‘Please, just let me do this thing for you.’
The tone had softened, and she hated that her heart did the same. ‘Okay...’
She didn’t protest when he took the case from her hand, and she followed him to the car, getting in before he could open the door for her. She had had too many lingering touches from him in the past when he’d done that, and she wasn’t interested in repeating it now. Not when she was already warning her heart to stay behind the wall she’d erected the previous night after she had finished sobbing. That wall had already been threatened by their kiss that morning, and she refused to put it in danger again.
When they pulled into the driveway at the house she immediately turned to get out—and then froze when she felt his hand on her thigh. It was in no way sexual, but heat seeped through her and she turned back in the hope that if she did he would remove it.
‘Are you going to miss it?’ he asked, and pulled back his hand as Mila had hoped.
He was staring at the house now, avoiding her gaze, so she sat back and looked at it, too. It was beautiful, she thought, and felt a pang in her heart.
‘I am,’ she said carefully.
‘But it’s not the vineyard?’ he replied and looked at her.
She felt pinned by the look—especially since he had said exactly what she was thinking. The house she had lived in for the past year had begun to feel like more of a home to her than this place, where she had lived in with the man she had married. It was going to be hard to leave all that behind, she thought.
‘I walked in here for the first time and I thought this would be a great house for you to come home to. Your first real home. I wanted it to be special for you.’
And just like that his words carved another spot in her heart.
‘It was special,’ she said, ‘and it will always be my first home. Thank you.’
She wanted to kiss him in gratitude—a simple peck as she would have given him so often before—but she resisted.
‘I’d like to show you something.’
He got out of the car before she could answer and she followed quickly, unsure of what was going on.
‘I wanted to show it to you yesterday, but we...er...got a little distracted.’
He locked the car, and then held out his hand to her. It was a simple gesture, almost a reflex, but he stood like that until she walked over to him and carefully took his hand with her own. The warmth immediately gave her comfort, and she almost pulled away. She didn’t need to be reminded of how much Jordan made her feel at home. But then she looked up, saw the impact simply taking her hand had had on him, and left it there.
You’re hopeless, she berated herself.
But still she followed—perhaps because she thought it was for the last time.
‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked, to escape her thoughts.
‘You’ll see,’ he replied, and she felt him tighten his grip on her hand.
It made her sad, and she wasn’t completely sure why. They walked in silence, and when they reached a gate that Mila had never seen before Jordan took a key out of his pocket.
‘Wait—this is the Gerber place.’ Mila let go of his hand and placed hers lightly on his arm.
‘It used to be,’ he answered, and then pushed open the gate.
It didn’t make any sound as it opened—confirmation to her that it had been recently put there—and Jordan gestured for her to go through. The plot was vast and green, as though completely unaffected by the coldness of the season, and a bridge led over the stream that ran around the whole property.
He held out a hand to help her cross, even though she saw that the bridge was fairly sturdy. And she took his hand, needing the contact to help her soothe the sudden anxiety in her stomach.
‘I don’t think this is a good idea.’
‘Trust me.’
She stood at the base of the bridge, looked at the sincerity in his eyes, and felt the wall she had prided herself on erecting and then maintaining completely disintegrate. She nodded, unable to speak, and they walked over the wooden bridge together.
She ran her free hand over the railing, forcing herself to focus on its design—anything to keep her mind occupied with something other than how much she loved him. It was a perfect example of the traditional charm that all the Stellenbosch properties had—just as the barn they were walking towards now was.
‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’ Mila asked softly.
‘This is the latest Thomas property.’
‘You own this place?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How? It must be recent, because I didn’t once see or suspect that the Gerbers were selling their property.’
‘They weren’t planning on selling it, but I managed to convince them.’
He stuffed his hands into his pockets, and the gesture made him seem less rich-vineyard-owner and more handsome-husband. Though his words implied that he had very much played rich vineyard owner to get the property.
‘When?’
‘About a year ago.’
‘A year ago? But that was—’
‘Just before your fall?’
She nodded, and he continued.
‘Yes, it was. I was going to surprise you with it after you gave birth.’
‘With what? Another property? We didn’t need that—’
‘With the Thomas Events venue.’
Her mind took a moment to process what he was saying, and the moment she did she felt the heat of tears in her eyes.
‘The Thomas Events venue?’ she repeated, and hated it that it sounded so right. Hated it even more that Jordan had been trying to make another dream of hers come true.
She wished with all her might that things could have worked out between them. Her life would have been absolutely perfect then! She would have had a place to go home to, a husband who loved her and a baby who needed her and to whom she would have given the world.
‘I thought it was time your business had a home,’ Jordan said when she didn’t say anything. ‘I had the barn redone so that you could host events there—weddings, conferences, anything you wanted—and I was going to turn the house into an office. You could meet your clients there, do mock-ups—even turn one of the rooms into a baby’s room, if you wanted.’
‘I...um... Wow...I...’ She took a deep breath, and pulled her hand away from his. ‘This is... I don’t know what to say, Jordan.’
A tear slid down her face and he took a step forward.
‘I didn’t want you to be sad. I just wanted to—’
‘What?’ she asked, grasping for anger instead of pain. ‘You wanted to show me another thing I don’t have?’
‘No! No, of course not,’ he said quickly, his eyes wide. ‘I wanted to show you this because it’s still yours. I want you to have it.’
‘I don’t want it,’ she snapped, and another tear rolled down her face. ‘I don’t want any reminder of the life we will never have together.’
‘Mila—’ He stepped forward again, opening his arms, but she took a step back away from him.
‘No, Jordan! You don’t get it, do you? I can’t do this with you any more. I can’t pretend that we’re friends, or whatever we’re pretending to be at the moment.’ She took a shaky breath and impatiently wiped at her tears. ‘I need to move on. I am moving on. The minute this event is over, I’m gone. Far away from this place—’ she threw a hand out ‘—from the house I lived in as your wife and from the vineyard that started this whole thing in the first place.’
She looked up at him and choked out her next words.
‘I’m filing for divorce and moving on from you.’
She bit her lip, trying to compose herself as the words tore her heart into pieces.
And then she sai
d slowly, ‘I don’t want you to show me things I’ll never get to enjoy. And I don’t want you to show me a person I’ll never get to be with.’
‘No, Mila—wait,’ he said when she turned to walk away, and she heard anger and something else coating his voice with gravel. ‘You had your say, so now I’m having mine. I showed you this because it’s yours. I don’t care what you call it, or if you accept it or not. I bought this for you. So that you can understand how much I care for you and how much I believe in you.’
Care, she thought. Present tense. Before she could caution herself against it, she felt hope reignite.
‘You can move on, move away, Mila, but this place will still be here when you get back.’ There was a momentary pause, and then he said, ‘It’ll be waiting for you just like I will be.’
He took a step closer and lifted her chin until she was looking at him.
‘I don’t care whether it’s a year or ten years, whether we’re married or not, I’ll be waiting for you.’
‘Why?’ she whispered, before her mind could give her permission to speak.
There was barely a moment before he answered, ‘Because I love you.’
He slid an arm around her waist and pulled her in, silencing her protests even before his mouth found hers. It was similar to the way she had kissed him two days ago, she thought hazily, and she wondered if his reason was similar, too—to show her that they mattered.
But she was already too lost in the taste of him to think any more about it. Her body was thanking her for something—someone—it had longed for but never got in the last year. And yet still she could feel a part of her resist—the sane, rational part of her that wanted to protect her poor already broken heart—and in response she felt his arm loosen around her.
He was giving her an out—telling her that she could leave the embrace if she wanted to.
But that only made her want him more, and barely a beat after he’d offered her a way out, she found herself pressed against him again. His arms went around her, tighter this time, and his mouth took hers more deeply, hungry after the possibility of stopping.
She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hear, couldn’t think in his arms, and she poured all the love she felt for him into the kiss, turning it from desperate into tender.
He eased away, and then looked down at her, his eyes heavy with need. ‘I love you, Mila.’
Hearing the words again was like a slap. ‘Stop!’ She pulled herself away from him completely and felt the tears come back. ‘You don’t mean that.’
‘Of course I mean it,’ he said firmly, almost angrily. But the look in his eyes was...fear.
‘If you really meant that, Jordan, you would stop being afraid of sharing with me and tell me about your childhood. About your mother and your father. You would want to tell me about it.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
JORDAN OPENED HIS MOUTH, ready to retort, but she had hit him exactly where she knew he was most vulnerable. He closed his mouth again, and before he could think of something to respond with she spoke again.
‘This is exactly what I’m talking about. Why is it so hard for you to tell me about it?’
‘For the same reasons you don’t talk to me about your childhood in foster care.’
Her head snapped back as though he had hit her, and something inside him warned him to stop. But the words kept sprinting out of his mouth.
‘It isn’t that easy to talk about when you’re on the other side, is it?’ he said steadily, and watched the emotions run over her face like a movie reel.
Eventually she replied, ‘No, it isn’t. But when you love someone you have to make a sacrifice and put your reservations aside.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I didn’t have anyone who needed me when I was growing up, Jordan. I lived with ten different families in eighteen years. It was hard.’
She blew out a shaky breath, and he felt himself shake a little, too. Was she doing what he thought she was?
‘I didn’t have anyone who needed me, and quite frankly no one wanted me. Lulu was the first person I met who cared about me—and I mean really cared—and I was sixteen years old when I met her.’
She wiped at tears he hadn’t seen, too captivated by what she was telling him to notice before—and even more so by what it meant.
‘Growing up like that made me... It made me someone I don’t want to be any more.’ She shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t ever say what I felt or what I thought because I wanted people to like me.’
‘Even with me?’ he asked, needing to know.
She looked at him through wet lashes that made her eyes all the more piercing. ‘Even with you.’ She bit her lip, and then said, ‘I couldn’t... I thought I couldn’t tell you what I felt. There was a big part of me that felt like being married to you was a dream, and I didn’t want to wake up. It didn’t matter how I felt about our house, our cars...’
All things he had chosen for her, he thought in disgust.
‘I had you. And that was enough for me.’
She lifted a hand when he opened his mouth to speak.
‘Wait, I’m not done yet. I have to get this out before you say anything.’
Something shifted in her eyes, and panic spread through his body in response.
This is the last time she’ll do this, he thought, and his heart pounded at the thought of losing her.
‘But that also meant I didn’t know how to ask you for help when we lost our child. I was afraid that you blamed me—you’d asked me to slow down and I hadn’t. And then I fell down the stairs and I thought that you were right—I should have slowed down, enjoyed being pregnant. After that... I felt like a failure. Like every fear of mine had come true.’
Tears shone in her eyes and he took a step forward, wanting to be closer to her, to comfort her.
‘It was a confirmation of what I’d feared all along—that I wasn’t worthy of you. I always expected you to leave me, so when you did—’
‘I proved you right,’ he finished for her, stunned.
How could he have been so unaware of what his wife was going through? How had he not noticed that she hadn’t ever disagreed with him? How had he been so blind? She had it completely wrong, he thought. He was the one who wasn’t worthy of her.
‘Mila, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know...’
He trailed off as he realised that she had just told him everything he had ever wanted to know about her. And based on that information—based on the completely raw look in her eyes—he knew how much it had cost her.
‘You love me, too.’
He didn’t need her to say it because it was suddenly so painfully clear to him. It made the fact that he felt as if he was losing her so much worse. He looked at her, saw the truth in her eyes, and the past year of his life flashed through his mind.
He had always been a loner, but he hadn’t ever felt alone. As difficult as his relationship with his father had been, Jordan had always known he had somewhere to go to, someone to talk to if he needed it. But after he had left for Johannesburg he hadn’t really spoken to his father. His life had felt emptier than he’d thought possible, and he’d felt more alone than ever.
He had missed Mila with all of him, and now he knew—he knew—that his grief at losing his son, at losing his chance of a full family, would have been bearable if he had been with Mila.
It was something her words had only just made him realise, and the simple truth of it led him to say, ‘My father blamed me for my mother’s death.’
When the words were out, he couldn’t believe such a simple sentence could convey the thing that had followed him around for his entire life. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and faced the stream. He didn’t want to see her face—the compassion he knew would be there—while he told her of his childhood. Not when what he was going to tell her might change h
er opinion of his father, whom she’d clearly cared about.
He rubbed a hand over his face, wondering where to start, and decided on the part Mila already knew about.
‘My mom found out about her cancer when I was two.’ He took a steadying breath, then continued, ‘She refused treatment. For two years she didn’t want to get treatment, even though she was ill most of the time... She wanted to be a normal mother.’
He took another breath, shifted the weight between his feet.
‘Her mom had died of the same thing, and they’d caught it earlier. She’d had treatment and it hadn’t helped. So she refused. She thought the treatment would only make her sicker, even if only for a little while, and she didn’t want to lose any time with me. So she chose to be a mother. She chose me.’
Jordan shrugged, the movement heavy with the weight he had been carrying. With the guilt.
‘My dad hated her choice. He told me once that he’d begged her every day for those two years to get treatment, until finally he wore her down. And during that time my dad kept me at a distance. He wouldn’t sit with her when she watched me play—would only agree to family time if she was there.’
Jordan wondered how his memories of the events he was talking about could be vague, but the feelings they evoked still sharp.
‘He helped to take care of me physically—especially when my mom grew weaker, more ill—but he wouldn’t be a father to me. Not a real one. But he was the best husband, and even at my age I knew that he loved her more than anything. By the time she agreed to treatment it was too late.’
He felt her move closer to him, and welcomed the comfort her presence brought.
‘She spent her last year in agony, going through a cycle of chemo and radiation, until finally my dad brought her home and she died in her sleep a few days later.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said, in a voice thick with emotion.
‘I didn’t think so until...’
This was probably one of the worst parts, he thought, but he pushed through.
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