Chapters (39)
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Epilogue
- Author’s note
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
Liam leaned forward. ‘I want you to come with me to New Zealand. No – listen,’ he said, as she opened her mouth to speak. ‘Please, hear me out. Please?’
Anna nodded, and he took a breath and began to speak.
‘I know this isn’t what either of us planned. But I wasn’t raised to abandon my responsibilities. If I was the kind of man to do that I wouldn’t be going back to take over the farm in the first place. I’m not going to leave you to do this alone. But I have to go back. I have to. So… I want you to think about coming with me. There’s plenty of room on the farm – there’s an empty cottage I was planning to do up in any case, for me. We can have it for our own.’
‘Whoa—’ Anna said, putting her mug down on the floor and holding up both hands. ‘Liam, stop. We’re not even a couple! If I hadn’t told you I was pregnant, you’d have never thought about me again. Now you want to set up home together, on the other side of the world?’
‘It’s not the other side of the world for me,’ Liam said. ‘It’s home.’
‘But—’
Liam put down his own mug, grasped her hands. ‘We had fun, didn’t we? We enjoyed each other’s company. Why can’t that carry on? It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’
‘I can’t just up sticks and move across the planet!’
‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘I did. And you’re not planning to stay here anyway, are you? So why not come to New Zealand? This place is no more home for you than it is for me. You don’t have any family here. You don’t have any ties. In New Zealand you’d have a family. You’d have me, you’d have my mum and dad, and so would our baby, Anna.’
‘But I don’t love you, Liam, not in the way that would make a move like that make sense. And you don’t love me, either. You know you don’t.’
‘Maybe we’d fall in love,’ he said stubbornly. ‘We like each other. We find each other attractive. I’ve known relationships grow out of less than that, haven’t you? Surely it’s worth a try?’
Anna pulled her hands out of his and stood. She turned away from him, putting her hands over her face for a moment before dropping them to her sides. ‘It won’t work. We’d barely been seeing each other two months before your eye was caught by someone else. And that’s fine. But to expect me to give up my entire life, to move to a country I don’t know, with people I don’t know…’