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CHAPTER 46
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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
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“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
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT CHAPTER 52
“Cindy,” you can’t mean to argue with me on this matter,” he said aloud. “I know you don’t want to drive in this weather.”We can all go in your car, she decided. Paul can pick mine up in the morning.He looked a little stunned by that decision but agreed quickly as if he were afraid that she would change her mind.Cal—who was proficient in sign language and had been following the conversation—looked relieved that they had made up their minds and ushered them toward Gerard’s sleek car.“Do you think my car will be okay here?” she asked Cal worriedly as he held the car door open for them.“Don’t worry about it, ma’am, I’ll have one of my guys pick it up tonight,” he assured her.I don’t want to inconvenience anybody, and this weather is atrocious.”“It’s our job,” Cal said with a polite smile. “We’ll take care of it.” Realizing that he wasn’t going to bend on the matter, Cindy ducked her head and climbed into the back of the car; Gerard followed, his bulk taking up most of the space in
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“Daddy baf I?” she asked, probably knowing that her dad would go easy on her. Cindy raised a questioning brow at Gerard , who nodded, his gaze tender as he smiled at the little girl.“Come on then,” he invited, holding his arms out to her. She toddled into them and he hugged her close for a long moment, shutting his eyes as he inhaled her baby scent. “Love you, sweetheart.”heart turned to mush as she watched them. She turned away and busied herself cleaning up the dinner debris as she struggled to keep the waterworks at bay. She kept her back to them as Kayla led him out of the living room and upstairs to the bathroom. She left them to it for about ten minutes while she fiddled about in the kitchen, before she followed them upstairs.Gerard was already toweling off a chatty Kayla by the time Cindy joined them. He smiled up at her as she entered his field of vision; the look on his face was so warm and unaffected that Cindy couldn’t help but smile back.“That was a fast bath,” she sai
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT CHAPTER 54
She was a lost cause. Her face was streaming with tears, and she reached for him but he flinched away and got up to pace to the window. He didn’t want her to touch him, and she wept for the lonely, hurt child he had been and for the emotionally distant and psychologically scarred man that he had become. He was sharing what he felt were his most shameful secrets, and it broke her heart that he thought this was his shame and not that of the pathetic excuse of a man who had fathered him.“I never felt like I deserved you,” he said, keeping his rigid back to her. “But like I told you before, I just couldn’t stay away from you after that first meeting. I kept making and breaking promises with myself just to spend time with you. When I proposed to you, I thought that I could manage the relationship; that I could keep your love for myself without tainting you, without hurting you. God, what a miserable job I did of that.” He started pacing in front of the window, prowling back and forth like
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