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“My brother’s getting married,” I said.
“To the de Vries girl, right?”
I nodded. “October. In Italy.”
“Good for him. She’s a catch. You’ll enjoy Italy too. Especially the food. You’ve family there, right?”
“Some distant cousins, yeah,” I murmured.
He hadn’t, I noticed, saidwe.
“It’s fast, I know,” I continued on, mostly to ignore my own perceived awkwardness. “But they love each other. My brother especially. Matthew loves Nina more than anyone. I’ve never seen him like this before over a girl. So fierce with her. He would do anything for her.”
I waited for Xavier to say something. I didn’t know what. Maybe I wanted him to tell me he understood. That he felt the same about me and Sofia. That he thought about doing the same thing with us, whisking me away to a chapel and making us the real family he knew we should be.
Again, I wondered why I was so eager to march down the aisle. Xavier and I had only been together officially for, what, a few months?
The idea, though, wouldn’t let go.
Maybe it was because things were different when you had a child together. Maybe it was because I’d believed him when he said he wanted to be together for good. Maybe I’d let myself jump too far when he said he wanted to leap together.
Whatever we were doing, though…that wasn’t leaping. I felt like I was falling from a cliff alone.
“They’re moving to Boston,” I told him. “At the end of the month.”
“Oh?” Xavier asked as he fingered the edge of the sheet around my back. “What’s going to happen to his house? Will they sell it?”
I shook my head against him. “I don’t know yet. I don’t know what Sofia and I are going to do. But we have to decide soon.”
He seemed to think about that for a long time. “It’ll be all right, Ces. You’ll figure it out.”
I waited for something more. For him to take the opening. Tell us to stay here, tell me he’d come back to New York with us, tell me something that suggested his investment in our future past the end of August.
“Well, send him my congratulations. Like I said, she’s a catch.”
I sat back up to look at him. “You sound like those people out there talking about you.”
Xavier snorted. “What do you mean?”
“Do you have any idea how many women I heard talking to their daughters about how to ‘land’ you last night? I realize the Season isn’t strictly about matchmaking anymore, but there were an awful lot of mamas there trying to make their daughters a duchess.”
Xavier just started laughing. “Never. And I only meant, good for them both. Your brother seems like a nice bloke, even if he did punch me in the eye.”
“Well, you dishonored his sister,” I pointed out. “He was duty-bound to sock you.”
“What would he do if he knew I was dishonoring his sister on a nightly basis?” Xavier offered his trademark shark grin.
But it didn’t do what he wanted.
“Stop,” I said as he nuzzled into my neck, inhaling deeply.
“Never. Been waiting since last night, and I didn’t even get to peel that dress off you. God, you smell good.”
He was joking. I knew he was joking and relished in his touch as much as he clearly did mine. But the allure of the joke was fading, and I was too shy to say it. Just like I was too shy to ask him all the things I really wanted to ask. Things like, have you thought about honoring me and your daughter instead of dishonoring me all the time? Would you ever want to run away to Italy or France or even Japan, if that’s what you want, to do something crazy like elope?
Would you actually want me to be your wife? And Sofia to be your real daughter, not just the accident everyone thinks she is?
But when I opened my mouth to speak at last, Xavier only captured it with his, delivering his patented kiss that knocked nearly every thought out of my head as he rolled me onto my back.
