Unbreakable (Cloverleigh Farms, #4)(82)

“Of course not.” Mia shook her head. “Because your connection to her isn’t just about sex. It goes deeper than that.”

“Which is what scares her.”

“Do you think it’s too soon for her?” Lucas asked, breaking his long silence.

“Lucas!” Mia reached over and slapped his arm. “No, it’s not too soon. This woman loves him. She admitted it.” She looked at me for confirmation. “Right?”

“Right. But she also told me to forget her, like in the same breath.” I explained what happened the last time I saw her. “I told her I loved her. I told her I wanted to take care of her. I wouldn’t walk away without a fight. And she said I had to—that she didn’t know how to let herself be loved like that and she was too scared to try.”

Mia had been sliding down on the sofa ever since I started talking, as if my story was deflating her hopes like a balloon losing air, and finally wound up in a puddle on the rug next to the coffee table. “That’s it,” she said. “I’m dead.”

Lucas exhaled heavily. “You’ll be okay.”

“Here’s the last part,” I said. I told them about Whitney overhearing the entire conversation, running into them last night, and the visit at the winery today. “So now I have no idea what to do. I’m terrified of fucking this up again.”

Mia sat straight up. “I know what you need to do.”

“You do?” I asked.

“Yes.” She nodded defiantly. “Listen, I get this woman. Maybe I didn’t go through everything she did, but I feel where she’s coming from. I don’t know if we’ve ever told you this, but right before I met Lucas, I was engaged to someone else who jilted me a week before the wedding. Paris was supposed to be my honeymoon, and I went by myself—the last thing I expected was to meet the love of my life tending bar in the Latin Quarter my first night there, but I did.”

I looked back and forth between them. “I never knew that.”

“Now, when I walked into that bar, I was angry, depressed, and miserable. I had the worst attitude ever.”

“The worst,” Lucas confirmed.

“But Lucas saw something in me that even I couldn’t see. He made me believe in love. He made me believe I was worth it. He made me believe that anything was possible—all I had to do was trust him.”

“But how?” I said, leaning forward, elbows on my knees.

“He refused to give up,” she said simply. “I tried to sabotage us. I broke it off in a train station, said au revoir, and walked away.” She looked at her husband. “Remember that, babe?”

He nodded. “You walked the wrong way.”

She laughed. “Yeah, that should have been a sign right there. But the point is . . .” She looked at me again. “I thought I was doing the right thing. And even better, I was taking control of it. I wasn’t going to give some half-French bartender-slash-psych professor the opportunity to abandon me—I was going to leave him first. And I did.”

“So what happened?”

“I had to go after her.” Lucas leaned forward, grabbed his wife’s arm, and tugged her onto his lap. “She forced me to. And I was a guy who didn’t believe in marriage, didn’t want kids, never thought the whole traditional family thing was for me. But she’d made me look at myself differently, and I knew I couldn’t let her get away.”

“And you can’t let Sylvia get away either, not if you love her.” Mia put her arms around Lucas’s shoulders. “It doesn’t matter that you haven’t been together for very long. What matters is the way you feel.”

“I love her,” I said adamantly. “And I know I can make her happy.”

“Then go get her.” Mia smiled at me. “If you know her well enough to love her, then you know what she needs to hear. It’s in there, Henry.” She put a hand over her heart. “Trust me. Trust you.”





Twenty-Four





Sylvia





I was helping April prepare for the inn’s big Valentine’s dinner when Whitney found me in the restaurant.

“Hey, Whit.” I placed one of the centerpieces that had just been delivered from the florist on a table for four near the bar. “Where have you been?”

“I went to see Henry,” she announced.

I looked at her, startled. “You what?”

“I went to see Henry in his office at the winery.”

My mouth fell open. “Why?”

“Because I needed to talk to him.” She pulled out a chair and sat down. “And now I need to talk to you.”

“Okay,” I said, pulling out the chair adjacent to hers. My head was spinning. “But since when do you call him Henry?”

“Since he told me to today. So here’s the thing.” Whitney placed her clasped hands on the table. “He’s really in love with you. It’s true.”

My face burned. “Whitney, what on earth—”

“Listen to me. You said, that night he came to the house, that you didn’t know whether he loved you or not. You said that was the problem.”

“I said that was part of the problem.”