“I’ve been safe, which I appreciate. And, heaven knows, I’m indebted to you for slipping me free of the life I’d been living.”

She felt indebted. They were at a painful impasse: she felt for him something he didn’t want, and she wanted from him something he didn’t feel.

Gemma had taken firm hold of the door handle. “If your feelings ever change, Baz, send word.”

And she’d left.

Life taught you to be careful who you grow attached to. It was both a true and incomplete summation of who he was and who he’d learned to be.

He was utterly attached to Gemma. He cared what happened to her. He missed her when she was gone. He was sorely tempted to beg her to stay despite knowing she’d be settling for less than she wanted.

That was what life had taught him to be careful about: asking more of people than he was able to give, making promises to them, however inadvertent, that he couldn’t fulfill.

Gemma deserved to live the life she wanted on her own terms. Earlier that very night, she had acknowledged she’d never been free before, and she valued having such freedom now.

He would not take that away from her by tying her to a man who was less than she needed him to be.

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

She told me every day that she loved me.

Gemma hadn’t been able to clear that from her mind. Every day. Before his mother died, Baz had been told by someone every single day that he was loved. No one had ever said that to her. Literally no one.

She’d always assumed that was because the Kincaids were a collection of no-account slubbers who hadn’t affection for anything but money and power. And she’d told herself Baz had never said he loved her because he’d had a difficult upbringing as well, that he likely didn’t realize what it’d mean to hear that.

She told me every day.

He knew. He just didn’t feel that for her.

Gemma’s heart had broken three years earlier, waiting for those words. A pathetic part of her had fully believed he’d say them to her eventually. Even if it weren’t a romantic-type love, she’d expected he’d at least come to care about her beyond someone he’d rescued.

She was a regular codshead, she was, thinking things’d be different this time.

Her father had been wrong about most things, but he’d been bang on the mark in saying that hearts were foolish things. She’d appreciate that misguided organ keeping quiet and minding its own business.

Baz had married her out of pity, her head would remind her. But pitiful people were sometimes endearing, her heart would insist. And, it would add, maybe Baz had a secret weakness for that particular combination.

Pathetic.