“For me?” He seemed surprised.
“I bought it with my money. All the money I’d saved before I met you.” Somehow it was important that he know that.
He set her on her feet but still held her in his embrace, the dark eyes looking quizzically at her. “Tessa, I have everything I want. You shouldn’t have spent your money on me.”
“I wanted to, Blaize. Wait here, I’ll bring it to you.”
She hurried to the second bedroom where she had hidden his gift in a cupboard. She had had it boxed so he wouldn’t immediately know what it was. He had shed his jacket and tie by the time she returned. He shook his head bemusedly as she handed him the gift-wrapped box, all tied up with pretty bows. Tessa waited impatiently for him to open it, hoping he would appreciate the thought.
But he didn’t smile when her gift was revealed to him. He stared at the two bottles of yellow-gold wine, a dark frown creasing his brow.
“I couldn’t get the ‘29 d’Yquem,” she hastily explained. “It was too expensive. The best I could do was the ‘45. I thought two bottles...”
She faltered as his gaze lifted to hers, dark torment in his eyes.
“Did I do wrong?” she whispered, distressed by a reaction that was not what she had anticipated at all.
“Why? Why would you want to remember that night, Tessa?” he rasped. “To give me this tonight...”
He shook his head as though in some dreadful inner anguish. “I’ve tried so hard to make up for it. I’ve tried all I could to make you happy with me. I thought...”
The dark eyes searched hers with pained urgency. “I thought today...it was all right. That I’d made the right decision for you as well as for me. Was I wrong, Tessa?”
“No. No... It was right for me,’’ she rushed out with vehement conviction. Her eyes begged a frantic appeal at him. “I don’t understand, Blaize. I thought you liked this wine. I wanted to give you something special that you liked.”
She felt the relief surge through him even before it hit his face. He stepped forward and swept her into a crushing embrace. His hands ran over her in feverish possession as he rained passionate kisses over her hair. She slid her arms around his neck and pushed her head away enough to look at him.
“Blaize, tell me why you were upset,” she pleaded.
His mouth twisted into bitter irony. “Tessa, for me making love with you that night... somehow it went very deep... and when you cried, it made me feel like all kinds of a heel for doing what I’d done. It was only then I remembered about the other man in your life... but I wanted you so much...”
He expelled a long heavy sigh. “When you said you wanted it ended the next morning, I tried to do the decent thing, Tessa, and step out of your life. But I couldn’t forget how you’d responded to me. I kept thinking I must have a chance with you... that you couldn’t be very deeply in love with your fiancé if you could respond to me like that... even though you cried.”
“So you called me up to your office.”
He nodded. “And then I realised why you’d let me make love to you. It felt like having my gut kicked in.”
“I’m sorry, Blaize. I didn’t think you cared about me,” Tessa said softly, beginning to realise that his feelings for her ran a lot deeper than she had ever imagined. She reached up and stroked his cheek. “I thought you just wanted a bit of sex on the side.”
“I wanted you,” he said gruffly. “Any part of you that you’d let me have. I thought if I could just stay in your life, given time enough, I could make you mine.”
“I am yours,” she assured him. “I’ll always be yours, Blaize. I love you very much. More than I’ve ever loved anyone. More than I could ever imagine loving anyone.”
It wasn’t at all difficult to say those words with his dark eyes burning with his need for her. Not just need for her body. Her... the person she was. Why it was so, or how it was so, didn’t matter. She was the right one for him. Tessa truly believed that now.
“You love me, Tessa?” he said, half-incredulously.
“That’s why I accepted your proposal, Blaize. I fell in love with you that weekend on the boat.”
He gave a funny little laugh. “As far back as then? You loved me then?”
She nodded.
“You mean I’ve been sweating blood to get you married to me, and you actually wanted to marry me all along?” he demanded, his arrogant confidence returning in a burst that blew aside all uncertainties.
“Well, I wouldn’t precisely say that.” Tessa backtracked. After all, it wasn’t good for their relationship for Blaize to be too arrogantly confident of her. He might start taking her for granted. “I wasn’t sure that a marriage between us would work. I thought I was taking an awful gamble saying yes.”
“You thought you were taking a gamble!” He threw back his head and laughed. Then he picked her up and whirled her onto the bed, pinning her down when she teasingly tried to escape him. “I’ve got you!” he said. “And I’m not letting you go, so you might as well resign yourself to your fate, Stockton,” he said with mock severity.
“I’m resigned, sir. Very happily resigned,” she returned cheekily. “But you have to call me Callagan, sir. I got married today.”
“Yes. You did.” He kissed her. “And don’t you forget it.”
She kissed him back. “I have an excellent memory, sir.”
“Tessa darling, you have a lot to make up for.”
“I do?”
“Yes, you do. I worked harder than I’ve ever worked in my life, thinking of a way to put a proposal of marriage to you. I spent the whole of that Sunday convincing myself I had a chance. I was almost sure you hadn’t just been pretending to be happy with me that weekend—”
“I wasn’t.”
“—and I couldn’t believe that your responses to me weren’t genuine.”
“They were.”
“But when it came to the point—make or break time—it was still the most terrifying moment of my life.”
“You? Terrified?”
“Oh, it was all very fine for you, my darling. I wasn’t using you as some kind of fantasy lover who couldn’t be accepted into real life. You put me through hell!”
“Would a little taste of heaven help you forget, darling Blaize?” she asked, sliding her hands over him in deliberate provocation.