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“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I think it is better if we marry before anyone tries to talk us out of it,” he said, laughing.
“I don’t think you’re
a man who could be talked out of anything.”
“It is not my resolve I am concerned about.”
Bella’s stomach churned. “You think I’m going to back out of this?”
“No.” His smile was like a bolt of lightning and the warm swell of the ocean, all at once. “But I shall not relax until you are officially my wife.”
She laughed now, shaking her head. “Why are we doing this?”
He didn’t laugh. “For our child.” His eyes roamed her face, and then her body, in a way that made a mockery of his claim that this was for the baby growing in her belly. He looked at her as though she were his only chance for survival, as though she were the antidote to every ill this world possessed.
“Yes, for our child.” She curved a hand over her still-flat stomach, and emotions clogged her throat.
“I will call you tomorrow,” he said, simply, and then he moved towards the door. She followed, simply because it felt like what she should do. “Bella?” He curved a hand over the knob but waited, looking at her intently. “Do not mention this to anyone. Let us marry, and get used to our new life together before we bring other people into the equation.”
She thought about her mother, whom she’d barely heard of since the wedding, and she shrugged – it would be no hardship not to tell Kat about this. Announcing her pregnancy had been hard enough!
But Sophia?
“My sister’s my best friend,” Bella said quietly. “I can’t imagine getting married without her at my side.”
His face shifted with something approaching tenderness, but it was gone almost instantly. “We will have a big christening,” he said, with a muted strength. “A double celebration. The last thing either of us needs is the pressure of family breathing down our necks while we… adapt to our new situation.”
And though she knew it would hurt Sophia, she also knew, deep down, that there was something infinitely appealing in what he was suggesting. She knew there was an element of rightness in an agreement between two people being made in complete privacy.
Her last wedding had been a circus – as befitted the daughter of an American senator and a man of Xavier’s standing. There’d been hundreds of guests, paparazzi stalking the gates, everything, and she’d hated it. She’d wanted, so badly, to run away – but she couldn’t. She couldn’t desert Xavier in his hour of need.
Her mother and Sophia, they’d both been with her then, when she’d agreed to spend the rest of her life with a man she didn’t love, and who didn’t love her. This wedding would be no different – except they both knew what they were getting.
Steel formed in the backbone of her resolve, and she nodded crisply, businesslike. “Fine,” she said with a lift of her chin. “Let’s marry in secret, but before we do, I’d like us to form a contract.”
“A contract?” He repeated, lifting his brows in something she suspected might have been amusement.
“To protect us both.”
“You mean a prenuptial agreement?”
“Sort of.” She waved a hand in the air. “Not about money – it makes sense that if we split, we’d both walk away with what we have now. I don’t need your wealth and you don’t need mine.”
His expression showed something like grudging respect. Though she was very wealthy, he was more so, and perhaps he’d always expected his marriage would, in some part, revolve around a woman’s desire for his fortune.
“I want to marry you because I think our baby deserves us to try our very best to make a family for him or her. But we don’t know we won’t end up hating each other. We don’t know we won’t be miserable, and I don’t want to spend my life worrying that you’re sleeping with someone else – and that our child will find out.”
Her skin paled without her knowledge, as she remembered her father’s deathbed ramblings, the discovery to twelve-year-old Bella that the marriage she’d always seen as perfect was, in fact, anything but.
“One of the reasons I’ve never considered marrying,” he said with such seriousness in his voice that she held her breath, “is because I respect the institution too deeply. Infidelity is abhorrent to me in every way. You need not fear I will stray from our bed.”
And his assurance filled her with something like gold dust, but still, she pushed: “You say that now, but a lifetime is a long time. I think it would be prudent to draw up an agreement, so that we both know what we’ll do in all eventualities.”
His smile took her breath away. “Fine, and so we shall.” He moved closer, drawing her into his arms. “Not because we will ever need it, asteri mou, but because I know we won’t.”
