His Princess in the Making by Melissa James Page B

“I’ll be leaving for home as soon as Charlie’s coronation is over.”
    “Maybe it was meant to be this way. All these years, and we have only a day.”
    “A day?” he shot back bitterly. “Not even an hour and it was over.”
    “It’s always the wrong time for us,” she whispered.
    He laughed without humour. “You’re right. So many times I’ve tried to tell you, and life changed. Most recently on the night out in Sydney we never had, the ten-year celebration of your release from the clinic. I’d planned the whole night around telling you how I feel. But you were gone.”
    After a few moments, she spoke, her voice filled with sadness. “So many times I tried to tell you too, and something came between us.”
    He still couldn’t look at her; he could barely stand the pain of being near her, not touching her. “You mean the women I dated? You said they divided us.”
    “It doesn’t matter now.”
    “It does.” He swung around, taking her by the shoulders, aching and hurting just at the sight of her sad beauty in the shaft of pale, dying moonlight, with the warm, silky feel of her skin in his hands. “Now is all we have, Giulia.”
    She sighed, turning her face slightly so she didn’t look at him. “So ridiculous, isn’t it? After fifteen years where we could have spoken, we choose now, when it can’t make any difference.”
    “It makes a difference to me.”
    Slowly she shook her head. “You don’t know what you’re asking. I’ve kept it locked inside for so long…”
    He cupped her averted face in his hands. “Tomorrow could be too late. Tell me, Giulia. Please.”
    Her face was ethereal in the waning moonlight. A ghost of Giselle, about to fade before his eyes as she sighed, and finally spoke the words he’d waited almost eleven years to hear.
    “I was so far and so deep in love with you I couldn’t see any other man, could never bear the thought of touching anyone else,” she said quietly. “I wanted to tell you so many times, but I’d almost destroyed our friendship once by kissing you.”
    “ Was in love with me?” His voice was rough with all the might-have-beens.
    “Was.” She sighed. “Until Mandy.” She turned to him with a brave smile. “But she didn’t last. We did. I’m still here, we’re friends.”
    Mandy was the first girl he’d dated since Giulia’s release from the clinic, three years after she’d come home. “I have to know. Did I hurt you?”
    Her mouth quirked in a travesty of the smile she’d given him moments before. “I wanted to die for a few days.” Shebit her lip, shook her head. “Stupid girl, huh? It’s a shame I didn’t make the ballet. It would have fulfilled my desire for drama.” She looked up when he didn’t respond: she knew. “I didn’t die, Toby. I grew up. Dating Mandy was probably the best gift you could have given me at the time.”
    He drew her close. “I’m so sorry, so damned sorry, Giulia. I was the stupid one. I thought you didn’t want me. I thought you’d turn from me, say you were sorry and I’d lose you. I thought—” He felt sick, but knew if it wasn’t said now it never would be. “I couldn’t risk stressing you to the point where you’d stop eating again.”
    She frowned and looked fully at him for the first time since they’d danced, and his heart jerked at the sad question hovering inside her. “Can’t you ever see beyond the anorexia to see me? Couldn’t you tell me, and trust that I’d deal with it as an adult?”
    She sounded more sorrowful than incensed, so he took the chance. “I should have, but I couldn’t.” He kissed her hair as he murmured, “Dr Evans said I had to wait for you to speak. He said if you didn’t want me, the threat of losing my friendship could make you sick again. He said the fear of losing me could kill you.”
    And she’d proved that tonight, getting sick for the first time in years at hearing about the death threats. She could deny the anorexia, claim it was