Page 96 of The Payback Plan
‘I told you,’ he said, a smile in his voice. ‘I’m at your door.’
For a second, Paige just stared in disbelief at the window then she leaped from her seat and ran. Across the room, down two flights of stairs, straight to the door, her breathing now as erratic as her heartbeat. Yanking it open, she found him standing there in jeans and a plaid jumper, smiling in the weak sunshine, looking ridiculously sexy.
‘Hey.’ He held up a zip lock bag containing her fridge magnets. ‘I thought you might be missing these.’
Paige laughed.Definitely not. But she had missed him. She launched herself at him then and he laughed as he caught her, his hands under her ass, his mouth hot on hers as they kissed like no one was watching, instead of a significant number of people on the Royal Mile.
‘I can’t believe you’re here,’ Paige muttered, dragging her mouth off his, her hands cupping his face. He was real. He really was real.
‘Believe it.’
She kissed him again until somebody passing by said in a thick Scottish brogue, ‘Get a room, you two.’
They broke off, grinning at each other as Paige dragged him inside. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said as the door shut behind him and she stood on the first step to equalise their heights, sliding her arms around his neck. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She stared into his eyes. ‘About the payback plan and lying to you and the whole bloody debacle.’
‘I know.’ He smiled. ‘It’s okay.’
‘It’s not.’ Paige shook her head. ‘But thank you. Mostly I just need you to know that I meant what I said in my email. I might have been faking a lot of things in Cornwall but my feelings, falling in love with you, were 100 per cent genuine.’
‘I believe you.’ He slid his arms around her waist. ‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot the last couple of days and I can kinda understand the genesis of the whole payback thing. Who can blame you for wanting to get revenge on Harvey and how that might make a normally measured individual do something a little… out of the box.’
She laughed. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’ She’d never underestimate the power of prosecco again, that was for sure.
‘And, honestly, if you hadn’t? We’d have never met. So I can hardly be mad about that.’
Looking into those blue Prendergast eyes, Paige couldn’t fault his logic.
‘All I care about right now,’ he continued, ‘is how much I’ve missed you and love you and don’t ever want to be apart from you ever again. These last two weeks have been hell.’
Paige’s system flooded with cool relief. She’d spent the fortnight convinced she’d blown it for good. ‘I love you too,’ she said, her chest filling up.
His arms tightened around her waist. ‘Please say you’ll come back to Cornwall with me when you finish here in a couple of weeks. Or if you don’t want to live there, pick a place. As long as I’m with you, I don’t care where we live. Wherever we are, I just want to love you to distraction.’
Paige wanted nothing more than to love him to distraction, too. Pressing her forehead lightly against his, she murmured, ‘Cornwall is perfect.’ She’d been reborn there in so many ways that it felt like herspiritualhome.
‘Cornwall it is,’ he said with a smile.
They kissed then, long and deep. The distraction beginning in earnest.
EPILOGUE
FOUR MONTHS LATER…
Paige stared at the bound pages Olly had just passed over. He’d completed the biography two weeks ago and she hadn’t read it yet. Not in its fully pieced-together form, anyway. And now it was in her hands, a wad of white paper containing months of his blood, sweat and tears, the bolded title in large font staring back at her on the top sheet.
A Complicated Man: Memories of My Father.
‘You did it,’ she said, smiling at him as he pulled out the chair at the end of the table and sat.
He smiled. ‘Thanks to you.’
‘Nope.’ She shook her head. ‘This is all you. I just?—’
‘Kicked my ass and told me to stop feeling sorry for myself.’
Laughing, Paige shook her head. ‘Pushed you in the right direction.’
She glanced at the title again knowing how hard it had been for him to dig this deep and lay himself bare and loving him all the more for it. These past four months had been intense for them with the on-again, off-again scrutiny from paparazzi but it had only pushed them closer. Oliver’s protection of her had been fierce and, as each day passed, she fell in love with him a little more.
