Page 48 of The Heir Affair

It was close to eight o’clock on a Saturday night. Who on earth could that be?

The cottage was at the end of a cul-de-sac, near the river. Concern cut through her misery. What if it was the local council’s officer, come to tell her they were about to be flooded?

She crossed the narrow living room, still holding her belly, and opened the door.

Shock came first, swiftly followed by the devastating wave of love and longing. But before she could process her conflicting, contradictory emotions, the irate man standing on her doorstep, his expensive coat soaked through, his wet face set in grim lines of fury, shoved open the door and marched into her living room.

‘You coward!’

Xander Caras was so incandescent with rage, he could hardly breathe. But what disturbed him more was the realisation that the fury that he had been stoking for two whole weeks—ever since he’d woken up on Parádeisos to find Poppy gone and while he’d searched like a lunatic to find her—began to fragment into something much more devastating as soon as he stalked into the dilapidated cottage.

That she’d rather live here, in some cold, stormy part of England, in a place that was so small and squalid, instead of on Parádeisos felt like the final insult.

This place’s proportions reminded him of the cramped, unkempt apartment in Athens where he and Theo had spent some of their childhood. The inclement weather outside was not unlike the first January after his father had left, when they had huddled together at night because they could not afford heating. And under the light perfume of flowers and herbs and charred wood in this room, he could detect the smell of damp earth, which was too close to the stench of rotting garbage, which had permeated that apartment whenever it rained.

He could smell the poverty here that he had worked to escape, and which she had chosen over him.

‘Xander, what are you doing here?’ she asked, her face flushed, her eyes wide with shock, even as she held her belly over the thick sweater she wore. As if she were protecting their baby, from him!

The rage rose into his throat, thankfully covering the well of hurt. And the desperate longing for her he hadneverbeen able to control. Not for the five months after he’d lost her the first time… And certainly not now.

How could she have this hold over him? Still? When she hadtreated him with such contempt? Such callousness?

She hadn’t even given him a return address, in that insane letter she’d sent him, full of platitudes and sentimental nonsense. Did she really believe that would excuse her behaviour? Or make her treatment of him, of their baby, any less appalling?

‘You had no right to run away from me.’ His voice rose to a shout as the emotions he had tried so hard to keep under lock and key exploded in a fury of fear, of loss. ‘You had no right to leave me. I wanted you. I needed you…’

His voice broke on the words, the bottomless pit in his stomach twisting into a great gaping chasm of rage and pain. He gripped the back of the sofa, aware that his knees were shaking. The humiliation of that, though, was no worse than the emotional overload of seeing her again. And the battle he was waging to separate the man he was now from the boy he had been then. The boy whose own father hadn’t wanted him.

‘Xander, sit down, you look tired…’ Her words came from far away, through the fog of memory and the scalding pain of all the tears he had never shed for that boy.

But then she placed her hand on his cheek and his head rose to see the regret in her eyes. And the compassion.

Tears ran down her cheeks, and instead of the indifference he had expected, she looked as devastated as he felt.

‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,’ she said, her voice breaking too as she held both his cheeks now, stroking, soothing, her palms shaking. ‘I was so scared, and you’re right—I was a coward.’

He nodded, his own eyes stinging, as everything inside him gathered and spun. The emotions were so raw, so vibrant. And so painful. But also somehow safer, now he had found her again.

He lifted his hands from the sofa to wrap his arms around her, to hold her.

‘Don’t ever leave me again. I can’t bear it…’ he managed.

He sank his face into her hair, to gather her warmth into his heart, and inhale her intoxicating scent—flowers and sultry musk—to banish the smell of his nightmares.

Gradually as they stood there together, in the cluttered room, his thundering heart began to slow for the first time in two weeks. Until the heat from the fire seeped through his wet coat, and wrapped around his chest, to sink into her heart. And he could drag himself back from the precipice he had been standing on the edge of ever since she’d left him.

He caressed her shoulders, her back, feeling the bumps of her spine, the curve of her bottom. Imagining her under him. Arousal flared, as it always did, but when he groaned, and pulled her closer, she shifted, and flattened her palms against his chest.

‘No, Xander,’ she said, her voice trembling with emotion, but firm. ‘We have to talk first. I can’t come back to you, not like this…’

His mind screamed as he jerked back.

‘What?’ he demanded, the raw fear returning. ‘Why not? If I forgive you? We can rearrange the wedding.’

She’d left him, but why did that matter now, when he had found her again, and she’d apologised? She loved him, she’d said so herself. He didn’t know why she’d run, but right now he didn’t care. All he wanted was to have her back.

‘I can’t marry you, Xander,’ she said, the determination in her eyes only terrifying him more.