Willow lay awake long after she’d heard his breathing slow to a steady rise and fall. How strange it was that within a few seconds she could now see Rick through completely different eyes. He was someone who had been badly hurt when young, whose family had been smashed to pieces and all he wanted, as an adult, was to recreate what he’d lost. It made sense of his obsession with keeping everything in order. Of his loving her and his happiness at being a father. She could see also why he worried about her, just as he had this evening, and why that worry had made him angry.

It reminded Willow of what Mum had explained to her once, that Dad had lost his temper the way he did at times because he too had lost his parents at a young age. Grief could do that, Mum said; it could have a lasting effect on a person, especially if they bottled it up and refused to talk about it.

Perhaps when Rick was more receptive to opening up to her about his family, Willow could help him to put it behind him. But for now, she would try harder to please him, to make him truly happy.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

‘I can’t believe it,’ he said.

‘What can’t you believe?’ she asked.

‘That you said yes. I was convinced you’d say no.’

‘Why did you ask me, then?’

Turning away from the silvery moonlight that was dancing towards them across the oscillating surface of the incoming tide, Ellis looked at Naomi. At the woman who had just agreed to marry him. One minute they had been sitting here on the sand quietly drinking Champagne to toast his sixty-fifth birthday the second the church bell had struck midnight, and the next they were on their feet and whooping like a couple of crazy teenagers. He hadn’t actually meant to propose, but in a sudden moment of now-or-never madness, the words had just slipped out – ‘Naomi, will you marry me?’

‘Because my heart had the better of me,’ he said in answer to her question. ‘Because since we started seeing each other again it’s made me realise I’ve never been happier. And,’ he added, ‘it just feels right.’

‘I feel the same way,’ she said. ‘Which was why it was so easy for me to say yes to you. But you know, another glass of Champagne and I might have been brave enough to propose to you. Or at least suggested we made things more permanent and official.’ She smiled. ‘Which wouldn’t have been half so romantic as the way you did it.’

‘All I did was blurt out the truth of my feelings. Would it have required bravery on your part to do the same?’ he asked.

‘I believe so,’ she said with a small nod. ‘Especially after the way I treated you, pushing you away because I was scared.’ She shook her head. ‘I turned into such a cliché and made myself thoroughly miserable into the bargain.’