She was holding her breath.
‘Of feeling. Of how you made me feel.’
The shake in his voice made her eyes burn.
‘My family feels everything so intensely, and when I was kid it used to scare me, being around that kind of intense emotion. And then, when I met Daniel that summer, I realised there were other ways to live. All I needed to do was take a step back, keep my distance.’
She felt him breathe out unsteadily.
‘I shouldn’t have let you go. It hurt so much, but I kept telling myself that I was doing it for the right reasons. That I couldn’t be the man you needed and so I’d just end up hurting you.’
Remembering his tense expression when he’d found Marta in his house, she thought her heart might burst with understanding and relief. So it had been fear that had made him put his sister in a taxi. Fear, not indifference, that had stopped him from telling her what was in his heart.
‘So what’s changed?’ she said softly.
His hands were shaking. ‘I did. I realised that I didn’t have a choice. I can’t live without you or Sóley. I’m going crazy without you.’
He was laying his heart bare, saying the words she’d longed to hear, and yet she was scared to hope, scared to believe that they were true.
She felt his fingers tighten around hers.
‘I didn’t believe it could happen to me. I didn’t think I could fall in love. And then it came so quickly and completely—and that scared me, because I didn’t think I was capable of giving you the love you deserve.’
His eyes softened.
‘My family are crazy when they’re in love, and I didn’t want to be like them. And then I realised that I’d been so fixated on all the ways I didn’t want to be like them that I’d stopped seeing all the ways I did. Like how brave and generous and loving they are.’
‘I know what you mean,’ she said slowly. ‘I did the same thing with my mum and Lucas, reading too much into our differences.’
He stared at her uncertainly. ‘Did you mean what you said? About not loving me.’
She shook her head slowly. ‘I want to mean it, but I can’t.’
Sliding his arm around her waist, he kissed her. She felt him breathe out shakily against her mouth.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘I love you too.’
His eyes locked onto hers. ‘Enough to be my wife?’
Looking down, she felt her heart swell. He was holding a ring with a sapphire as blue and clear as his eyes.
‘Let me try that again,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Will you marry me, Lottie Dawson?’
She was nodding and smiling and crying all at the same time.
‘That is a yes, isn’t it?’
She nodded again. ‘Yes, it is.’
As he slid the ring onto her finger she pulled him closer. ‘So what happens next?’
He smiled. ‘This...’ he said softly.
And, tilting her face up to his, he lowered his mouth and kissed her.