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He placed the rucksack he’d brought down onto the table and a plume of dust rose in response.
“This is where we’re honeymooning?” His bride asked, her wedding dress so absolutely immaculate and elegant in the midst of this run-down, ancient stone building on the edge of the world. She looked completely wrong here, and he didn’t want that to be the case.
He nodded slowly, looking around, seeing it through her eyes and wincing. A little preparation would have been wise, but bringing her here had been a last minute decision.
“After the accident,” he said gruffly, “and after my divorce, I spent a lot of time here. It was the only place I found I could clear my head.”
She didn’t speak and yet he wanted to hear her voice. He needed to hear her voice, and hear her answers.
“There’s no cell reception,” he continued, opening the rucksack and pulling out a bottle of water. He handed it to her, and used the opportunity to force her to meet his gaze. “I liked the solitude.”
“Would you like me to leave?” She offered, a single brow arching. Challenging him. Just as she had when she’d slid his wedding ring onto his finger.
“Do you know how to pilot a chopper?” He couldn’t resist teasing.
“I know how to walk,” she responded with defiance, and he was so glad for it. Glad for her defiance because it was an alternative to the trembling, sad woman who’d married him only hours earlier.
“Don’t walk,” he said gruffly, and the words were meaningful. He didn’t refer only to that moment, to wanting her to stay in the cottage with him. There was a broader implication, a more wide-reaching question.
She was hurting – they’d both been hurt. He needed to do something to fix it, somehow.
And he asked a question to which he feared the answer, because he needed to know the truth unequivocally. “Why did you marry me today, Elizabeth?”
She blinked at him, and then looked away, her features so fragile and etched in stress. A large window had been cut in the stone, and a glass panel sat in it, but it was grimy – the result of sea wind and salt air. “For Joshua,” she said, eventually, heavily.
His gut churned. His heart throbbed. His jaw ticked. “I see.” All his fears had been confirmed. Was he surprised?
“He deserves to have a father.”
Xavier’s eyes narrowed. “I’m his father whether we’re married or not.”
She jerked her head to his, her gaze firing. “Yes. The father who threatened to take him away from me for at least three years.”
There was nothing he could say to excuse that, no defense he could offer, but those words felt like something he’d spoken in another life. He couldn’t imagine saying them now.
“I couldn’t live with that,” she said simply, oblivious to the tsunami of feelings she had spurred into motion. She wrapped her arms around her shoulders. “I’d do anything to keep him.”
“Even marrying me,” he surmised grimly. He turned away, seeing her as she’d been in the church. The look of stoicism carved onto her beleaguered features.
Her voice shook with the strength of her emotions when she spoke. “Of course.”
He strode towards the window, his hands braced on his hips. His back heaved with the movement of his breathing. “And the toll of this marriage to you?” He spoke the words with a contempt that iced her heart.
“I want what’s best for Josh,” she said simply. “There’s no greater toll to me than losing my son.”
Neither spoke and the room seemed to throb with a caustic sense of mistrust and hurt.
He dipped his head forward, sucking in a breath of the ancient, musty air, and telling himself he had to be the man she deserved – even when he didn’t want to be. “This marriage…was a mistake.”
He heard her stagger backwards, and swore from deep within his soul.
“But… you… insisted on it.”
He turned to face her, and felt like the worst kind of bastard. Her expression was a mask of desperate agony.
“I was wrong.”
“You don’t want to be married to me?”
