Burn My Hart (The Notorious Harts 2)

I stare at her with intense frustration. ‘Then how come we’re both standing here in the rain arguing about this? I want you and you want me. It seems pretty damned simple to me.’

I drop my mouth to hers and the kiss is like coming home again. Fuck. I have never felt so whole as I do in this moment. I kiss her, pushing her body against the building, my back being doused in rain that has started to fall more heavily now, and I lose myself in the magic of this perfection. I breathe her in, tasting her, my body cleaved to hers, and I believe, in

this moment, that everything’s going to be okay.

‘No!’ She rips her head away, pushing at my chest, glaring at me and then she sobs, a sound that’s akin to ripping my heart out of my chest. ‘No.’ Softer, but somehow more desperate.

‘What is it?’ I demand, but with desperation because we’re so close to working this out. I just need her to tell me clearly what she needs from me and I’ll do it. I’ll give it to her. Anything.

‘We don’t want the same thing. We want precisely the opposite thing.’

‘You’re crazy.’ I shake my head. ‘We’ve just covered this.’

‘I want you in my life in every single way. Not as just my lover, but as my boyfriend, my friend, my confidante. Everything you’ve been this whole time without realising it. I want you in my life for as long as we both shall live. I want you to be my partner, my husband, my everything. I want you to be the father of my children.’ The last sentence is broken, filled with grief.

Her words are shelling down on me, harder than the rain, harder than anything. I listen to them with a growing sense of panic, my breath burning through me, and shake my head without realising I’m doing it. Everything she’s saying is the exact opposite of what I want, except in one way. I don’t want marriage, children, for ever, but I do want Asha. I want her, but not like she’s described. I can’t offer her those things.

‘And you just want me in your bed—’ her eyes are squeezed shut ‘—for a few more months.’

The insufficiency of what I’ve offered slams me like a freight train. We’re looking at each other from two sides of a ravine. It’s impossible to cross it.

‘I want you to be happy,’ I say quietly. ‘And I think I can make you happy. For a time, at least. I think you’re hurting now and you don’t need to be.’

She sobs softly.

‘I think you are beautiful and brave and that if I was ever going to question my approach to life, if I was ever going to change my mind about relationships and marriage, it would be for you.’ I need her to hear that, to know it’s the truth. ‘This is who I am, and I can’t change. I won’t change. But if you let me, I will give more of myself to you than I ever have to another soul, and I will make you happy again, I will make you laugh, and I will be there with you until you’re ready to walk away.’

She stares up at me and I have no idea how she feels, no idea if she’s going to agree or disagree, but I know I need her to say yes. So I keep going, taking her silence as an opportunity at least.

‘Look. The whole “setting you up with someone else” thing was dumb. It made it seem like I could let you go without a thought, and that’s not it at all. I just thought I could find someone who’d give you what I can’t, someone who could make you happy because you deserve to be happy. But you’re not, and it’s my fault, and I want to fix it.’

I move closer to her again, pressing my body to hers, reminding her of the one way we can make sense of everything, of the way we can fix whatever’s broken in both of us.

‘Can we just pretend Sydney never happened?’

The idea comes to me from nowhere and it feels pretty fucking perfect, to be honest. Because before Sydney we were happy and everything was easy.

She lifts a hand to my chest but doesn’t push me away. ‘It wasn’t just Sydney. I’ve had this feeling—’ she taps her other hand to her chest, pushing it between her breasts ‘—inside me, here, for a long time, I just didn’t understand it. But there’s nothing worse than loving someone who will never love you back. I know what I’m talking about—I have lived my whole life with this feeling, knowing that my dad doesn’t love me and that, no matter what I do, he never will.’

My heart breaks for her.

‘You don’t love me, right?’

God. You have no idea how badly I want to contradict that. To say what she needs to hear, just to make her smile. But lying to her is worse than anything else, so I don’t.

‘I like being with you.’

She flinches.

‘I love spending time with you. I love how you make me feel.’

‘But you don’t love me.’

I look past her, to an old flyer on the door.

‘Just say it, Theo.’

Fuck. ‘No, Asha. I don’t.’ The world is dropping away from me. I feel as though I’m falling into the pit of fire at the centre of the earth’s core. ‘I’m sorry.’ I feel a thousand things for Asha but none of them is exactly what she wants. ‘I wish I’d been clearer about this.’