AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I didn’t think I could bear it if I saw the same thoughts running through my mind in those eyes.
Thoughts like,I miss you.
I need you.
I still love you.
Dammit.
“You can take these home with you,” Dr. Kyler said briskly as she handed Xavier the pictures.
Then she smiled warmly at me, as if she could see the new tension in my shoulders, though likely misreading it as a pregnant woman’s natural fear rather than the fact that I was completely and utterly pining for the father of this pending baby, whom I had absolutely no business being with. Not anymore.
“They’ll take care of you up front after you’re dressed,” she said. “We’ll still need to have the radiologist look over the images, but you can schedule that echo as soon as fourteen weeks. I’ll see you then for your next checkup too, and the one after that will be the big scan.” She glanced at Xavier. “I assume you’ll be paying for my services again, Pops?”
Xavier smarted. “Damn right, I will. Only the best for these two.”
Dr. Kyler rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Well, then I’ll be seeing you too. Take care, Frankie.”
And with that, she left us in the tiny blue room together. Still wondering if an entire ocean of hurt lay between us, but sitting very, very close.
NINE
“Ibrought these for you.”
Xavier had barely said five words by the time he’d paid for the ultrasound, left the office, and exited the building onto the relatively quiet street in the Village with me at his side. Which was why I was surprised when he turned to me suddenly as he opened the passenger door of the hired Audi and removed a canvas tote bag.
I took the bag and looked inside, finding a stack of nondescript black notebooks I recognized immediately—the memorandum books used by the dukes and stewards of his family for the last two hundred years or so, which I’d previously discovered on a dusty shelf in the Corbray Hall library.
I looked up with genuine shock. It was the very last thing I expected him to bring me. Most men looking to make amends would bring flowers. Jewelry, maybe. But not books.
Look who knows the bookworm,tittered Kate’s snarky voice in the back of my mind.
I blinked. “Why?”
Xavier gave a shrug. “You were working on something with those. I won’t pretend to understand why you found my family’s boring old journals about rain and blight and mining the slightest bit interesting, but it was important to you. Something about narrative records among the English gentry.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “You remembered the title.”
Another shrug, but his long nose turned slightly pink with something akin to embarrassment or maybe pride. The few times we’d talked about it, Xavier had seemed so distracted by his own affairs that I hadn’t even believed he could hear me, let alone remember what I was doing.
Apparently, I was dead wrong.
I was offered a lopsided smile that made my chest ache with want. “I should remember more. But I’d never forget something you need, you know.” He nodded. “That was your ‘something more,’ right? I wasn’t sure if you’d have the time to continue, but I thought I’d give you the option.”
Another surprise callback to one of our first conversations upon my arrival in Kendal. My desire to be more than just an accessory to his life. The need to have something of my own.
In response, Xavier had offered me yet another library and complete access to any family secret I could find. At the time, I’d thought maybe it was his way of saying “My life is yours to share.”
This felt like the same sort of token.
“I…thank you,” I said honestly. “But Xavi, I can’t take your family’s history. Not now, right?”
“You mean since you’ve brutally rejected me several times over?” he said lightly.
I frowned. I didn’t find it funny.
Xavier just sighed. “Just because you’re not there doesn’t mean you should give up your work. You wouldn’t ask me to stop cooking just because we broke up, would you?”
