“Dad said I could have my Easter egg after breakfast. Can I?” Dan asked.
“Just a little bit,” Laurel answered. “Goodness knows how you’ve room for it after all those sausages! Don’t get a tummy ache in the pool!”
She was glad to wave him off, relieved. Even if she was on the receiving end of a very old-fashioned look indeed from Xander. Knowing exactly, she was burningly aware, why she was shooing them both away. But only when they’d both gone, Dan hurrying off, could she start to feel the tension that had been winding around her like steel wire ease fractionally.
She seized her cup of tea, gulping it down.
She dared not think, dared not remember, dared not anything at all. In her head, like a neon light flashing, mocking, were the wordsJust for this evening.
Oh, dear God, why had she gone along with it? She should never have done so. The unforgiveable folly of it.
Her eyes were bleak.
All I can do is blank it out—now and forever.
Consign it to oblivion.
Xander was biding his time. He had no other choice. Breakfast, swimming with Dan, driving them back to the cottage—all had to be got through. At last Dan was settled in front of the TV, sprawled on the floor, Easter egg beside him, happily watching a children’s Easter special programme.
He waited for Laurel in the kitchen. It was a sunny day, breezy and fresh. Fine for sitting out in. Out of any possible earshot of Dan. He’d made tea for Laurel, coffee for himself. As she came back in he opened the door to the patio.
“Let’s sit outside,” he said.
Immediately her expression changed. “Why?” Her voice was filled with suspicion.
“So we can have the conversation we couldn’t have this morning,” he said. His voice was bland, but there was steel beneath. “Laurel,” he said, “this has to happen.”
Emotions were visible in her face, but he gestured her to go past him, taking their mugs with him as he joined her. She sat down at the ironwork table, stiff as a poker. He sat down opposite her. Took a breath.
“About last night,” he started.
She cut right across him, her voice terse and tight. “I told you. It should never have happened! It was insanity.”
“No,” he said evenly, “it was the opposite of insanity.” Certainty filled him. As strongly as it had when he’d realised the one thing above all: that he wanted was to make Laurel his again. To recapture what had been before Olympia arrived.
But now, after last night, a new certainty was filling him. One that went beyond mere recapturing. He leant forward, folding his hands around his coffee mug.
He let his eyes rest on her. Even back in her rubbish clothes, playing down her beauty as she stubbornly sought to do, he felt desire course through him. Last night had been…incandescent. It had shown him, indelibly, what he was now going to say to her. What was essential to say to her.
“Laurel, last night showed us the way forward, for us both. For us all. You, me and Dan. Don’t you see? We’ve already achieved so much. Dan is taking to my presence in his life, is taking to the new life he can have if you agree to it. He’s happy! And now, after last night, we can move on even further.”
He paused a moment, trying to read her expression, but it was shuttered, her mouth pressed tight, so he took a breath, forged on with what he must say.
“You asked me, a while back, what my plans were when it came to Dan, how much would I be in his life. I said I didn’t know yet, because too much still divided us. But now—” he took another breath “—I do know. And you know too, Laurel! You must! That after last night, what it showed us is the perfect, obvious answer!”
That overwhelming sense of certainty filled him, drove him forward now.
“Last night has shown that we can do the one most important, vital thing for our son.” He paused, never letting his eyes off her, his gaze boring into her. “We can give him a proper, united family. Once,” he said, “we are married.”
Laurel heard him speak, but the words made no sense. She heard herself echo the one that made least sense of all.
“Married?”
Xander’s eyes were fixed on her still.
Eyes that had flashed with harsh accusation and scathing condemnation, accusing her of stealing that bracelet, stealing his son. Eyes that had been hard as iron and cold as ice as he’d thrown her off on the quayside at Piraeus, when he reeled off his demands of her in the car he’d hauled her into outside Dan’s school, denouncing her for keeping Dan from him. Eyes filled with vicious vitriol as they’d raged at each other in earshot of their son.
“Yes,” he was saying now, his eyes never leaving her. “Married.”
