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“I’ll be up all night.”
“That did occur to me,” he drawled, the cynical edge to the words sparking in her blood stream. Her eyes jerked to his and then away again as the power of his suggestive thoughts overtook every thread of her sanity.
“Are you hungry, darling?” She turned away from Xavier, keeping Josh on her hip, glad to have his familiar, sweet shape to hold tight. Glad to have him right there. It was weak and silly to depend on a small boy for security, and yet she did.
He was her anchor and her rock.
“Yep.”
“Traitor,” Xavier laughed, surprising Ellie by moving alongside them. And his smile was so genuine and so fulsome that it rocked her to the core. He was beautiful. Beautiful with his scarred face and enigmatic expression. Different to how he’d been when they’d first met, but no less stunning.
He caught her looking and she turned away quickly, focusing on the door. She slid through it, keeping Josh close.
“Is there a kitchen in this place?”
His voice was droll. “Two.”
She rolled her eyes. “Why am I not surprised?”
“One is down here, the other is on the rooftop. For entertaining.”
Such a rarefied existence. He had every drop of glamour and prestige at his fingertips. It was a world she’d never had any desire to enter. While her high school girlfriends had all styled themselves to within an inch of their lives, trying to look like extras from The Kardashian family, Ellie had been content to float along without an Instagram account and a backlog of selfies. She’d never aspired to money, prestige, position, power.
Yet here she was, in the lap of the luxury and promised to marry an insanely wealthy tycoon.
“I just need to fix him some pasta.”
He nodded. “It’s time for you to meet the staff.”
Staff? She stopped walking, her face tight with alarm. “What staff?”
“Relax. It’s just the housekeeper and a few casuals.” He said it so blithely, as though this wasn’t all incredibly unusual and confronting for Ellie.
“Housekeeper?” Ellie repeated, lifting her gaze to his face, trying to keep a neutral tone in her words. “Does she live here, then?”
His smile showed he understood the direction of her thoughts – that he knew she was clutching at any straw that might mean they would be alone together less frequently. “No. Janice works normal office hours – later if I’m entertaining and she’s required to oversee a dinner party or similar.”
Ellie’s stomach swirled. Dinner party? Was she expected to do this hosting now? The thought of standing side by side with Xavier Salbatore as his friends and business acquaintances came to this incredibly grand home filled her with utter dread.
“Do you… entertain often?” She asked, darting the tip of her tongue out and tracing her lower lip. Enormous brown eyes lifted to his face and heat flushed her cheeks when she realized his eyes were trained on her lips.
“Not since the accident,” he said.
Curious. She switched Joshua to her other hip and stroked his hair absent-mindedly. Beautiful soft, springy curls that tickled her nose when he crept into bed in the middle of the night and found his way to the crook of her arm.
“Have many things changed since the accident?”
He was instantly closed-off, his face shuttering as though a cord had been pulled and the blinds dropped down.
At the wide doors that led to the kitchen, he turned to face her. He was choosing his words with care, at least, she thought he was. But then he shook his head and locked himself away from her once more.
“Janice?” He called, no longer speaking to Ellie. “There’s someone here I’d like you to meet.”
Janice, when she appeared, was an elegant woman in perhaps her fifties, with a slick blonde bun at the nape of her neck, wearing demure cosmetics and a black pant suit. She wasn’t like the Mrs Doubtfire character Ellie had been imagining, yet she liked her immediately. Particularly when the housekeeper smiled kindly at Joshua and reached for his cheeks, pinching them so that he smiled coyly.
“You look much better, Master Salbatore,” the woman said, so Ellie’s eyes jerked to Xavier’s with impatience. Her son was no a Salbatore – yet.
But one look at the mask of stone on his face silenced her. For now.
