Conflict of Interest (The McClouds of Mississippi 2)
Page 76
And so she looked around with forced patience when a sound from her office doorway distracted her from a difficult letter she was trying to write. “What can I do for you, Ja—”
She fell silent when she saw the man standing in her doorway.
“Don’t blame your assistant for not announcing me,” Gideon said, closing the door behind him. “I sort of barged past her.”
She wanted to rise, but she wasn’t sure her legs would support her. “I thought you’d gone back to Mississippi.”
“No.” He set his bag on the floor at his feet. “I spent the night in a hotel. I decided during the night that there’s something I need to do before I leave.”
She cleared her throat. “What?”
“Ask you to go with me.”
It was a good thing she was sitting down, she decided. She would surely have fallen if she hadn’t been. “You—”
He took a step toward the desk, his expression grimly determined. “You’re right, you know. I was afraid to ask—still am, I guess. It’s going to hurt like hell if you say no. Not to mention being a rather humiliating experience. It’s the sort of risk I’ve been careful to avoid my entire adult life.”
“Then why—”
“Because you’ve changed me,” he answered before she could even complete the question. “You didn’t ask me to change, but I changed, anyway. I know now that my house is never going to feel like a home again without you in it. And I know that if you can’t see yourself living there with me, then I’ll have to figure out a way to live here with you, if you’ll have me.”
She finally found the strength to rise, but she didn’t move toward him. “You just suddenly decided all of this?”
“I can understand why you’d be skeptical, considering the things I said to you yesterday,” he acknowledged. “But it isn’t as impulsive as it seems. I was already thinking along these lines when I came to New York. And then yesterday, well, I guess I panicked. I didn’t want to admit that I was the coward you accused me of being, so I sort of blamed everything on you.”
“You panicked,” she repeated.
He shrugged sheepishly. “I’ve never asked a woman to marry me before. It was a knee-jerk reaction to get cold feet at the last minute and try to run.”
“Marry.” She fell into her chair again when her knees folded. She’d known the feelings between them were strong—strong enough to draw him away from his home, strong enough to frighten him into running again—but she had never expected this. “You’re asking me to marry you?”
“I guess I am.”
“Why?”
“The usual reasons.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve been in love with you since the night you walked into my house and found Isabelle’s owl. I knew it almost immediately, but I fought it. Thought I would get over it. Now I know that I won’t.”
She locked her fingers in her lap, forcing her eyes to stay dry, her voice even. “It isn’t the most poetic proposal any woman has ever received.”
“No,” he said with a grimace. “But it’s an honest one.”
One more time she pushed herself to her feet. “I’d much rather have honesty than poetry.”
“So would I.” He moved another step toward her. “You don’t have to give me an answer now. I realize we’ve only known each other a few weeks—other than the strictly professional relationship we’ve had for the past couple of years, of course. I just thought you should know that I—”
“The answer is yes,” she said gently. “We’ll have to do some compromising about where we’ll live—maybe we can keep a home in Honesty and an apartment here for business purposes. But those details don’t matter right now as much as the fact that you love me and that you trust me enough to tell me so.”
He looked as though he wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. “You’re saying yes?”
She smiled mistily at his hesitation. “Yes. I love you, too, Gideon.”
Fast? Yes. But maybe she had been in love with him before she’d ever even met him. Maybe she had fallen in love with a voice on the telephone or with the man who had written the books that had spoken so deeply to her.
All she knew for certain was that she had gone to Mississippi and had found the home she hadn’t even realized she was looking for.
He swallowed hard. “So you’re saying you will marry me.”
Suddenly she couldn’t stop smiling. “Did you think I was going to say no? Are you sorry now that you asked?”