Rags To Riches Collection. Rebecca Winters

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      Where had he gone?

      His self-control was such a part and parcel of his personality that to see him stripped of it had shaken her to her core.

      Or had she been mistaken? Was he just angry with her?

      With a little cry of horror and shaky panic, Sarah flung the covers off her and scrambled around the room to fling on a pair of jogging bottoms and an old long-sleeved jumper—a left-over reminder of her teenage years, when she had been in the school hockey team.

      The house was dark and quiet as she tiptoed into the hall. Her parents had never been ones to burn the midnight oil, and they would be fast asleep in their bedroom at the far end of the corridor. Oliver’s door was ajar, and she peeped in, through habit, to see him spread flat on the bed, having kicked off his quilt, a perfect X-shape, lightly snoring.

      Just in case, though, she made sure not to turn on the lights, and so had to grope her way down the stairs until her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she could move more quickly, checking first the kitchen, then the sitting room.

      It wasn’t a big house, so there was a limited number of rooms she could check, and her anxiety increased with each empty room. After twenty minutes, she acknowledged that Raoul just wasn’t in the house.

      The temperature had dropped, and she hugged herself as she quietly let herself outside.

      At least his car was still there. She hurried down to the road and glanced in both directions. Then, as she headed back towards the house, a faint noise caught her ears and she stealthily made her way to the back of the house.

      The garden wasn’t huge, but it backed onto fields so there was an illusion of size. To one side was her mother’s vegetable plot, and towards the back, through a wooden archway that had been planted with creeping wisteria, was a gazebo. Her father’s potting shed was right at the very bottom of the garden. Trees and shrubbery formed a thick perimeter.

      Walking tentatively through the archway, she spotted Raoul immediately. He was in the gazebo, sitting with his head in his hands. She paused, and then walked quietly towards him, feeling him stiffen as she got nearer although he didn’t look up at her.

      ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said helplessly.

      Just when she thought that he wasn’t going to reply at all, he looked up and shrugged his broad shoulders.

      ‘What for? You were being honest.’

      ‘I was just trying to be mature about the whole thing …’

      Raoul flung his head back and stared up, away from her, and in the fierce, proud, stubborn set of his features she could see the little boy who’d grown up in a foster home, learning young how to hide himself away and build a fortress around his emotions.

      She rested her hand on his forearm and felt him flinch, but he didn’t pull it away and for some reason that seemed like a good sign.

      ‘I gave you what you wanted,’ Raoul said, his eyes still averted. ‘At least I gave you what I thought you wanted. Don’t you like the house?’

      ‘I love it. You know I do. I’ve told you so a million times.’

      ‘I’ve never done that before, you know. I’ve never let myself be personal when it comes to choosing things for another person, but I made it personal this time.’

      ‘I know. You wanted Oliver to have the very best.’

      ‘I very much doubt whether Oliver cares that there’s a bottle-green Aga in the kitchen or not.’

      Her heart skipped a beat. ‘What are you trying to say?’

      ‘Trying? I thought it had been obvious all along.’ He glanced across at her and her breath caught painfully in her throat. ‘I wanted you to marry me. Maybe at the beginning I didn’t think it was necessary. Maybe at the beginning I was still clinging to the notion that I was a free, independent guy who happened to have found himself with a child. It took me a while to realise that the freedom I’d spent my life acquiring wasn’t the kind of freedom I wanted after all.’

      ‘I don’t want to tie you down,’ Sarah said quietly. ‘I did. Once. When we were out there. I thought you were just the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life. I built all sorts of castles in the air, and then when you dumped me my whole world fell to pieces.’

      ‘I did what I thought was right at the time.’

      ‘And I understand that now.’

      ‘Do you? Really? I look at the way you are with your family, Sarah, and I see how badly you must have been affected by our break-up. You’ve grown up with security and a sense of your own place in the world. I grew up without either. I never allowed myself to get too close to anyone, and even when we met again, even after I found out that I was a father, I kept holding on to that. It was different with Oliver. Oliver is my own flesh and blood. But I still kept holding on to the belief that I wasn’t to let anyone else in.’

      ‘I know. Why do you think it’s been so hard for me, Raoul? You’ve no idea what it’s been like, standing on the side, wondering if the time will ever come when I can just get inside that wall you’ve spent a lifetime building around yourself.’ She sighed and dragged her eyes away from him. The moon was almost full and it was a cloudless night. ‘Look, you’re not the only one who was afraid of getting hurt.’

      Raoul opened his mouth to protest that he wasn’t scared of anything, and then closed it.

      ‘I know you hate the thought of anyone being able to hurt you.’

      ‘God, it’s ridiculous how well you seem to know me.’

      There was wry, accepting amusement in his voice and, heartened by that, Sarah carried on.

      ‘I spent so many years thinking of you as the guy who broke my heart that when we met again I still wanted to think of you as the guy who broke my heart. Yes, there was Oliver, and there was never any question that I would tell you about him and accept the consequences, but it was so important for me to keep you at a distance. And you kept looking at me and reminding me how much I still wanted you.’

      ‘And yet you could never come right out and say it,’ Raoul inserted gruffly. ‘You were driving me crazy. I wanted to sleep with you and I knew you wanted to sleep with me, and you carried on fighting it. Every time I looked at you it was as though we had never been separated by five years. I didn’t even know it at the time, but I let you into my life five years ago, Sarah, and you shut the door behind you and never left. I only thought you did.’ He groped for her hand and linked her fingers through his. ‘Asking you to marry me was a very big deal for me, Sarah.’

      ‘You said that we were unfinished business …’

      ‘If that’s all you were to me I would never have asked you to marry me, because it wouldn’t have bothered me if eventually you found another man.’

      ‘You were worried about losing Oliver.’

      ‘I think I knew, deep down, that that wouldn’t happen. You would have allowed me all the access I wanted—and, let’s face it, it’s not as though children СКАЧАТЬ