Page 145 of Only Ever You

You said I was the moon, but you, Sébastien, are the world. My safe place. Myhome.

He could hear her voice saying these things, his name likethat,which might be why in the middle of his kitchen on a blustery afternoon,Bash’s eyes welled, and the grin on his face was the most aching, goofiest it’d ever been.

I’m so very sorry for how things unfolded yesterday. I know now that I’m not scared anymore of losing control of the future, because with you there I can trust that everything will be fine.Wewill be fine. I asked you to have faith in us, and now I realise that I have to have faith in us too (I’m sorry again that it took me so long).

Bash chuckled as a beam of sunlight from his windows landed on the card. She was always apologising when she didn’t need to.

So I’m promising to you now, Bash, that I will believe in us.

I should never have asked for us to be casual. Loving you isn’t something part-time. You make it so easy to trust that with you my heart is safe, and I should’ve listened to that feeling in my heart instead of running away from it.

I know this next year will be hard on us, but we’ve waited eleven years to be together … and I don’t want to wait one more.

Can you forgive me?

(P.S. Yes, the doughnuts are a bribe.)

(P.P.S. Would you like to one day, maybe, marry me?)

Yours forever, Faye x

We’ve waited eleven years to be together, and I don’t want to wait one more.

Something warm and wet blotted a patch on the edge of the card.God—only Faye confessing how much she loved him and wanted her life to be with him could turn Bash into such a blubbering mess.

He put the doughnuts in the fridge, not risking getting jam and sugar on this note he was going to treasure eternally, and read the letter again and again until it was memorised in his brain and he was sure that he’d understood every word.

Until he wondered to himself what he was still doing standing here?

He had to go and get his future wife.

44

BASH

Nothing moved fast enough.Not his fingers which laced up his shoes and zipped up his coat. Not the Piccadilly line hurtling underground and the four stops he waited through. Not his legs as he burst out of Covent Garden station into strobes of mild sunlight that broke through the shifting clouds.

Bash dodged the busy midday foot traffic and sped his way towardsBaked By The Dozen.The front windows gleamed with the shine of earlier rain, and as he saw the queue inside and the full tables and chairs, his nerves gave themselves another jump scare. Another shot of adrenaline to his already galloping pulse.

So many people, at least twenty, were inside where Faye was supposed to be, and Bash had the urge to rub his knuckles on his chest, rake fingers through his wild hair. He hadn’t thought to grab a hat so his ears were as frozen as his nose.

What he was going to do didn’t need strangers’ eyes, but Bash physically strained to contain his thoughts from spilling out. The New Year’s Eve party wasn’t until tonight; he couldn’t wait half a day to respond to Faye’s question.

So he sped up along the pavement in yet another race through London for her.

Baked’sdoorpushed open with a rattle of the glass and Bash had just enough thought of mind to stop it from slamming the wall.

Several heads whipped his way.

One woman squeaked in her shock and he stumbled to a halt.

Chandra behind the counter startled into high alert like a coffee making meerkat until she saw it washimwho’d made such a loud entrance. Leaving the giant beverage machine, she scurried into the kitchen.

All of the forty-odd eyes were on him – the nightmare of Bash’s childhood, which explained why his mouth turned into a desert.

More gently than he’d entered, he closed the door, nodding his apology in that very typically English way to the abundance of customers glaring at him warily. He would do too if he was in their seats.

The fact that the crowd’s attention didn’t go back to their plates and conversations, but let the tar-like abrupt silence remain, didn’t help Bash’s jitters in the slightest.

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