Chapter Ten
LIGHT STIRRED LAUREL AWAKE. Or something did. Then, dimly, she realised it was not just the daylight filling the room that had awoken her. It was a sleepy, questioning voice, from beyond the connecting door, still slightly ajar.
“Mum?”
She straightened instantly, shock and dismay seizing her. In a few heart-pounding seconds, she had leapt from the bed, panic taking over.
Oh, dear God, he mustn’t find me here.
She snatched up the towelling robe provided in the en suite and pulled it on, hurrying through the doorway.
But to her abject relief, Dan seemed to have gone back to sleep again.
She went quietly up to him, small in the double bed, looking down at his dark hair just showing.
A wave of love went through her, but more than that.
Confusion, dismay intensifying and one dominant, overwhelming emotion.
An emotion she knew the name of—knew it bitterly in the clear, brutal, pitiless light of day.
Regret was far, far too weak a word for it.
Insanity was the only one that fit. Total, unbelievable insanity.
“Laurel?”
The voice from the communicating doorway made her whip round. Xander was standing there wearing nothing but a towel snaked around his hips. She surged towards him, panic uppermost again, pushing him back.
“Don’t wake him!” she hissed urgently.
He stepped back, and she rushed past him, desperately looking about for where her own discarded clothes were. The splash of vermilion over the back of a chair made her target it immediately, scrabbling around for her underclothes dropped on the carpet.
In my rush to get naked.
She grabbed her clothes and pressed them against her.
“I’ve got to get out of here!” Panic was in her voice.
In Xander’s amusement, as he said, “Dan’s fast asleep. Leave him be.” His expression changed, she saw it happen. Heard the husk in his voice as he spoke again. “Come back to bed.”
Clutching her evening gown and underwear like a shield, she lurched away again.
“Xander, no! What happened last night was impossible!”
His mouth, his beautiful mouth, which had kissed her body all over so devastatingly, quirked.
“What happened last night, Laurel, was unforgettable,” he said.
“But we must forget it!” The cry, the plea, came from deep within. A desperate place.
The amusement left his face. “That is what is impossible! Forgetting it.” He stepped towards her again.
“Laurel, there is no need for this panic! Last night has been waiting to happen ever since I came back into your life! I told you, the flame that burned so fiercely seven years ago is still alight. Last night proved it. How could it not?” Something changed in his face, something she had never seen before.
“But now, Laurel, there is more. More than what there was then. Shall I spell it out to you?”
He held out a hand to her. “Listen, Laurel, to what I have to say.”
She lurched back again. “No! I can’t hear it—won’t hear it! Last night should never have happened!”
She took a ragged breath that she had to force into her lungs, made herself look straight at him. He was standing there, almost naked, his superb body illuminated in the morning sun, every muscle, every sinew, every honed contour. The body she had once known so intimately and now knew again.
A wave of desire washed through her, weakening her limbs, setting that disastrous fatal flame running through her again. Looking him in the face was no better. His darkening expression sculpting the planes of his face, narrowing his lidded eyes.
“Laurel, listen to me.”
But she would not. Could not. Dared not. Could only plunge away from him, heart still pounding frantically, towards the communicating door, getting through it.
Locking it against him.
Against the disaster she had let happen, falling into Xander’s arms. His bed.
Xander watched her go, frustration filling him. His eyes went to the bed, the tangled bedclothes. Memory flooded. Last night had been unforgettable indeed.
But more indeed, than just the past returning.
He felt emotion move within him, inchoate, powerful. Urging him to drag Laurel back.
But now was not the time. Dan would wake soon, and his day would begin. With an indrawn breath he headed to the en suite. His mouth twisted again. Maybe a cold shower would be good.
As he emerged again, freshly shaved, he started to get himself dressed, heard the communicating door open and glanced round. It was Dan.
Xander’s expression warmed. “Hi there,” he said.
“Happy Easter!” Dan beamed. He advanced into the room. “I’ve got an Easter egg for you, but it’s at home, as I couldn’t tell Mum we’d be spending the night here after the Easter Jamboree.” He looked expectantly at Xander.
Xander laughed, mood lifting. How could it not? He ruffled Dan’s hair. Gave him the answer he was obviously hoping for.
“Yes, I’ve got yours here but you can’t have it till after breakfast, okay, or it will spoil your appetite!”
“Okay,” said Dan. “Is it time for breakfast now?” he asked.
“Why not?” Xander replied. “If your mum is ready?”
“She’s having a bath. A very long one. It’s full of bubbles. She said you and me should go down first.”
“Did she now?” Xander’s voice was dry.
He glanced at the time. “Okay, go back and tell her we’re heading down, but give her only fifteen minutes max to join us!”
Dan nodded, and ran back through, and Xander heard him repeating his message to Laurel. He was back a moment later, taking Xander’s hand in his. “Let’s go,” he said enthusiastically. “I’m starving!”
Hand in hand with his son, Xander headed off. His thoughts were full but very clear. Clearer than they had been since he had discovered his son’s existence.
Now all that was necessary was to make them clear to Laurel as well. Resolution filled him, because this time she would hear him out. So very much depended on it.
Somehow, Laurel got through breakfast. Dan and Xander were already halfway through when she joined them.
She was back in her shabby clothes from the previous day, hair knotted, face free of make-up, and somehow it served as armour for her.
Yet even so, Xander’s eyes swept over her, making her heart pound.
She focussed all her attention on Dan, who was well stuck into sausages, hash browns, and an excessive amount of ketchup.
“Dad says you loved last night!” he said to her.
“He says you were the most beautiful lady there! He says you both ate yummy food and drank champagne, all fizzy, and there was music and songs and a band, and then you danced!” His eyes were bright, alight with pleasure that she had so enjoyed her Easter treat.
“It was a lovely evening, Dan,” she said. Lied.
Lovely until I committed an act of unforgiveable insanity…
“It was indeed, Dan, a lovely evening together.” Xander’s deep voice echoed. He was putting away a full English. Laurel made do with sliced fruit and yogurt. All she could manage.
She looked brightly at Dan. Too brightly.
“When you’ve finished your breakfast, Dad can take you swimming. I’ll just stay here, I think, and have another cup of tea.”
“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 words Just 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.”
He lifted a hand, as if to stay anything she might be about to say, but it was impossible for her to speak. Impossible to do anything except meet his gaze. He was speaking again, his voice insistent.
“It’s the obvious thing to do! Last night proved that the flame between us still burns as fiercely as it ever did. How can you deny it?” His voice changed, and the look in his eyes too.
“And why should you want to deny it, Laurel, after last night?”
She heard the change in his voice. It licked at her like the sweetest poison.
“Taking you into my arms, making love to you, glorying in your incredible beauty, finding the ecstasy again for both of us, making you mine again, making me yours again…”
Seduction was in his voice, the poison sweeter still, his eyes washing over her now, his hand reaching for hers across the table, winding his fingers into hers.
He smiled, and the sweet deadly poison filling her veins flowed more deeply yet, reaching into her. Oh, dear God, that smile.
Memory, flooding in on the poison, burned in her.
Not just of last night, of that hectic, urgent fusing of their heated bodies, but from so much longer ago.
His smile—lazy, knowing, seductive, caressing—as they’d raised champagne glasses to each other on the deck of his yacht, as they’d lain beside each other, limbs entwined, on the hot sand of a secluded cove after a swim to shore, as they’d lounged negligently amidst the tangled sheets after he’d brought her to the ecstasy that had made her cry out in sobbing crescendo.
Dear God, that smile.
Through the haze of memory she heard him speak. That same seductive caressing voice, his fingers, warm and strong, capturing hers.
“Marry me, Laurel,” he said. “Marry me so we can make a true family for Dan, a home for all of us and bliss for ourselves. Marry me.”
His eyes were pouring into hers, that lethal smile playing about his sculpted mouth, willing her to yield to him…tempting her so, so much…
But slowly she drew back her hand. Looked across at him. Her face was expressionless, her voice the same. Saying what she must now say.
“Do you really think,” she said, “that I would ever stoop to marrying a man who treated me as you did?” A razor was in her voice. “A man to whom I am, and always will be, a lying, despicable thief.”
For a moment he said nothing. Then, in a voice that was strangely blank, he spoke. “If I give you my word of honour that never again will I call you liar or thief, can we finally put it behind us?”
She went on looking at him. “No,” she said.