WHEN ROMY WOKE the next morning, she knew instantly and instinctively that Matt was not only absent from her bed, but that he’d left the flat altogether—and the grief of it almost suffocated her, so that it took a long, long time for her to force her legs over the side of the bed.
When she finally did, the first thing her eyes alighted on was the platinum signet ring on the bedside table. No note, but why would he need to leave a note? The message was obvious: Teague was the man she deserved, and Matt was handing her over to him, as he’d handed her over all those years ago.
She slid the ring back onto her pinky finger, seeing very clearly why Matt was right to say it wasn’t jealousy, what he felt about her and Teague. It was more heroic than jealousy. There was something almost ceremonial in his giving her up because he didn’t want to defile her.
How hard it must have been for Matt to come to terms with the fact that although he didn’t want anyone else to have her, he did want someone else to have her. That he not only wanted her, he loved her.
Not that he’d ever tell her that.
That night in San Francisco, he’d said there were better words than love for what they had, words that couldn’t be desecrated. And yes, maybe he’d heard I love you so many times it really was meaningless, but she would have given anything to hear those words from him, because they had to be very special for him to be so careful with them.
Well, she couldn’t reproach herself with not having thrown herself into the moat and swum like crazy to reach the tower—that was something. But she also knew ten years was long enough to wait for a man who wouldn’t let himself have you. A man who pushed and pulled you and tied you up in knots, who made you yearn for impossibilities and then gave them to you only to snatch them away.
But how much easier it would be to let him go if he’d left things at sex against the wall last night. If he hadn’t taken her into the shower and washed himself off her like he was a stain. If he hadn’t towel-dried her like she was made of delicate glass. If he hadn’t gathered her into his arms in bed, and held her close and stroked her hair and kissed her in a way that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with deep and lonely love.
She took a painful breath...held it...blew it slowly out.
Okay, enough wallowing. Just...enough.
It was Sunday and she had a typical English roast dinner to prepare for Teague if he could be persuaded to join her, because she not only owed him for the steak and ale pie but she needed a friend now more than she’d ever needed one in her life. A friend who could never, ever be more, not because of who he was but because of who he wasn’t.
But first, she would clear Matt out of the nursery—a symbolic fresh start.
She strode purposefully to the spare room, but as she grabbed the pillow off the bed to remove the pillowcase for washing, Matt’s scent—the scent under the soap—flooded her, and she stumbled. She couldn’t take off the pillowcase. The sheets, either. Because that would mean he was really gone. That what was between them was really over. Not just five weeks of insane passion, but ten years of irreplaceable love.
She looked at the crib, with its misshapen stars and paint drips, and before she knew what she was doing, she’d crawled into Matt’s discarded bed, drawn up the covers, buried her face in his pillow, and she was crying like a troll.