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CHAPTER 43
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LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT CHAPTER 43
“Don’t call me that,” she said. She just felt tired and defeated. He stood there, hand still outstretched and looking miserable, with alcohol dripping from his hair and into his eyes. For a very brief moment she felt herself softening.“I know that I’ve been an utter bastard,” he admitted.“Yes.”His admission strengthened her resolve.“I’m sorry . . . ?”“Is that a question? Or an actual apology?”He hesitated briefly and she rolled her eyes. “Get back to me when you know for sure.” She swept from the room, and Gerard stared at the door for a long time after she’d left.Now that this whole divorce thing was becoming a palpable fact, he admitted to himself that he wasn’t quite so willing to roll over and give her everything that she asked for. He wanted his wife and child but he was a broken man, both physically and emotionally, and it hardly seemed fair to saddle her with his innumerable problems after everything that he had already put her through. Yet he knew that without her he’d
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT CHAPTER 45
“And that disappointed you?” he asked levelly, trying not to sound jealous at the thought of his wife ogling some other guy. Of course, he had no idea if he succeeded or not, but he hoped that he managed to sound as neutral as he was pretending to be.“No, it was more of a scientific experiment.” Her eyes were on his lower lip, and he wondered what the hell she found so fascinating about it.Going to a strip club was a scientific experiment?” He knew that he sounded like a complete idiot, but he wasn’t sure he was following this weird conversation correctly. He kept feeling like he was missing something.“You have such a gorgeous mouth.” She totally threw him with that one. “Much better than Massive Marvin’s.”“Are you going to compare me to this Massive Marvin guy all night?” he asked resentfully, feeling ridiculous even saying the stupid name.“No . . . not fair, he’d lose.” She went up on her toes and completely slammed him by kissing him. Her arms crept around his neck, and her bo
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT CHAPTER 46
“I’ll get my assistant to look into viable homes for you. Once we’ve compiled a list of possibilities, you can decide which one suits you best.” He turned and walked out of the room, leaving Cindy feeling wrung out and deflated by the hollow victory.Gerard waited until he was safely back behind the closed door of his study before bending at the waist and inhaling deeply as the consequences of his promise hit him like a freight train. She was going to leave him and he was going to let her because she deserved her freedom, because it was cruel to saddle a vibrant and affectionate woman like her with an emotionally crippled husband, and most importantly because he still didn’t know how to explain his actions on that long-ago night.A baby, Jesus God, he had thought. He wasn’t ready to be a father! He would be terrible at it. He would be like his own father—abusive, mean, and absent in both heart and soul. He couldn’t have a child yet, not until Cindy healed him some more. Over the last
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT CHAPTER 47
“You were always so easily distracted from work,” she reminisced. “Like the time you flew me to Mauritius for a long weekend, completely forgetting about that important conference call you had on the Monday.”“I have no regrets.” He shrugged. “That was a hell of a weekend.” They had spent most of it naked on a private beach.“Pierre was furious with you,” she recalled.“He got over it. Besides, we were newlyweds, he understood.”“We’d been married for more than a year,” she corrected.“Your point being?”“Do you remember that street performer who followed us from the marketplace back to the hotel?” she asked, and his eyes lit up with laughter at the memory.“He wouldn’t stop his horrendous serenading the entire walk back.”“You begged him to stop, bribed him, and offered to put his unborn children through university,” she said, giggling.“I don’t think he understood my high-school French,” Gerard laughed.“He was awful!” they both said in unison before lapsing into an awkward silence.
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT CHAPTER 48
“You were the most entrancing thing I’d ever seen,” he said, his voice gruff, and she shook her head dismissively.“Hardly.”“You still are, Cindy .” He brushed aside her automatic protest. “You’re not some boring, conventional beauty, true. And yeah, you tend to be a little clumsy at times. But you’re unusual, interesting, and to me you’re just so indescribably gorgeous. I never thought that I deserved you. You were too good for the likes of me.”She didn’t understand that sentiment at all. He was heartbreakingly handsome and she was painfully plain. He came from a background of wealth and privilege while her family had been as poor as church mice. He had been Oxford educated with a master’s degree in business while she had barely made it through high school. It had been a classic Cinderella tale, and Cindy had been the one to feel inadequate when compared to him.“I should have left you alone,” he was saying, his low voice alive with misery and his eyes filled with such profound sad
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT CHAPTER 49
“Cindy,” he murmured, and she jumped, nearly spilling the wine. She blinked up at him as if surprised to see him standing there. She self-consciously tucked an errant strand of brown hair behind her ear.“Gerard , you startled me.” He sat down next to her and turned to face her.“Sorry about that,” he apologized. “I just wanted to give you these.” He handed over half of the papers he was holding, and she put the glass onto a side table to take hold of the documents. She stared blankly down at the big, bold words at the top of the first sheet.“That was fast,” she murmured. He reached over and angled her jaw upward, and she realized that he hadn’t been able to read her lips. She repeated the three words, keeping her face determinedly neutral.“I had them drawn up last week. I gambled on the fact that I knew you well enough to guess which place you’d go for.”“Why bother showing me the other places then?” she asked, and Gerard shrugged. Yes, he’d been confident she would go for the last
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT CHAPTER 50
“I didn’t want to stain your childhood memories with the truth.”“You couldn’t possibly have done that, since most of my memories involve you and the fun we had . . .” His eyes went distant, and Gerard watched his mouth form a foul word. “All those so-called sports injuries? He did that?” Gerard nodded, and Rick swore again. “Sonofabitch! Shit, Gerard . . . I’m so bloody sorry.”Not your fault.” Gerard shrugged.“How many of those knocks did you take for me?”“It’s not important, and this is why I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want you to blame yourself. I made a decision to protect you and I did. End of story.”“Why didn’t you tell Cindy about this?”“Tell her what? That I allowed a dictatorial bastard to use me as a punching bag? That I may turn into the same dictatorial bastard and use my fists on her and Kayla someday? She’s a hell of a lot better off without me.” The words burned like acid but they had to be said.“Why do you think you’d hurt Cindy or Kayla?” Rick asked him,
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT CHAPTER 51
“Okay,” she consented, determinedly squelching the screeching protests in the back of her mind. She glanced around the empty shop. “I’ll close up and we can get going.”“Gino’s?” Cindy smiled radiantly up at Gerard , all the tension that had built up during the drive dissipating. She had followed Gerard’s car to the tiny family-run restaurant in Green Point and had laughed out loud when she recognized the familiar route. Gino’s had been her favorite restaurant back when they had first started dating. She had insisted on going Dutch in those early days and had often suggested Gino’s because of its affordability. The food was good and the atmosphere warm and cozy. They had stopped coming here after their engagement, and Cindy had all but forgotten it existed. She was surprised that Gerard remembered it.“I thought that you’d like it,” Gerard informed, his voice quiet, before glancing over at Cal, who was hovering behind them as usual, his eagle eyes sharply assessing the streets around
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