‘His schemes became more and more bizarre and my mother grew concerned. She tried to get all our assets put in her name, but he was far cleverer than she was. I guess these days she wouldn’t have stayed with him—but things were different then. And she was loyal, too.’ Just as you would be, he thought suddenly.
He saw her look of horror and heard himself defending his father. And that was something else he’d only just realised. That, whatever wrong he had done, his father was still his father.
‘Oh, it wasn’t a malicious action on his part—more a lack of judgement and a sense of misplaced pride. But one day he went too far and lost everything.’ Guy shrugged. ‘The business, the house, the car. Everything. With debts galore thrown in for good measure. Only this time his spirit was broken, too. I was fifteen, and my brother was twelve.’
There was a grim silence. Sabrina didn’t say a word.
‘My mother’s parents took us in—they had a beautiful big house close to the cliffs in Cornwall.’ His eyes grew distant as he thought back to a time he’d buried away deep in the recesses of his mind. ‘But accepting charity—even family charity—was anathema to my father. He tried working in paid employment, but he could never cope with working for other people. His mood went down and there seemed to be no way that anyone could reach out and help him. And he and my mother never communicated particularly well.’
Sabrina nodded. That explained a lot, too. Guy’s fear of relationships, his wariness of commitment and sharing. A bad role-model could put you off for life.
His face grew dark as he forced himself to say the words. ‘One night he went out and never came back again.’
‘What happened?’ whispered Sabrina hoarsely.
He didn’t coat it with any sugar. ‘He went out walking on the cliff-top. It was a wild night and the wind was blowing up a storm. He fell…We’ll never know what really happened—whether he lost his footing, or if the wind caught him off balance. Or whether he jumped.’
He met her eyes with such a bleak expression that Sabrina couldn’t help herself. In fact, even if he’d been just about to kick her out she still would have gone straight over and put her arms around him and hugged him as tightly as she knew how. Trying, however futilely, to take some of his pain away.
‘Oh, Guy,’ she whispered brokenly. ‘Guy.’
He dropped a kiss onto her beautiful head, but forced himself to continue, feeling the burden lifting even as he shared it with her.
‘I determined then that I would never be placed in such a vulnerable position again—and neither would my mother or brother.’
‘So how did you manage?’
‘Against everyone’s advice, I left school at sixteen and started working, and I never really stopped. Khalim’s father gave me a break, and I was off.’ Off on a merry-go-round of hard work which had continued until this bright-haired temptress had walked into his life.
Sabrina rubbed her cheek against his shirt. He’d told her everything she’d wanted to know, without her having to ask him. He’d trusted her enough to open up to her. Would his trust now spread out and out, like ripples on a pond, so that their relationship got bigger and bigger?
‘I didn’t plan to feel this way about you, Sabrina,’ he admitted huskily as he caught her by the shoulders and forced her to look up at him, his own eyes soft with promise.
She felt the glimmer of tears. ‘As if anyone has any control over their feelings.’ She gulped. ‘I wasn’t planning on…’ Her words tailed off. To talk of love would frighten him almost as much as it frightened her.
‘On what?’
‘Needing you like this,’ she compromised.
‘Need can be a powerful emotion, princess.’ He tipped her chin upwards with the tip of his finger and gave a slightly shell-shocked smile. ‘I find I need you pretty badly myself.’
She recognised what it had cost him to admit that. She stood on tiptoe to plant a soft kiss on his lips, and he sighed.
‘So you’ll stay?’ he asked.
She drew her mouth away, her dreamy expression replaced by one of caution. Should she stay? But did she really have any alternative, when the thought of leaving filled her with a kind of mad despair?
All he’d told her was that he cared for her. He’d made no promise other than an unspoken one, which was that he trusted her enough to open up his heart. And surely trust—coming from a man like Guy—was worth all the most passionate declarations in the world.
‘Sabrina?’ he prompted softly.
‘You know I will.’
‘What’s the date?’ he asked suddenly, stroking a red-gold lock of hair off her cheek.
She thought back to all the order forms she’d filled in at the bookshop that morning. ‘June the tenth. Why?’
He kissed the tip of her nose. ‘Just remember it,’ he urged softly.
GUY closed the front door and turned to look at Sabrina, a slow smile lighting up his face as he thought how beautiful she looked in her mint-green dress with her glorious bright hair tied back with a matching green ribbon.
‘So, how did that go, do you think?’ he asked her.
‘I think they enjoyed it.’ Her eyes glinted with mischief. ‘Your mother kept asking me whether we’d arranged a wedding date.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said no, of course. Because we haven’t.’ But there was no resentment in her voice. ‘And your sister-in-law kept telling me how much she had enjoyed her two pregnancies.’
‘I’ll bet she did!’ He grinned. ‘Like some more champagne?’
She’d barely touched a drop all afternoon. She’d been so nervous about meeting Guy’s mother and stepfather and his brother and wife and their two children. But the lunch had gone like a dream, and now relief began to seep into her veins. ‘Love some.’
He opened up the French doors leading onto the balcony and brought out two fizzing flutes. He handed her one as they sat side by side on the small bench, turning their faces towards the sun.
‘Do you know what the date is, princess?’ he asked quietly.
The glass was halfway to her mouth, but she quickly put it down on the decking and turned to look at him as a distant memory stirred in her mind. ‘But you know the date!’ she exclaimed. ‘We’ve had this lunch in the diary for ages. It’s June the tenth. Why?’
He put his own glass down to join hers—champagne was the very last thing on his mind. ‘It’s exactly a year since I persuaded you to stay,’ he said softly. ‘Remember?’
She nodded, mesmerised by the dawning tenderness on his face. ‘I didn’t take a lot of persuading,’ she said drily.
He smiled. ‘It didn’t seem like that at the time. I knew then that I loved you, princess.’ He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed one fingertip after another. ‘But I didn’t want to rush you, or push you into something you weren’t ready for. You needed time to recover from Michael’s death and time to decide whether you could ever trust yourself to love again.’
‘Oh, Guy,’ she whispered, shaken by the depth of his understanding. ‘Darling, darling Guy.’
‘I