fling to get over Olivier. You were so definite about us having different lives and not wanting part of mine, and I told myself that I had to respect that, but then they sent me the advance tape of the programme.’

He paused, remembering. ‘I watched you on the screen, and you were so gorgeous and funny and I saw myself and it was blindingly obvious that I’d wanted you right from the start. It made me realise that I had to try and persuade you to change your mind.

‘You weren’t the only one with plans to say something tonight,’ he told Tilly with a half smile. ‘All I could think about was getting you alone somehow so I could tell you how I felt. I was going to tell you that I love you and need you, that life’s no fun without you now. I was going to ask you to marry me,’ said Campbell. ‘Is it any wonder I was nervous?’

Tilly was struggling to take it all in. This had to be a dream, she thought. That would explain everything. She had drunk too much champagne and fallen asleep and any minute now she would wake up and her heart would break to realise that none of it was real.

But Campbell seemed real. This awful waiting room seemed real, and so did the biscuit crumbs in her skirt and the unmistakable hospital smell.

‘If I had had the chance to say all that, Tilly, if I had been able to ask you to marry me,’ said Campbell quietly, ‘what would you have said?’

Maybe it was real. Tilly’s heart quivered, ballooning with hope, and her eyes were huge as she looked back at him. If this were a dream, this was the point when she would fling her arms around him, laughing with delight, when she would tell him that she loved him, too, and that of course she would marry him.

But if it wasn’t, if this was real after all, she would have to remember all the real reasons she hadn’t told him that she loved him before.

‘I think,’ she said slowly at last, ‘that I would have asked you if you were sure that you were over your ex- wife.’

Campbell nodded. ‘That would have been a good question,’ he said seriously. ‘I saw Lisa in New York. I needed to see her again.’

His fingers twined around Tilly’s, warm and strong. ‘I hated it when she left me, but you made me realise that I hated losing more than I hated losing her. We weren’t right together, and I know now that was as much my fault as hers.’

He paused, wondering how to explain the relief of meeting Lisa and realising that he felt nothing. ‘Lisa’s happy now. She’s found someone who’s right for her, and I’m glad for her. I wish in lots of ways that I’d faced up to seeing her again, but maybe I needed to meet you before I could understand that she did the right thing when she walked away. You taught me a lot.’

‘Me?’ Tilly was astonished. ‘I only taught you how to make a sponge cake! I don’t know how to do anything else.’

‘You know more than that,’ said Campbell. ‘You’re the one who taught me that success isn’t always about what you have, or what you achieve. It’s about how you live your life. You’ve always known that. You look after your brothers and you care for your friends, and they love you in return. You live where you want, doing a job you enjoy. You do what’s right, and you do it with warmth and laughter. In the things that matter, you’re the most successful person I know, Tilly.’

Tilly gulped, tried to speak and failed utterly. Nobody had ever said anything like that to her before.

Smiling at her expression, Campbell tightened his hold on her hand. ‘So, no, this isn’t how I imagined tonight,’ he said. ‘I imagined I would tell you all of that without making a fool of myself, or stumbling and stuttering too much when I asked you to marry me. I’d even let myself imagine you’d say yes.’