‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t want to tell her we’re moving in together, getting married, a happily ever after. It’s still really early days yet. I want to be sure that what we have is real before you propose and whisk us down the aisle.’
‘Well what do we tell her? You’ll be here some of the time, sleeping in my room some nights too. We need to explain that.’
‘We’ll just tell her we’re friends, for now. I don’t think we need to go into details. And I feel like we need to go slowly with this so we don’t just launch a full-blown relationship on her.’
‘I don’t want to lie to her.’
‘We won’t be lying. We don’t know what this is yet. Twenty-four hours ago, you were still insisting that you didn’t want anything more to do with me. And now we’re having a baby together, we’re kissing, making love. I just think we need to be sure ourselves before we explain our relationship to her. We don’t want to have to explain to her in a few weeks why we’re no longer together.’
Xander scowled and she could see he didn’t like this, or the thought of them ending in a few weeks, but she had no idea how long this new leaf of his would beturned before turning back or even growing brown and crispy. She smirked at the stupid metaphor.
‘OK,’ he said.
‘Don’t be sad. I want this to work as much as you do, but we don’t have a great past history to build on, we really are starting from the beginning here. We haven’t even been on a date.’
He nodded. ‘You’re right. I’m going to pull out all the stops tonight.’
‘You don’t need to pull out all the stops, just be yourself.’ Immy looked at her watch. ‘OK, I need to grab a shower, and then maybe we can do a few more hours in the shop before it closes.’
He climbed out of bed. ‘I better give you a hand.’
She laughed. ‘In the shower?’
‘You’re growing a baby, that’s hard work. I want to be supportive.’
‘Well, I can definitely get on board with that kind of support.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Xander was making Immy soft boiled eggs as she got dressed in his room. He had to make the most of being with her now as there definitely wouldn’t be any more incredible shower sex once Etta came home the next day.
Just then the doorbell rang, quite insistently.
He went to the intercom and saw that it was two of his brothers, Logan and Archer. Logan didn’t look happy, but then he never did. He was the oldest of the six of them and took that responsibility very seriously.
Xander cursed under his breath. He really didn’t want them here when Immy was here. But as the bell rang again, he knew he didn’t really have a choice. Logan even had his own key, which he hadn’t had call to use so far, but Xander wouldn’t put it past him to just come up.
He pressed the button to let them up and heard themstomp up the stairs. A few seconds later, they arrived in his lounge.
Logan cast an eye over him. ‘You’re alive then?’
‘Why wouldn’t I be alive?’
‘Maybe try answering your bloody phone,’ Archer said. ‘We were worried you were OK.’
Xander grabbed his phone which he hadn’t looked at since the night before, to see he had fourteen missed calls from all of his brothers. Although most notably, nothing from his parents.
‘Why wouldn’t I be OK?’
‘We heard you ran into a burning building to rescue a dog,’ Archer said.
‘Ah.’ Xander went back to the kitchen to remove the toast from under the grill from fear of starting his own fire.
‘Is that true?’ Logan said, following him. Archer helped himself to an apple from the fruit bowl and then followed them into the kitchen too, biting into the apple and crunching it in the most irritating way.
‘Umm, not technically. The building wasn’t exactly on fire, just the shop downstairs, and I went upstairs which wasn’t on fire. And I wasn’t there to save a dog, although I did carry him out of the building and take him to the vet afterwards.’
