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“I told you I would send a driver for you at nine this morning.”
She recoiled. “Oh, really? I didn’t hear that. I was probably still digesting the disgusting threat you’d just made.”
He absorbed her accusation and wasn’t in the least offended nor shamed by it. He had threatened her – but it wasn’t idle. It was a threat he intended to stick to.
“You were trying to run from this?” He asked, the question sounding calm and unconcerned when he had no idea how he’d react if she answered in the affirmative.
“Oh, you would think that,” she glowered. “Trust you to make this all about you.”
“We had an agreement,” he responded. “You chose to ignore it.”
“I chose to take our son to hospital where I’ve spent the night, so I’m sorry if I put a spanner in the works of your revenge plan. You’ll just have to wait an extra day to extract more penance because I am absolutely exhausted right now and if you touch me I’ll either be ill or cry. Do you understand?”
He was very, very still, every single one of her words landing against his broad, muscled chest like a super-powered dart. “What’s happened to him?” He homed in on the one part of the equation he was willing to deal with. “Why did he go to hospital?”
“Because he was sick,” she hissed with obvious exasperation.
“I am asking you for details, not pithy statements of fact which I am clearly able to appreciate for myself.”
She glared at him and then nodded, a terse sign of agreement. “He was sick about ten minutes after you left,” she said, compressing her lips. “I was worried. He’s rarely ill and certainly not like that. He vomited three more times and his fever wouldn’t calm. So I took him to A and E. I didn’t know what else to do,” she said, and something in the region of his heart panged at this admission. And at the loneliness that it conveyed – a loneliness she’d lived with for a very long time. All of these decisions had been hers, all of the responsibility and worry.
Though she’d had a sister and then Apollo, they weren’t the same as another parent. It was Elizabeth alone that had been caring for their child, looking after him, in sickness and in health. The words took on a new meaning then, understanding what a commitment it was to love someone to this degree. And he did love their son, already.
“It took hours before a doctor would see us.”
At this, Xavier puffed his chest, raising himself to his full height. “You will give that child my name from now on,” he said, “and no one will keep you waiting.”
A look crossed her face, and he wondered if she was thinking of the hospital he’d been in after the accident – the luxurious, expensive room he’d awoken to, eventually, had been the last word in comfort. Like a five star hotel, really.
“The hospital had people with much more serious injuries coming through the door,” she said stiffly, but her face was so pale that he felt pain behind the words. Something was upsetting her.
Damn it. He didn’t care. “You prioritized strangers over our son?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, do me a favour and stop trying to see the worst in me for just a damned second. I took him to hospital, I sat with him on my lap all night, and a nurse triaged him. He was in good hands. Mine, the nurse’s and believe me, Xavier, if he’d continued to decline, I would have shouted the place down until someone helped him.”
Her protective instincts slammed into him and he felt the truth in them, understood that she was motivated by a mother bear mentality that was as real as it was impressive.
“What’s wrong with him?” He asked, reluctant to pay her any compliment, to praise her in the slightest.
“He’s got a tummy bug. They gave me a medicine that is supposed to keep his temperature right down, which should help with the vomiting. And he’s to have these special ice-lollies from the pharmacy to help keep him hydrated.” She glared at him. “I was going to drive there once I got home but your angry little man was waiting, shouting at me and pointing at the car and I didn’t want Joshua to be frightened or upset. Damn you, Xavier.”
A muscle jerked in his jaw as he pictured José doing exactly what Elizabeth had described. And under different circumstances, he might even have found it funny to hear all six feet of muscle described as ‘an angry little man’, but he was beyond humour.
“And what would you have done with Joshua while you went to the pharmacy?”
“Taken him with me,” she said wearily. “Like I always do. You have to start thinking like a parent, Xavier, if you want to play the part.”
“Play the part?” He intoned angrily. “You think this is something I will need to pretend to do?”
“I think that if you don’t understand that plans get waylaid when you have children then you don’t understand anything at all. I didn’t think about you, or what time your cross, unpleasant driver was coming to collect us because I’m a mum, and all of my mind was focused on our son. That’s how it goes.”
Her words had the power to shame him, so that he had to draw himself up and remember who he was talking to. A woman who’d cared so much for their son, allegedly, that she’d kept him from his own father.
Yet she dared stand there and lecture him? Berate him as though he was the one who was selfish and out of order?
Without dropping his gaze from her pale face, he lifted his phone from his pocket and pressed José’s numbed. He held it under his ear, noting the fragile flesh beneath her eyes that was stained a cloudy grey. He noted the mess of her hair and the fact she was wearing the same clothes he’d removed from her the night before.
He spoke in Spanish, but then paused, pulling the phone away from his ear. “Was there a specific brand of ice-lolly?”
