Chapter Eight
“DO YOU LIKE IT?”
Laurel’s head whipped round. Xander was standing in an open doorway at the side of the room. A linking door. He strolled in, nodding to what had caught her eye the moment she and Dan had walked in.
It was a dress hanging on the outside of the wardrobe. An evening dress. A beautiful vermilion silk evening dress.
Dan went running up to it. “Do you like it, Mum? Do you?” There was eagerness in his voice and glee. “I chose it! Dad showed me the pictures on his tablet and asked me which one you would like, and I said this one because it’s red, so he bought it!”
Dismay was coursing through Laurel. Dismay and a whole lot more.
“It’s your surprise Easter present!” Dan was still exclaiming gleefully, his face alight.
“Dad and me planned it all! You’re going to wear it tonight, and you’re going to look like a princess in a fairy story!
You can be Cinderella,” he went on happily, “but not with glass slippers because we got you red ones to go with your dress.”
Dan scooped up a cardboard shoebox on the floor by the wardrobe, and Laurel, still in shock, saw the very expensive fashion name on it. He put it on the bed and opened it.
“See?” he said. He held up a pair of elegant evening heels, in matching vermilion, then dropped them back on the bed.
“You’ve got to have a shower now, Mum,” he instructed, “and wash your hair. Dad’s got you some make-up too, because he said that since tonight is a surprise you wouldn’t have your own with you.
I’m going to have my bath in Dad’s bathroom, and he’s bought me new jim-jams, and then he’ll get ready for your posh dinner too, and I can watch TV in his room while he does, and then the babysitter will be here, and I’ll come back in here and go to bed, and you and Dad go off to your posh dinner!
It’s all sorted, Mum! Me and Dad sorted it! ”
He ran across to Xander. “Go on, Mum!” he instructed her, turning back. “You have your shower, and I’ll have my bath! See you!”
He grabbed his father’s hand and started tugging him back through the communicating door.
Laurel stood motionless.
Xander looked at her. “See you,” he echoed softly. Far too softly. Mockery open in his voice. Knowing exactly just how royally she’d been stitched up. By a master tactician.
Laurel walked over to the dress. Emotion rose in her, but just what it was, she had no idea. Except that it was filling her totally…
Xander’s mood was buoyant. Almost as buoyant as Dan’s.
Finally, he was getting his own way with Laurel.
Getting her out of those damn rags she insisted on wearing.
And to ensure the success of his cunning plan, he’d got the absolutely essential help of his son.
Dan was as cock-a-hoop as he himself was.
He had his bath—lavishly filled with bubbles from the complimentary toiletries provided—in record time, and was in his pyjamas and snuggled up on Xander’s bed, while Xander sorted out a children’s TV channel for him, then left him to it, together with a bottle of fruit juice from the room bar to get his own ablutions done.
Knowing how long it took women to glitz themselves up he took a leisurely shower and shave, then emerged from the en suite in the courtesy towelling robe to share in the ending of the adventure film with Dan.
“Can we go and see Mum yet?” Dan asked hopefully, as the film ended.
Xander cast his son a worldly-wise look. “Ladies don’t like being hustled, Dan, when they’re getting themselves ready. Boyfriends are strictly banned till they’ve done their hair and face. It takes them forever,” he added, from long experience.
Dan nodded in an equally worldly-wise fashion. Then he looked at Xander quizzically.
“Are you Mum’s boyfriend?” he asked. “Because you’re my dad?”
Xander froze. Talk about out of the mouths of babes and innocents…
He picked his words carefully now.
“I was when your mum and I were in Greece,” he said, keeping his voice nonchalant. The word boyfriend didn’t really cover what had been the state of things in Greece, but he knew it was the only one that would make any kind of sense to Dan at his age.
Dan was still looking at him. Expecting more. Xander went on, even more carefully.
“Then she came back here, to England.”
Dan’s eyes, dark like his own, stayed on him.
“Were you in lurve?” He said “lurve” exaggeratedly, as if he’d heard it in a film, which he probably had.
Xander stilled even more. Babes and innocents…more forensic than a cross-examining barrister.
“It was,” he said, “a holiday romance.”
Because what else was it?
His own question hung there. He’d never had to answer it because of that ruby-and-diamond bracelet.
Condemning Laurel.
And yet now—
He got to his feet. How could he be planning the evening ahead with a woman he thought a thief? How could he just set that aside, ignore it? When it came to Dan, to sharing parenthood with her, he had no choice but to set it aside.
But for what I want now?
He didn’t want to answer it. Didn’t even want to ask it. Didn’t want to think about it. Not now. Not here.
He looked down at Dan, who was still looking up at him with his dark eyes, so like his own.
“I’d better get dressed, Dan,” he told him. “The babysitter will be here soon.”
He fetched his tuxedo out of the wardrobe. He always travelled with one. The last time he’d worn it in England had been to take Fabia out for the evening. It seemed a million years ago. Another lifetime.
Dan watched with interest as Xander busied himself with his dress tie, always a tricky business. “It takes practice,” he told his son.
Dan nodded wisely. Then a question was in his face. But it had nothing to do with dress ties. “So, are you going to be Mum’s boyfriend again?”
Xander stilled again. Heard the continuing cross-examination of a barrister putting him to the question again.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly.
Tonight is as far as I can think.
Flying blind—
The buzz of the house phone on the bedside table came to his rescue. He snatched it up.
After he hung up a moment later, he announced, “That’s the babysitter on the way up.” He nodded at Dan. “We’d better go and see how your mother is doing.”
Dan sprang up eagerly and ran to the communicating door, not bothering with a knock, but opening it and running through.
Xander followed more slowly.
His son’s innocently spoken words rang in his head.
Are you going to be Mum’s boyfriend again?
He’d given the only possible answer.
But as he stepped through the doorway in Laurel’s bedroom, and his eyes went to her, he knew, with a searing through his body like a hot brand, that tonight was going to be exactly what he wanted.
Starting right now.
Laurel jerked around at the sound of the communicating door opening. She was standing in front of the full-length mirror inset into the door of the mahogany wardrobe on which the silk vermilion evening gown had been hanging. Which she was now wearing.
Dan was running into the room, then he stopped dead. A gasp broke from him. His face alight. “You’re a princess!” he exclaim rapturously. He turned his head back, calling out. “Dad, Dad! Come and see! It worked! Mum’s a princess!”
Laurel’s eyes went past Dan to the tall figure walking slowly into the room. She felt her breath catch. Memory burned instantly. Overpoweringly.
It had been seven years since she’d seen Xander in a tuxedo. She remembered it vividly. It had been that awkward, difficult dinner on board his yacht with Olympia playing gooseberry, but doing her damnedest to make Laurel feel she was the gooseberry.
Overstaying my time—the final-fling floozy who should clear off now.
Conversation had been stilted, and Laurel had known that she was trying too hard, emphasising her newly acquired history degree, deliberately asking erudite questions about Greek history to show she wasn’t the bimbo Olympia clearly wanted to think her.
Xander, it had been obvious, was in a bad mood, and had been since Olympia had been dumped on them, but his moodiness had only, Laurel vividly recalled, made him even more darkly attractive.
He always looked a knock-out whatever he was wearing—or not wearing, because stripped down he was breath-stopping—but in his tux he was at peak Xander.
She blinked now. That Xander was right here, again, in front of her.
Whatever it was about a tuxedo, from the superb tailoring to the set of the sable shoulders to the old-world pizazz of the wing collar to the perfection of the bow-tie and the discrete but oh-so-classy gold studs at his cuffs and on his shirt front, whatever it was, whatever it did, took her breath away.
Dan had stopped gawping at her open-mouthed and thrilled, and had run up to her. “Oh, Mum, you look beautiful,” he said, his little face upturned to her with open delight and wonder.
Her heart melted. Oh, she’d been royally stitched up, and Xander had used Dan shamelessly to achieve his ends, but in the instant of hearing Dan say what he had all her spleen vanished.
She had nursed it all the way through the lengthy process of showering, washing her hair, then glamming herself up as Dan so gleefully wanted her to do, to style her hair and adorn her face with the conveniently provided make-up, to slip that fabulous silk vermilion evening gown over her head and feel it slither over the wispy bra and panties that had been discreetly included in a separate up-market carrier bag, and then ease her feet into the elegant satin shoes.
Nursed it with a set expression on her face as she’d gazed at her own finished reflection, bearing undeniable witness to what Dan had just said.
But I’ve done it for Dan, for my adored son! So I wouldn’t disappoint him.