His eyes still on Beth, he nodded. ‘So am I.’
‘You’re a lucky man. Not many women would forgive what you did to her.’
His defensive hackles immediately rose. ‘All I did was end a relationship that wasn’t working for me, nothing that people haven’t been doing since the dawn of humanity.’
‘It was the way you ended it. You forget I was there. I saw her before you got home. It was the happiest and most excited I’d ever seen her, which is a high bar for Beth, and then I heard her pleas and her sobs. We all heard her, and we all saw the state she was in when she left. You broke her, Xavi.’
‘That was a lifetime ago,’ he dismissed. ‘And I didn’t break her. She was upset at the time, I don’t deny that, but she got over it quickly. She understands why I ended it the way I did, and she agrees I was right to do so. Neither of us was ready for what we had then.’
‘Sure about that, are you?’
‘Yes,’ he said, his tone brusque and with a hint of irritation enough to tell his sister he would listen to no more on the subject.
Beth’s musical laughter cut through the tense air that had formed between Xavi and Blanca, and he shrugged off the irritation and strange discomfort his sister’s unwanted probing had set off in him and focused his attention back on the woman about to retake her place as the most important person in his life.
In two days, this fabulously crazy, vivacious woman with a zest for life was finally going to be his wife. Tonight, though…
Tonight he would make her his again, and this time she would be his forever.
Chapter Six
‘YOU LOOKED LIKEyou enjoyed yourself,’ Xavi commented as they drove out of the de la Rosa estate.
‘I had a great time.’ Beth smiled wistfully. ‘It was lovely seeing everyone—I’d forgotten how big your mother’s side of the family is.’ The first time Beth had seen the whole family together, she’d felt incredibly intimidated, a state of affairs that lasted only seconds as everyone had made her so welcome. She’d had no qualms about seeing them all again, and she left with a lovely warmth in her chest, which made a wonderful change from the ice that had been in it since she’d wrenched herself out of that horrible dream.
Her cheeks had received more kisses in one night than the whole of her face had received in eight years.
‘It was a shame your grandfather couldn’t be there,’ she added. She’d managed only a few short words with Ferdinand at the funeral.
‘He will be at the wedding.’
‘Good.’ She tried to sound like she meant it. She liked Ferdinand as much as she liked the rest of Xavi’s family, and it had struck her that evening that they would all be there at the wedding, would all hear them exchange their vows and believe Beth meant hers. Guilt was already trying to scratch at her over this. When she took the Rosbel Group from Xavi, they would all wonder if she’d been playing them, too. She could only hope they all, Mireia, Carlota and Blanca especially, found it in their hearts to forgive her. None of the women cared about the business, not in the way Xavi did, and had no financial stake in it anymore, but she didn’t want to hurt them. If she could stay married to the family without having to stay married to the man, then she’d take it in a heartbeat.
She had to stop thinking like this and keep her focus on her revenge. Her professional life had gone forward in leaps and bounds these past eight years, but her personal life had been stuck in stasis. She’d tried to move on, but it had proved impossible. Xavi had ruined her for every other man. Until she eradicated him from her life once and for all, she would never have the family she had once so craved. She wouldn’t be capable.
They would already have a family if he hadn’t put his precious business above his feelings for her. There was no way of knowing if their child would have survived if they’d stayed together, but Xavi would have been there for her through the loss, and they would surely have tried again.
Knowing from the tightening in her stomach and chest that she was on the cusp of falling into melancholy, she breached the deliberate distance he’d once again created between them and leaned into him. For her revenge to have maximum impact, she needed to keep focused.
‘Are you nervous for Saturday?’ she asked softly, resting her hand on his lap.
In the old days, he would have covered her hand and slid it up to his groin. This time, he covered it and squeezed. ‘I don’t do nerves,mi vida.’
And neither would she. Nor guilt.
Twisting her bottom, she draped her leg over his lap and tugged her hand out of his hold to press it to his chest.
He gripped the thigh lying on him, but made no effort to slide his hand up the skirt of her dress.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked with husky bemusement when she undid a shirt button and slipped her hand through the gap to place her palm on his naked skin. Her heart trembled at the familiar warmth of his smooth skin and the softness of the hair covering it, and then trembled more violently to feel the strength of his heart beating beneath it.
In their old life, Beth had spent hours with her head on his chest while he slept, listening to the rhythmic beat that kept him alive while he was unconscious. Death was something Beth had always had a strong respect for, a respect that verged on fear. As a child, she’d often woken in the night and slipped into her father and grandparents’ bedrooms to check they were all still breathing. With her family, that check had been enough for her to go back to sleep. With Xavi, she’d woken regularly through the night, that switch in her brain pinging her awake just to check he hadn’t slipped beyond the veil.
Every morning, without fail, she messaged her father and grandmother with two words: Good morning. She never felt settled in her skin until she heard back from them, and now, with the weight of Xavi’s heart thumping so strongly against the palm of her hand, she wondered for the first time if she’d become such a prolific social media poster because the likes and comments Xavi gave them were the proof her subconscious needed that his heart was still beating.
So frightening was this thought that instead of answering with something flirty and seductive as she’d intended, her whispered, ‘I just need to touch you,’ came from her trembling heart.
His grip on her thigh tightened.
