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“Six ribs, my sternum, a vertebrae. I’m lucky I wasn’t paralysed.”
A shiver ran down her spine as she imagined this very virile, very active man being unable to walk. “And your back?”
“Burns.”
“God, Xavier,” she shook her head.
“That’s almost exactly the phrase I used,” he said, and there was – for the first time – a hint of something like a smile around his face. Her pulse went into overdrive at this ghost of their past – when smiles and laughter had been second nature.
“You must have hated that. The recovery, I mean.”
“I was grateful to be alive,” he said with an assumed air of non-concern. But it was a lie. Ellie had spent only forty eight hours with this man four years earlier but she knew him inside out. Every flicker of his face, every twist of his lips – she knew him.
“No, you weren’t,” she hazarded, putting her elbow on the table top and resting her chin in the palm of her hand.
His eyes narrowed imperceptibly. “Why do you say that?”
“I can tell,” she said simply. “You hated being injured.”
“Of course. Who wouldn’t?”
“You hated it and wished, sometimes, that you had died…”
His eyes were guarded, his expression carefully blanked of any emotion. “Why didn’t you talk to Bella, at the hospital?”
Ellie’s eyes drifted to the table and he laughed, a harsh, throaty sound.
“You close your eyes or turn away from me whenever I ask you a question you do not wish to answer. Are you so afraid of the truth, Elizabeth?”
She forced herself to raise her attention to his face, and stared at him in defiance of his cynical – yet accurate – observation. “Didn’t you just do the same thing by changing the subject?”
A tilt of his head showed his acknowledgement of her statement. “I never wished I was dead,” he said seriously. “But I hated the state I was in. I had never known despair, not for a day in my life. And then I had it in spades.” He grunted, but she thought he had intended it for a dismissive laugh.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly, shaking her head. It was a platitude that was offered often, but for Ellie, it came from deep within her.
He dipped his head in acknowledgement, or was that dismissal?
“What happened, when you came to the hospital?” He asked, reaching for a serving spoon then passing it to her. She held it in her fingertips without using it.
“I was showed to your room by a nurse. I never knew her name, but she was kind to me. She’d asked if I was family and I obviously wasn’t, but I was…” her eyes lifted to his, and there was so much pain in them that he felt an answering hurt deep inside his chest.
“I was obviously desperate to see you. I was beside myself with worry. They’d played the aerial footage of the crash scene on the news and your car was just completely destroyed. I couldn’t imagine how you’d survived.” She shivered, as though to erase the memory. “Anyway, she showed me to your room, and there was a big window on the outside,” she said, remembering it as clearly as if she’d gone to the hospital that same day.
Everything she’d felt then was still inside of her, heavy and immovable. She couldn’t tell him how she’d sat with him all night, how she’d stared at him and prayed for him, and spoken to him in the hopes that her voice alone would bring him to life. She couldn’t tell him how she’d made deals with God all night, hoping only that he would live. It was too raw. Too painful. “And she was there,” Ellie said, cutting to the end of her time at the hospital.
Xavier’s lips tightened and his expression was one of utter determination. “You weren’t angry with me?”
“Angry?” It was her turn to laugh, a strangled, manic sound. “I felt every emotion under the sun. I was furious at you, of course, but God, what I wouldn’t have done to swap places with you.”
His frown was etched across his face. “It was just one weekend,” he said, prompting her with curiosity. “You truly felt so much for me?”
She jerked in a sharp breath; it didn’t help. It was as though he’d slapped her face. She lifted potatoes and chicken onto her plate, simply for something to do with her hands. “I thought I did,” she said stiffly, then smiled weakly. “It was just a foolish girlhood dream.”
He nodded, his expression impossible to interpret.
“I didn’t know you, really. It was all an illusion. You were very, very good at the whole seduction thing.”
He had the decency to look momentarily embarrassed, but he recovered quickly. “I wasn’t your first lover,” he said, his frustration obvious. And she understood what it must mean to a man like Xavier Salbatore, used to being in command of all situations, to have holes in his memory.
