“You’re not having any?” he queried.
She was back sitting on the opposite sofa, but leaning back now, propped by cushions, wine glass cupped in her hands. She took a sip every now and then. Her expression was still veiled. She shook her head.
He glanced at her again. “It won’t make you fat, you know,” he said dryly. “Your figure’s just as knock out as it was seven years ago. Even in those rubbish clothes—”
He saw her expression change. Wished he hadn’t mentioned her figure or her clothes. But it was too late now, so he waded in more. What was there to lose after what had happened this evening?
“Buy some new ones, please, Laurel,” he said. “On me. Use your new credit card. You’re too beautiful not to have beautiful clothes—”
Her expression changed again. “I won’t have you spend your money on me, Xander,” she said. She spoke quietly, but there was no anger in her repudiation. Only calm resolve.
He held up his free hand. “I thought we’d agreed we weren’t going to argue again?” He kept his voice light, eyebrow quirking. It felt strange to be talking to her like that, without any jab of hostility. He hadn’t spoken to her like that since before the moment he’d thrown open her suitcase in his cabin.
“Then we must stick to subjects that aren’t controversial,” she replied, again without any edge to her voice, only that calm composure.
Xander backed off. He wouldn’t risk the cautious, careful rapprochement they seemed to have achieved.
“I daresay we’ll find some,” he answered dryly. He drank some more of his wine, finishing his mac and cheese. Both wine and pasta were having an effect, a good one, distancing him—and her?—from the precipice they’d plunged so disastrously over with their vicious attack on each other, hurling such vitriol.
Had it lanced a festering wound, their raging at each other? He didn’t know, but if it had, maybe that was, as he had said, to the good.
He set aside his empty bowl, sat back, and let his eyes go to her. Her gaze was resting on the play of flames behind the glass of the wood burner. What he had said just now was true. Her beauty was undimmed.
He let himself watch her, his eyes half closed, her face reposed, it seemed to him.
As beautiful as I remembered her.
A sense of regret filled him.
It ended so badly.
But what if it hadn’t?
In the wood burner the logs crackled. The warmth of the room embraced him, created an atmosphere around them. It was very quiet. Laurel had left the door to the hallway slightly ajar, presumably to hear if Dan should call out. It was strange, sitting here like this. With his son upstairs, the mother of his son opposite him.
Like we were a family.
The thought was in his head—disturbing, mocking. For their son’s sake they were now trying not to be at each other’s throats, but that was for Dan, not each other. Whatever had been between them, whatever it was, had ended seven years ago. Ended with the glint of diamonds and rubies in her suitcase. How could it have done otherwise?
A great wash of weariness went through him. He wanted to let it go, that weight he’d carried for seven long years, that he’d had to pick up again as Dan had come into his life. The son he’d never known he had, who had been deliberately hidden from him, thereby compounding, a thousand times over, all the anger and fury he’d felt at Laurel as he’d stared down at Olympia’s bracelet in Laurel’s suitcase.
He took another mouthful of his wine, wanting to let that weariness wash from him. Letting the quietness of the room, the warmth, the crackling of the logs, lap around him, his eyes still resting on Laurel as she went on sipping her wine, looking into the flames.
“Laurel?” He had said her name before he realised he’d said it.
She turned her head to look at him. Her expression was strange. That guarded look in her eyes again. He didn’t want it there. Did not know why he did not, only knew that he didn’t.
“We’ll make this work,” he said. His voice was low, his eyes holding hers. “We’ll make it work, for Dan.” He paused, his eyes not letting hers go. “He needs us both. I won’t…rebuke you any more for keeping him from me, but that time is gone. He has us both now, and we must be, as best we can, the best parents we can be to him.”
He paused again, took one more mouthful of his nearly finished wine.
“You asked, this evening, how much time I would spend with him. It will be as much as I can, but there are, yes, complications. Not Olympia. She’s now gone, and I am glad of that for many reasons, but most of all because of Dan. Laurel, he won’t—” his voice was intent, he wanted, needed, her to understand this “—be my ‘secret son,’ as you called him, but you must accept—” he caught himself, moderated his words “—please accept that I am feeling my way here. I will not promise what I cannot perform, but what that is I don’t yet know.”
He took a breath, said what was difficult to say. It did not come easily to him to say it to the woman who had proved a liar and a thief, who had deliberately, knowingly, kept his son from him, but it needed to be said.
It’s part of the way forward we have to find—
“In the car, outside his school that morning,” he said now, never letting go her eyes, her head turned to his, her expression impossible to read, except that he knew he did not want that guarded look in it, “when I confronted you that I now knew about Dan, you asked for time. I ask for it too. We both need it, Laurel. So…so let’s just give ourselves time—take things…slowly. Find that way forward.”
