“No, not the same conversation. This one is a different one. A far more important one. Because while I was stuck out there fighting this bushfire, with no idea what was happening here or what you were facing, all I knew was that if the worst happened, I could lose you forever. And it tripped a switch in my brain, and made me realise what you really mean to me.”
Her eyes filled with panic, and she pulled her hands from his and spun away, crossing her arms across her chest, protecting herself that way she did.
“I don’t have to listen to this.”
“No, you need to hear this. I don’t just care for you, Ava. I love you.”
“No!” she cried, flinching as if he’d physically struck her. “No!”
“I love you, Ava,” he repeated, because the words sounded so right and she needed to hear it, needed to know what she meant to him. “And I want to spend the rest of my life loving you. I want yours to be the face I see when I go to sleep. I want yours to be the face I wake up to every morning. And I’ve been walking on eggshells around you, afraid to lose what we have for fear of speaking up, when I realised I could have lost you and never have told you what I now know.” He reached a hand to her shoulder, and turned her too him, his eyes imploring. “I love you.”
She shook her head, not meeting his eyes. “I don’t want your love. I don’t want anyone to love me.”
“That’s something I can’t help you with. I can’t turn off what I feel for you. I can’t stop loving you. And be honest, can you say you don’t care about me? You don’t feel something for me? You weren’t worried the tiniest bit when you realised I’d been up there, fighting that bushfire?”
She looked up at him then, her face a mask filled with shock and horror and fear. “No...’
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, her whole body shaking, her eyes wild. “I can’t do this. I can’t let you love me. I can’t let anyone love me. I can’t risk it.”
“Why?” he demanded. “What’s stopping you?”
“Because I know what love leads to!” she cried. “I know how it ends. Because it hurts too much to be broken and I don’t want to ever be broken again.”
And before his eyes, she seemed to crumple in on herself until she sagged, boneless, to the floor. He scooped her up before she hit the ground, collecting the puddle of flesh and bones she’d become and cradling her close against his chest, wanting to protect her from the pain of what was hurting her.
“Oh, Ava, what happened to you? Who did this to you?”
He pressed his lips to her hair and carried her to her room, laying her on her bed and holding her close as the sobs racked her body, her keening cries piercing his soul.
And, with every savage convulsion, his anger built. “I love you,” he whispered to her, even as she shook her head and told him he mustn’t. Yet still she clung to him while the storm moved through her, and still he held her tight, until her shudders subsided and her tears abated, the only sound her fractured gasping breaths.
“What kind of man could do this to you?” he asked her, stroking her hair, because he knew it must have been a man to hurt her so deeply, to make her so afraid of giving too much to another. Gently he lifted her chin to face him, her tear clumped lashes forming spikes around her wounded eyes. “I want to tear whoever did this to you apart.”
She sniffled and pushed herself away from him then, curling herself up to sitting on the bed, one arm wrapped around her knees and the other hand swiping at the moisture on her cheeks while she started blindly ahead. “That would be a pointless exercise,” she whispered, her voice now eerily calm. “My parents are already dead.”
Chapter Nine
She heard his gasp of shock, and knew his mind was joining the dots.
“Oh, Ava,” he said, reaching out a hand to her cheek and she saw the look of abhorrence in his eyes, but the confusion too, at what he was hearing. “Is that why...”
His fingertips brushed against her damp skin, and she closed her eyes against the sensation, leaning into it and savouring it, knowing it would be one of the last times they touched.
“I had an idyllic childhood,” she started, blinking her eyes open again.
She’d never told anyone about her past before, but she now knew this man would never give up, and it was the only way to make him understand why loving her was futile.
“I couldn’t have dreamed for a better one. My mother was an Australian model who worked all over the world for the best houses, Chanel, Valentino, Yves St. Laurent – you name it, she was there strutting the catwalk – when she met my father. He was handsome and magnetic, already a rich man with interests worth countless millions in property development, hotels, and retail.”
She flicked the bobbles on her shorts, focusing on something meaningless, inane, while she spilled the toxic details of her life. “They met one evening, at a fashion event in Singapore, and that night he proposed. She gave up her career to become his wife. They were the golden couple, the successful businessman and his supermodel wife. She had golden wavy hair and emerald green eyes, and so glamorous, that as a child, I thought she was the most beautiful woman
