Her Knight in the Outback (18 page)

And no home worth having came without risk. It was time to be brave.

‘I wasn't out there to find Travis,' she whispered, taking the chance. ‘I think I was out there trying to find a way to let him go.'

She shuddered in a breath. ‘But that was terrifying. What if I had nothing but a massive, gaping hole inside where my love and worry and pain for him used to be? What if I could never fill it? Or heal it. Who was I without him? So much of
me
was gone.'

His strong arms wrapped across his chest and all she could think about was wanting them around her.

‘And what little was left around the outside was just numb.' She stepped closer to him. ‘But then you came in with your ridiculous orange motorbike and your hairy face and your tattoos and you were like...an icebreaker. Shoving your stubborn way through the frost. Inch by inch.'

A tragic kind of light flickered weakly behind his eyes and it sickened her that she'd been the one to extinguish it before. The memory of him standing in her bus, appealing from the heart, in visible, tangible pain. And she'd not been able to feel a thing.

But his body language was giving nothing away now.

‘I'm not a plug, Eve. I'm a person. You'll have to find someone else to fill the void.'

‘I don't want you to fill it. I want you to bridge it.'

His eyes came up.

Eve picked up a cushion off his sofa and hugged it close. ‘When you left, it was horrible. You gone. Travis gone. Mum gone. Dad on the other side of the country. I'd never felt so alone. Which is ridiculous, I realise, given I'd been travelling solo all year.'

His brow twitched with half a frown, so quick she almost missed it. His posture shifted. Straightened. ‘What changed?'

‘I couldn't stay frozen.' She shrugged. ‘I tried to do what I'd done before, just...deal. But all these emotions started bubbling up out of nowhere and I realised that I'd been harbouring the same feelings Travis must have had since Mum died. Despair. Anxiety. I'd been suppressing them, just like he must have.'

‘So you developed some empathy for your brother. That's great.'

‘I wasn't thinking about him, Marshall,' she rushed to correct. ‘God knows, I should have been, and it took me a while to notice, but eventually I thought how strange it was that I should feel such despair about my brother being
alive
. Anger, sure. Resentment, maybe. But despair...?

‘Travis has been absent in my life since Mum died. Even back when he was still physically present. I'd learned how to compensate for his absence and not fall apart. But there I was, trundling up the highway, completely unable to manage my feelings about the absence of someone I'd known less than a fortnight.'

His face lifted. His eyes blazed. But he didn't say a word.

‘I wasn't thinking about Travis. I wasn't weeping about Travis. I was thinking about you. Missing...you.'

He had nothing to say to that.

‘Nothing felt right without you there,' she whispered.

Agony blazed from his tired eyes. ‘Do you understand how hard this is to hear? Now?'

It was too late.

Something grasped at her organs and fisted deep in her gut.

She gathered up her handbag. ‘I don't want you thinking badly of me, Marshall. I don't want you remembering me as the outback psycho in a bus. I have years' worth of coping mechanisms that I need to unlearn. I barely know where to start. It's going to be a long work in progress.'

She stepped up to him. Determined to get one thing right in their relationship, even if that was goodbye.

‘But I'm on my way. Thanks to you. I just didn't want you never knowing how much you helped me. What a difference you made. I'm just sorry I couldn't return the favour. I'm sorry I hurt you.'

She pushed up onto her toes and pressed a kiss to his face, over the corner of his mouth, and then whispered into it, ‘Thank you.'

Then she dropped back onto her soles and turned for the door.

‘Eve.'

His voice came just as she slid her hand onto the heritage doorknob. But she didn't turn, she only paused.

‘What about that bridge?'

The one over the void where her love for Travis used to be?

‘I guess I won't be needing it,' she murmured past the ache in her chest. ‘It doesn't go anywhere now.'

He stepped up behind her and turned her to face him. ‘Where did it go? Before?'

As she spoke, her eyes moistened and threatened to shame her. But she didn't shy away from it. She was done hiding her emotions.

‘Someone once told me about a garden,' she breathed, smiling through the gathering tears. ‘One which used to be barren rubble. With old stone walls and handmade trellises, and where someone had planted a beautiful, fragrant vine. That's where it went.'

He swallowed hard. ‘How will you visit it with no bridge?'

‘I won't,' she choked. ‘But I'll imagine it. Every day. And it will grow without me—up and over the trellis, through the cracks in the wall. And eventually it will cover up all the rocky and exposed places where nothing could thrive.'

And then she'd be whole again.

Marshall glanced away, visibly composing himself. And then he spoke. ‘There's something you need to see.'

He slid his fingers through hers and led her out through the front door and down the paving stones to the rear of the house where a large timber door blocked the path. He moved her in front of him and reached around her to open the door.

It swung inwards.

And Eve burst into tears.

She stepped through into the garden of her imagination. Complete with trellis, flowering vines, stone wall and even a small fishpond. All of it blurred by the tears streaming down her face.

All so much prettier than she could ever have imagined.

‘Don't cry, Eve,' Marshall murmured right behind her. Closer than she'd allowed herself even to dream.

Which only escalated the sobs that racked her uncontrollably.

‘It's so perfect,' she squeezed out between gasped breaths.

‘I made it for you,' he confessed. ‘It was the first thing I started when I came here.'

Her body jerked with weeping. ‘Why?'

‘Because it's yours—' he shrugged, stroking her hair ‘—it was always yours.'

He turned her into the circle of his arms. Warm. Hard. Sweaty from a day of work. Heartbreakingly close. One arm pulled her tighter, the other curled up behind her head so that he could press his lips there.

‘You are not some outback psycho,' he soothed into her hair. ‘You're passionate and warm and you feel things intensely.'

Maybe she could now that the ice inside her was starting to thaw.

‘I wanted all that love you kept in reserve for your brother,' he breathed. ‘I hated that Travis was hoarding it. That he'd just walked away from it as though it wasn't the most precious commodity on earth.'

She pulled back and gave him a watery smile. ‘He doesn't want it.'

‘Someone else does, Eve. Every single bit of it.' Grey eyes blazed down on her. ‘I don't care where it comes from, or where it's been. I just care that it's here, in your garden. With me.'

She curled her hands in his shirt. ‘You don't hate me?'

‘I never hated you,' he soothed. ‘I hated myself. I hated the world and everything in my past that stopped me from being able to just love you. And I was angry at myself for trying to be your champion and fix everything, when all I did was make things worse for you.'

‘If you hadn't found Travis, I'd still be driving around the country, heartbroken.'

‘If I hadn't found Travis, I'd still be driving around with you,' he avowed. ‘I would never have left that easily. I would have just given you some breathing space. I was trying to protect you, not control you.'

‘I couldn't face the road without you,' she admitted. ‘That's why I went home.'

‘I have a confession to make,' he murmured. ‘This farm wasn't just about MacKenzie Falls. I picked it so that your father wouldn't have to lose you twice.'

She peered up at him and he tackled her tears with his smudged flannel shirt. ‘Lose me where?'

‘Lose you to here,' he said, kissing one swollen eyelid and then the other. ‘To me.'

Breathless tension coiled in her belly. ‘You wanted me to come here?'

‘I wanted you with me.'

‘Five minutes ago you said it was too late.'

‘Eve...if I've learned anything from you it's that surviving is not enough. I survived by leaving my mother and brother behind but it didn't change anything—it didn't change me. I've been on emotional hold since then, just like you. And that can work to a point but it's no good forever. At some point I had to take a risk and start believing in people again. In you.'

‘I let you down so badly.'

‘I was expecting it. I would have found it no matter what.'

Confused joy tripped and fell over its own feet in her mind. ‘You believe in me now?'

‘Better, Eve. I believe in myself.'

‘And you want me to stay here?'

His lips, hot and heavy, grazed hers, and it wasn't nearly enough contact after so long. She chased his touch with her own.

‘I want you to
live
here,' he pledged. And then, in case her addled mind really wasn't keeping up, he added, ‘With me. And the forest. Somewhere we can retreat to when our crazy all-consuming families get too much. Somewhere we can just be us.'

A joyous blooming began somewhere just behind her heart.

‘I'll always worry about him,' she warned. She wasn't simply going to be able to excise Travis from her life the way he'd done to her. Once a big sister, always a big sister.

‘I know. And I'll always have the family felon to help keep tabs on him.' Then, at her quizzical expression, he added, ‘Long story.'

‘Everything I said—'

‘
Everything
is in the past, Eve. I'm asking you to choose the future. I'm asking you to choose me.'

The last time he'd asked that of her, she'd chosen her brother. And broken Marshall's soul.

She slid her arms around his gorgeous, hard middle and peered up at him from the heart of their fantasy garden.

‘No,' she said breathlessly, and then squeezed him reassuringly as he flinched. ‘This time
I choose us
.'

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt from THE RENEGADE BILLIONAIRE by Rebecca Winters.

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