Those two words stilled the easy smile on her lips, replacing it with the cold hand of dread. ‘London? But you can’t go to London.’ What about us? ‘What about your Masters?’
‘It will have to take a back seat. I can finish it in my own time, but for the moment my future calls.’
She was trembling. She had banked on having him around for a few more months, at which point she would be able to cross the inevitable bridge. That bridge was now staring her in the face. Maybe, she thought, desperately salvaging the best possible take on the situation, they could carry on a long-distance relationship? It wouldn’t be ideal, but it could work. A few hours on the train every other weekend, and then there were the holidays…
‘When?’
‘Immediately.’ Alessandro allowed the finality of that word to settle between them like a rock sinking into deep, uncharted waters. It hurt to look at her distraught expression.
‘Immediately…as in immediately…?’
‘Just time to pack up my belongings—what little I have—and put my past behind me for good.’
‘It’s not that bad,’ she whispered. Thoughts and fears were whizzing around in her head and she was beginning to feel sick. ‘What…what about us…?’
Alessandro didn’t answer, and the silence stretched between them until she could almost hear it vibrating in the air.
‘We…we can still carry on seeing each other, can’t we? I mean, I know London’s a long way away, but loads of people have long-distance relationships. It might be romantic! Who knows? We could…um…meet up every so often…’ Her babbling trailed off into silence. More silence.
‘It wouldn’t work,’ Alessandro said flatly.
‘Why not? Wouldn’t you even be willing to give it a try?’ Desperation had crept into her voice, and she searched his face for the smallest sign of comfort. But she was looking at a stranger. His expression was closed and hard.
‘There’s no point, Megan.’
‘No point? No point? How can you say that, Alessandro? We’ve practically lived together for the better part of a year! How can you say that there’s no point in trying to stay together? I…we…Alessandro, I love you. I really do. You’re the guy I gave myself to…you know how much that meant to me…’
Alessandro flushed darkly. ‘And I cherish that gift.’
He said it as though their relationship had already been consigned to the memory box.
‘Then tell me that you won’t walk away.’
‘I…I can’t say that, Megan.’ He embraced the room in one sweeping gesture with a look of distaste. ‘This…this was a chapter in my life, Megan, and it’s time for me to move on with the book.’
‘What you’re saying is that I’m a chapter in your life. You had your fun but all good things come to an end.’
‘All things do come to an end. And your life is here, Megan. Here with your family, with your teaching job out in the country. You know you hate the city. You’ve always said that. You told me that the only reason you ever ventured into Edinburgh in the first place was because your cousin had dragged you there, and that the only reason you kept coming back was to see me… If you think Edinburgh’s city living, then London is in a league of its own.’
‘You’re twisting everything I said to you! My life could be anywhere with you!’
‘No.’
He almost wished that she would cry. A crying female he could deal with, because crying females had always irritated the hell out of him. But she wasn’t a crier.
‘You’re a country girl at heart, Megan, and you would be miserable if I—or anyone else, for that matter—removed you from the open fields you enjoy. That aside…’ He paused, because he wanted to be completely honest with her. That much she deserved. ‘This step of my journey I must take alone. I’m about to devote myself to my career. I literally wouldn’t have time to spend…’
‘…taking care of a hopeless country bumpkin like me?’ Megan finished for him.
She stared down at her bare feet. The bright red nail polish she had applied to her toes earlier in the day was already beginning to flake. She would have to get rid of it. She actually hated bright red nail polish anyway. She had only put it on because it matched the Marilyn image she had wanted for her stupid, childish surprise cake gimmick.
‘Taking care of any woman.’ But maybe, he thought, there was some truth in her statement. Falling out of a box in front of three of the country’s top finance gurus might seem a bit of a joke to her, but this was going to be his life, and falling out of boxes just wasn’t going to cut it.
‘I don’t believe you.’ Megan held her ground stubbornly, determined to wade through every inch of pain until the picture was totally clear in her head. ‘You just don’t think that I’m good enough for you now you’re about to embark on this wonderful jet-setting career of yours. If I had been an…accountant, or…an economist, or someone more serious, then you wouldn’t be standing there, airbrushing me out of your life as though I’d never existed!’
‘What do you want me to say, Megan?’ He finally snapped, furious that she was making this already difficult situation even more difficult by demanding answers to hypothetical speculations. ‘That I can’t see myself in a permanent situation with someone who will probably still be fooling around and singing karaoke when she’s thirty-five?’
If he had extracted a whip from his back pocket and slashed it across her face it couldn’t have hurt more, and she stared at him mutely.
‘I apologise,’ he said brusquely. ‘That remark was entirely uncalled for. Why can’t you just accept that there are limitations to this relationship and always have been?’
‘You never mentioned anything about limitations before. You let me give you my undivided love and you never said a word about me not fitting the bill.’
‘Nor did I ever speak to you about a future for us.’
‘No,’ Megan agreed quietly. ‘No, you never did, did you?’
Alessandro steeled himself against the accusatory look in her big blue eyes. ‘I assumed you were aware of the differences between us as well as I was—assumed you knew that my intention was never to remain in Scotland, playing happy families in a cottage somewhere in the middle of nowhere.’
‘I assumed you cared about me.’
‘We had fun, Megan.’ He spun round and stared out of the grimy window to the uninspiring view two floors down. In the rapidly gathering dark the strip of shops opposite promised fish and chips, an all-you-can-eat Indian buffet every lunchtime, a newsagent and that was about it—because the other three shops were boarded up.
‘Fun?’
Alessandro ignored the bitterness that had crept into her voice. When he had first made love to her, had discovered that she was a virgin, he had felt a twinge of discomfort. In retrospect, maybe he should have walked away at that point, rather than allowing her to invest everything into him, but he had been weak and—face it—unable to resist her. He was now paying the price for that weakness.
‘You’re better off without me,’ he said roughly, as he continued to stare outside. ‘You have all you need right here. You’ll teach at that school of yours, only a short distance away from all your family, and in due course you’ll find a guy who will be content with the future you have mapped out.’
Megan had thought that the future she had mapped out for herself had included him!
‘Yes,’ she said dully. He wasn’t even looking