Close to You (30 page)

She swallowed, tears pooling in her eyes.

He closed his eyes for a second and tried to gather himself. When he opened them, a couple of tears were trailing down her cheeks. He wiped them away with his thumbs. One left a streak of dirt in its wake. “You are brilliant, and funny, and feisty, and beautiful, and I hope with everything in me that I'm the man for you. But if I am, I know it's not right now. And if I'm not, I need to set you free to go and find him, because you deserve every single moment of joy that he can give you.”

“I don't want anyone else. I want you.” Her soft words almost undid him. Winding his fingers through hers, he lifted her hand up and pressed a kiss into her skin as he held her gaze.

“I want you too. It j—”

“Stop talking, Jackson.” Before he could even process what was happening she'd grabbed his T-shirt between both hands and tugged him down. Allie leaned into him, kissing him like her survival depended on it. He closed his eyes and kissed her back. Poured everything into the kiss that he couldn't say with words. Her hands framed his face as his fingers wove through her hair, down her back, pulling her closer. By the
time it ended they were both breathing like they had just sprinted a mile.

Allie let go of his T-shirt, smoothing it across his chest, and slid back along the bench a few inches.

Jackson tried to get his heart rate under control. He curled his hands back under the bench before he could pull her back to him to fill the gaping void she'd just left.

She stood up. “Okay. I'm going to go. Because if I don't leave now, I'm never going to.”

If she stayed for one second longer, there was no way he was going to let her.

Allie walked across the yard, toward the fence, heading for a red car beyond it.

He stood up, followed after her, mind scrambling for something to say.

The car beeped and Allie opened the door. She turned, just as he was opening his mouth and spoke first. “Don't say it. Don't you dare say good-bye.”

Thirty-Four

Four months later

A
LLIE SQUARED HER SHOULDERS AT
the door to the Gulbenkian lecture hall.
God, please help me.
She'd repeated the same desperate prayer before every single lecture in the last two weeks. She forced her feet to move beyond the threshold and pasted on her lecturer's face. Getting her dream job hadn't magically erased all her fears, but every day things got a little easier.

It was a first-year undergraduate English-literature class: Introduction to Tolkien. She could have taught this in her sleep. Given that it was nine in the morning on a Friday, half her class of mostly eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds probably still were.

Not only could she have taught this class with two arms tied behind her back, but much to her surprise, once she got over the hump of her fear and started talking, she loved it. She'd told Jackson he'd reignited the passion for Tolkien she thought was gone forever, but until she'd started teaching again she hadn't realized how true it was.

Just thinking his name brought the familiar ache of never-
to-be-fulfilled yearning. Still. After four months. She longed for the day when it didn't. Even better yet, for the time when she made it a week without the first thought when she opened her eyes in the morning being the hope that today would be the day he'd walk back into her life. So far her best run was four days. Once she'd even made it all the way to lunch before it found her. He was right. They both had to move on. Though there was one thing she did know: she would never ever regret that kiss.

Opening the classroom door, she walked in with her papers tucked tightly against her chest and the USB holding the morning's presentation in her hand.

Love and Tolkien. She planned to skip over the obvious couples in her lecture. Aragorn and Arwen. Celeborn and Galadriel. She would spend most of her time homing in on the true love that weaved its way through the stories. Brotherly love. Sacrificial love. A love where the desire for justice conquered fear. A love for light and life that took on the powers of darkness.

Placing her papers on the desk, she plugged the USB into the university's system and pulled up the slides. Then, closing her eyes for a second, she took a deep breath and turned to face the room.

Almost two hundred pairs of eyes stared back at her. A wave of colors and faces, genders, and hairstyles. Fancy that. Most of them had managed to drag themselves out of bed after all.

Picking up the microphone, she leaned back against the desk and felt her lecturer persona settle over her.

She could do this. She was good at this. “Good morning, everyone. When we left off on Tuesday, we were discussing the
important role of symbolism in Tolkien's work. Hopefully, this was continued in your tutorials this week. Today we're going to turn our attention to one of these overarching themes. Love.” She heard her voice falter at the four-letter word.

How long was it going to take before she could say the
l
-word without the face of a certain American flashing up in her mind? Or before she was able to reconcile herself to the fact that she was never going to know if that was what they'd had?

* * *

J
ackson sat awestruck. He'd gotten here early to claim a seat toward the back of the lecture hall, even paid a fee under an assumed name to attend the class, just in case there was someone checking such things. He watched as students started wandering in, wave after wave, until the room was almost full.

Clearly, even undergraduates took things seriously in England. When he'd been in college, you did everything you could to avoid signing up for lectures on a Friday. And if you had to attend one, you only showed up if you absolutely had to.

It was clear after the first five minutes why that wasn't the case here. Allie was amazing. Poised, confident, holding the microphone as she leaned back against the desk and chatted away like she was having a conversation at a dinner party and not speaking to hundreds of people.

He drank her in. She had cut her hair. It now sat in a sleek bob just above her shoulders. She was wearing some kind of dress-and-jacket combo that managed to be both professional and crazy sexy, which was helped by the high heels that gave her an extra four inches. He could sit here and watch her all day.

She kept talking, her words rolling over him. She never referred to any notes. The only time she even looked at the screen was to move on to the next slide. Most of the people around him held pens, but their pages were empty, so captivated were they by her seamless weaving of material from the books with movie references and personal anecdotes about her work with the movies and as a tour guide.

His insides twisted, his hands slick. This had seemed like a terrible idea when it first came to him. The day his acceptance letter had arrived. The moment he realized there was a chance God might have managed to do the impossible and create crossing paths for them. Cambridge and Oxford. Both of them in England. Only a couple of hours apart by train.

It was a rash, crazy idea. He'd shoved it away, thinking there couldn't be a worse thing to do to her, but it kept coming back, the small voice prodding him.

It had grown into an insistent drill sergeant the moment he'd clicked on the Oxford English faculty page to see her picture smiling back at him.

He looked around the room at all the entranced upturned faces. Not a single student was sleeping, or even surreptitiously texting, that he could see.

He couldn't believe he was going to do this. Here. Today. It was insanity.

But then, more miraculous things had happened. Like his mom's cancer treatment being so successful that specialists had used words like
unprecedented
while trying to hide their surprise as all her markers defied the most optimistic of predictions.

Or like Cambridge being the only school, out of twenty-­
something, to accept his application to their MBA program. His very late application, at that.

He blew a breath out and focused back on Allie. Her smile. The way her hands gestured as she told a story about something that had happened during filming. The way the sound of her voice slid down his spine like maple syrup on pancakes.

Seeing her now made him marvel at how he'd survived months without her. He was even more determined that it wasn't going to continue for one more day. If she said yes.

This was always going to be a bit risky, given what had happened before. And that was when he'd thought he'd be dealing with a small class of maybe fifty students.

He swallowed, his mouth like sandpaper. It had been forty minutes, which meant she had to be wrapping up soon.

Why couldn't he just lie low? Go and find her in a café or something like a normal guy? Spend days wandering around the English department, if need be, until they ran into each other.

But he'd prayed. And this was what kept coming back. Lord help him—He was the only one who could.

She was finishing up, segueing perfectly to the final bullet point on the slide. She looked up and across the room. “Any questions?” No one else would have noticed the sudden stiffening of her posture or the trepidation that flickered across her face for a split second.

Two hands went up. Two easy questions dealt with in a couple of minutes. “Anyone else?”

Silence. He was frozen.

“Okay, well, first essays are—”

“I have a question.” It took a moment for him to realize it
was his voice booming out, causing people to look around to see where it came from.

Allie looked in his direction but didn't see him. “Sure. Go ahead.” Again, a slight tremor in her voice.

This was either going to be a story they'd be telling their grandchildren or an epic disaster. There was no middle ground.

Dear God, please let me have heard You right.

He got to his feet.

* * *

A
llie had finally let herself relax, congratulating herself on another lecture down. She'd even enjoyed most of this one—the upturned faces of all the students, most of them actually looking engaged and interested in the material.

Then the guy's voice boomed out, the American accent sucking her back into the past. So at odds with the softer English lilt she'd gotten accustomed to spending most of her days surrounded by.

It had taken two months, but she'd finally stopped turning her head at every American male voice, hoping she would find the impossible face behind it.

She hadn't heard from Jackson since the day she'd shown up in Pennington. She'd thought she might be finally starting to get over foolish, nonsensical hope, but the way her heart lifted for a second, tried to make her believe this one, this American accent belonged to him, told her she'd been kidding herself.

“Sure. Go ahead.” Her voice wavered. Had she missed a hand somewhere? It had sounded like the voice came from the back of the room.

A ripple of movement toward the top left of the lecture hall.
Someone was standing and seemed to be walking toward her.

“You haven't talked much about Aragorn and Arwen.” Allie's breath caught. She knew that voice. She did. “Or even Faramir and Éowyn.”

Her eyes searched the upper reaches for him, but the glare of the fluorescent lights temporarily blinded her. Then he appeared out of the haze. Three-quarters of the way up on the left-hand side, standing in the aisle. His gaze focused unwaveringly on her.

Those ocean-blue eyes she'd finally managed to convince herself she was never going to see again. Here. In her lecture.

She found her voice. “You're right, I haven't. Everyone knows about them. I prefer to focus on the other types of love woven through the stories. They're even more important—like Sam's love for Frodo. What would've happened without ‘I may not be able to carry the ring, Mr. Frodo, but I can carry you.'?”

Jackson kept walking down the stairs. “But she gave up her immortality for him. Surely that must count for something?”

“Something, yes, but not everything.” Her words came out raspy. He'd had a haircut. It made his cheekbones stand out even more. That bone structure belonged to a Renaissance sculpture, not a man.

His gaze was still locked on hers, almost making the hundreds of spectators disappear. Except for the murmurs rippling across the room and the phones being lifted up. She abandoned any pretense they were talking about Tolkien. “What are you doing here?”

He quirked a smile at her. The same one that still caused her heart to stop. “An MBA at Cambridge.”

“An MBA?” She repeated the words.
At Cambridge?

He was nearly to the bottom of the stairs and turning over ground fast. “Turns out being a spectacularly failed entrepreneur does have some benefits, after all. Got me admission to one of the best programs in the world.”

“Here? You're
here
? In England?” Her voice boomed around the room. She was still holding the microphone. She put it on the desk behind her with an amplified
thump.

“I am. The first scholarship recipient of the Louis and Mavis Duff Foundation.”

It took her a second to realize what he was saying. “Louis and Mavis got
married
?”

He laughed. “They eloped—two weeks after the tour. Sorry I forgot to mention that.”

Good grief. Who would've put money on the eighty-year-olds taking the gold medal in the whirlwind-romance race?

She pulled herself back to the infinitely more important matter at hand. How long was the MBA program at Cambridge? For the life of her, she couldn't remember. “How long are you here for?”

“At least the next ten months. Maybe more.” He hit the bottom step, then started walking across the front.

“Maybe?” She tried to absorb everything. His haircut—she liked it. His insane blue eyes looking at her like she was the only thing on the planet. The fitted red T-shirt and jeans that accentuated his athletic physique. Her breath stalled.

“It depends.”

Her hands gripped the edge of the desk behind her. “On what?”

His legs were carving up the remaining distance between them with sure, unwavering strides. “On you.”

She couldn't breathe. In a good way. If there was a good way not to be able to breathe.

He stopped in front of her. “The last four months have been the longest months of my entire life. And I cannot spend another day without telling you how I feel.”

She had no words.

“Allison Marie Shire. I have loved you since the day you told me I don't drink real coffee. I went to New Zealand thinking I knew what I was there for but, as always, Tolkien was right.”

“About what?” The words just squeaked out.

“ ‘You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.' ”

Allie almost fell over as he quoted
The Hobbit
to her.

Jackson reached out and brushed her cheek. The girls in the class let out a collective sigh. “I found something so much better than what I was after. I found you. And I know we ­haven't even been on a proper date yet, so this may be a little unexpected, but I never want to say good-bye.”

I love you too.
The words resounded in her head but didn't make it out of her mouth. After months of self-analysis, she'd worked out that she'd fallen for him at the stupid dinner where he'd eaten her torte.

Her vocabulary had abandoned her, so she did her best to tell him with her eyes.

He stood right in front of her. “But this is what God told me to do, and I figure you don't mess with the creator of the universe.”

Wait. What? God had told him to do what now? What was he talking about?

He started kneeling and opened his hand to reveal a small box in his palm. What was he doing?
What
was he doing?

“So, Allison Marie Shire, will you accept this as the one ring to rule them all for the rest of our lives?”