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“I appreciate you were trying to make this easier for me, but you should have asked. I don’t want strangers handling my move. So cancel them, and I’ll go and do it myself.”
“You will be busy today,” he demurred with frustrating firmness.
“Busy? Why?”
She turned to face him, and wished she hadn’t. He’d obviously had a quick shower while she’d been tending to Josh and his hair was wet, and though he’d dressed in jeans and a black shirt, he looked so devastatingly handsome that all she wanted to do was strip him naked again. Awareness made her cheeks glow pink.
“Organising the wedding,” he drawled slowly.
“What wedding?” She demanded, panicked.
He looked at her as though she were a half-wit. “Ours? Remember?”
“Oh,” she shook her head. “We’re not … I-I thought we’d simply get married. In a registry office. And be done with it.”
His eyes flashed with hers and he stood, unfurling his great frame so that every bone in her body resonated with awareness. He closed the distance between them, and stood so close that, though they weren’t touching, she could feel his breath fanning against her temples. “It will be a small wedding,” he conceded, “but it will be a wedding. With you in a white dress and me in a tuxedo, and our friends and family watching, believing us to be deeply in love. You will carry flowers, and there might even be a dove or two flying overhead. And Joshua will be a page boy and there will be photos. A great many photos. So that when he is older, he will see for himself that his parents loved each other, and loved him.”
Her skin prickled with the image he was painting, an image of a wedding she would have loved to plan – had there been any truth to the sentiment behind it.
He closed the last, final gap between them, his body pressing to hers now, his eyes mocking when they held hers. “Speaking of which,” he reached into his pocket without ceremony and then took her hand. “You should wear this.” He slid a ring onto her finger and when she looked down to see it, he moved away, turning his back on her so that he didn’t even see her reaction.
He didn’t care.
He didn’t care that tears moistened her eyes for how perfect the ring was, how right on her finger. How well it fit and how perfect it looked.
And it did look perfect, she conceded, her throat thick with emotion. A band of white diamonds surrounding a single canary yellow diamond, as big as her thumbnail, with diamonds running down either side of the ring.
“It’s beautiful,” she said huskily. And then, with a shake of her head. “It’s too extravagant.
“It had to be.” The words were grim. “If anyone is going to believe this to be a real marriage, I had to give you the kind of ring I would to a wife of my choosing.”
He ignored the rush of regret that shrouded him. He ignored everything except his goal. That child, their son, would be his, and to hell with anything else.
But was hurting Elizabeth essential to that? His subconscious prompted, and Xavier winced, because that was a fair point. He didn’t need to wound her the way he was, and yet he found it impossible to stop.
He’d been so angry to discover Joshua, he’d barely stopped to think. He’d lost so much in the accident. It had taken him several long, painful months to regain anything near his usual range of motion, and even now he experienced flashes of pain in his body from time to time. His mind would never be the same. His brain was tired, his memories were bare, like a tree in the brink of autumn, leaves loosening, becoming lost forever.
Yes, he’d lost a lot, and to discover that he’d also lost the chance to be a father – it had been the final straw. And Elizabeth had been an instrument to that loss, so he’d been punishing her, using her sensual need against her. Because in bed, their bodies didn’t lie, and everything made sense – even just for a moment. In bed, he could hold her in his arms and whisper Spanish spells in her ear, and she welcomed him and he could forget. He could forget what he’d lost and what he was doing to regain some of that.
But it was no way to live – with this harsh sense of acrimony chewing up the air between them.
For the sake of their son, he knew he needed to make an effort to separate his anger from his wants. To forget that she had taken so much from him and focus instead on what she was giving him.
If only intentions could so easily translate into being…
Chapter 10
JOSHUA ADORED XAVIER. And Xavier adored Joshua. She’d watched them throughout the day, the way Xavier gave their son the full force of his attention and Joshua lapped it up. The way Xavier took his time to explain everything to their son.
She wouldn’t have thought it possible to form a bond so quickly, and yet they had, these two males with the same blood in their bodies, the same smiles on their faces and eyes in their heads.
They bonded instantly so that when it came time to prepare Josh for bed, it was Xavier he requested. “You read my book?”
She could see that the question, so sweetly and innocently asked, but indicative of trust and affection, affected Xavier. The way his strong, ruthless face shifted in response to this simple request.
“Yes,” he said with a nod, the word throaty. “I will.”
She stayed downstairs, pretending to read a book of her own. An hour after disappearing together, Xavier appeared. “He’s asking for you.” He didn’t meet her eyes.
