“Problem?” Raf had swum to the same edge of the pool and was resting his arms along the coping in a gesture she just knew to be assumed nonchalance.
“It’s…Aaron,” she said, not meeting his eyes, so missing the way they narrowed, a hint of darkness crossing his features.
“Your ex-fiance?”
She nodded once.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?”
She bit into her lip and shook her head. “I—can call him later,” she said, flicking her phone to silent and placing it screen-side down on the bed. “I have no idea what he wants to talk about, anyway.”
She moved back to the pool and slid into the water, but the easy, relaxed feeling had evaporated completely. A tension was stretching inside of her, and she could feel it emanating from Raf, as well.
Not only hadhe not heard Elodie swear, he genuinely couldn’t imagine her cursing. But when she stalked into the dining room later that night, her expression was mutinous and a dark word flew from her lips. “You’re not going to believe this.”
He arched a brow, amused despite her obvious storm cloud mood. “Problem?”
“My mother ran into Aaron at the shops, this afternoon. She was apparently so sideswiped by our news that she blurted it out to him.”
“Your ex-fiance,” he repeated, with an appearance of calm he didn’t feel.
“Can you believe it?”
“I don’t know your mother,” he said. “I can’t say if that’s out of character or not.”
That stopped her in her tracks. “She’s not a gossip,” Elodie muttered. “She was probably genuinely shocked. Still…to have told Aaron, not to have given me a chance to do that myself…”
Raf ignored the complexity of emotions he felt at that. In fact, it was further evidence of Elodie’s goodness and considerate temperament. As soon as she said it, Raf realized that he should show Marcia the same courtesy of a heads up, before it became publicly known.
“I just wasn’t ready for him to know yet,” she added. But the concern on her face was pulling at something inside of Raf that he hated. An emotion he wasn’t sure he’d ever experienced before.
He wasjealous.
Jealous of the man she’d been supposed to marry.
Jealous of the man shewouldhave been married to now, if Aaron hadn’t cancelled the engagement. And then, he and Elodie would never have met, slept together, conceived a child.
Even though this hadn’t been planned, it was anathema to him to imagine that reality.
Why wouldn’t she have wanted her ex to know? There was no answer to that question that didn’t make the darkness of his mood worse. No answer that he was okay with.
If she was over the guy, and genuinely didn’t care about him, then she would have had no issue with him learning about the baby. A courtesy phone call, because of their relationship, would have been the easiest thing in the world to make.
She dropped her head into her hands then, and he realized for the first time that she was upset. Hurting. His own feelingshad clouded his perception, but now, he moved to her, his gut twisting when she sobbed.
“How is this my life?” she asked imploringly, looking up at Raf with a frown on her face, like she barely recognized him.
“What do you need?” he asked, thinking he would do whatever she asked.
“I think—I just need to be alone a while.” She glanced behind him, to where the table had been set for dinner. “Do you mind…”
Her voice was so small that a new kind of anger split through him. “Of course not.” His voice was calm. “But Elodie? I’m here if you want to talk.”
Only,she didn’t want to talk. She wanted to run away. To bury her head in the sand and pretend none of this was happening.
That should be us, Ellie. Our baby. We always talked about that.
The nerve of Aaron, to act as if any of this was her fault, her choosing.
