Chapter One Hundred and One

So he was deeply affected by the loss of their child. It didn't mean he loved her. The empty seat was just an empty seat. It couldn't be concluded that he couldn’t bear to be with anyone else. There was no point in tormenting herself with such thoughts. If he'd loved her, everything would have been different.

Jasmine kept telling herself this, day after day, week after week. She worked hard at her job, avoided meeting Favour in person, held endless one-sided conversations with her goldfish who listened sympathetically to her emotional outpourings and her best attempts at logical reasoning. In this regard, Rhett and Scarlet were her perfect companions.

She told herself she was managing okay...until the parcel came. It was a box—a box sent from London—and the sender's name was Collins Templeton.

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Collins felt uncharacteristically tense as he belted himself into his seat for take off on the long flight from London to Sydney. He'd failed with Jasmine last time—had deserved to fail—and it was impossible to forecast her response to his message. Had enough time gone by? Had he waited too long?

He vividly recalled the bitter irony of her words... This, too, will pass.

But it hadn't. And it never would. He'd been trying to block Jasmine Leclaire out of his mind for over a year. It had proved impossible. And ..now he couldn't block her out of his heart. Nor did he want to.

She was his woman. Somehow he had to undo the damage he'd done so she would accept him back into her life.

Had the rose started that process for him?

It had been a risky gamble, sending it to her. She'd remember him taking it out of her hair the night of Leonard's wedding—a prelude to the intimacy they'd shared, after which he'll left her without a word. Would it mean anything to her that he'd taken the rose with him? She might think it had represented a crass souvenir of a great night of sex. He couldn't blame her if she did. Yet it wasn't true.

He'd kept the rose because instinctively he'd wanted to keep her. At the time he wouldn't let himself go down that track. Not until he knew about the baby—how much it had meant to her—how much it had suddenly meant to him.

Their child. His and Jasmine's. It had gradually seeped into his soul— the lightness of their being together.

He'd been so blindly stubborn not to recognise it before.

Bad move—his proposal of marriage at LAX. Too quick. Totally inappropriate after the miscarriage. And lacking in credibility in the light of all he'd done and not done.

Her walking away from him had been one hell of a wake-up call, underlining how she had read his behaviour—every action totally self-centred, not even pausing to consider where she had been coming from, nor asking where she wanted to go. It had to be different this time. Very different. He was extremely conscious of the thin line he'd be treading. Any mistake...

The airline steward offered a tray of drinks. He took a glass of orange juice. No champagne for him. Champagne was for celebrating and he had nothing to celebrate on this trip.

'Are we running late?' he asked, impatient to get on his way to Jasmine.

'No, sir. We'll be taking off on schedule in ten minutes,' came the confident assurance.

Ten minutes...plus over twenty hours in the air...more time waiting through the stopover in Singapore, it was a long haul to Sydney...and he wasn't even sure Jasmine would meet him. Had the note he'd put in the box with the rose said enough to win him another chance with her?

Once again he weighed the words he'd written—words he'd formulated and reformulated dozens of times during the weeks he'd already waited.... He'd wanted to send it in a text at first, but he wanted to send the flower too and a note seemed more... Personal for some reason. The note read:

Jasmine — It's long past the next day and the next and the next. No amount of time will wear away the connection I feel with you. Can we meet again? I will be in Sydney on the first day of May. There's a rose garden in the botanical gardens, just down from the Macquarie Street entrance. From twelve noon I'll be there waiting for you.

Collins.

If she didn't come...every primitive male instinct pushed to go to her apartment and break down the door if necessary, smash any barrier she put up, take her in his arms, make wild passionate love to her, force her to respond.

But would such action work?

In the end, the choice was hers.

What did Jasmine want? That was the critical question. This meeting had to be based on giving, not taking—persuasion, not force.

The steward came and collected his glass. The jet started rolling down the runway. The die was cast.

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It was 12.30pm, and Collins was sitting in the garden he'd told Jasmine to come to. He'd arrived at 11;45,not wanting to be a second late. The one thing he didn't want was to arrive late and keep Jasmine waiting. That would only give her a reason to think that he wasn't serious and he was damn serious about her. He had screwed up many times and he didn't expect her to just forget everything that had happened, but he hoped... That was all he had left now. Hope.

He'd ordered a champagne, but he was so nervous and anxious that he'd barely touched his drink. Hell, he couldn't even remember if he had ever felt this way about any woman, and he hated that it had taken him this long to realize how he felt about Jasmine.

Minutes passed, and he tapped his foot and checked his wrist watch. Almost 1pm and she still wasn't here. He began to lose hope.. What if she didn't come? He couldn't blame her. He'd done nothing to earn her trust. In fact, he had done the opposite of everything he was supposed to do.