Chapter 32
Ivy
Afew minutes ago, Xav’s lathered-up hands were making slow, appreciative circles on my skin as I lay back against him in the bath, encircled in his arms and catching my breath. I felt like a drunk parachutist drifting woozily back down to earth.
Now, he crouches before me so he can dry every inch of me with a fluffy white towel while I stare down at him as if he’s a fairytale prince who’s somehow worked his way up from the London sewage system like some sexy male spin on Giselle in Enchanted.
My poor knees, which were pretty buggered after the pounding I gave them in the bath, are doing okay now.
I suspect my poor heart may need a little longer, though.
Xav presses a sweet kiss to the skin just below my belly button before getting to his feet and holding out a robe just as fluffy as the towel for me to thread my arms through.
He carefully tugs one side closed, and then the other—whether to keep me warm or reinstate my modesty, I don’t know—before knotting it.
On second thoughts, maybe I’m the princess in this scenario. He’s certainly making me feel that way.
‘I don’t know about you’—he puts a gentlemanly hand to the small of my back—‘but I need a cup of tea and a few biscuits after that performance.’
I smile at him, still giddy. ‘I could murder a builder’s.’
‘I bet you could. You definitely fucking earned it.’ And with that, he reaches for me properly, pulling me against him by the lapels of my robe. His kisses wear the memory of every single thing we’ve just done to each other.
We still have an hour before Flora is due home. An hour before we need to return to the real world.
‘Do you have a family commitment tonight?’ he asks me as we saunter down the hallway. ‘Because I could stay down.’ We’re barefoot—entirely naked under our robes, in fact—but it’s so toasty in this house that no slippers are needed. I think the entire place is underfloor heated.
I give him a sad little nod. It’s unreasonable, given the indecently good hour we’ve just spent together, that I should resent not being able to see him tonight, but I do.
He’s willing to stay in London for me, and I can’t bloody make the most of it.
God, what I wouldn’t give to shack up here with him for an evening.
We could get Deliveroo and watch TV in bed and fuck like rabbits and just be.
Just be normal.
But there’s no normal for us, even without Dawn and my sisters in play, because this perfect guy is marrying another woman in less than seven weeks, and then moments like this will be nothing but dust and memories.
Maybe that’s why I feel so gutted, as if I’ve been kicked in the stomach.
Maybe it’s because I know that we’re on borrowed time that it seems so particularly cruel when we can’t beg, borrow or steal any more of these moments.
Already, panic is clawing at the edges of the precious memories we've just made, threatening to shred them to ribbons with its cold fingers, and I can't bear it.
He holds my hand as we pad down the huge staircase together. ‘It’s not a problem. I’m the last person who can judge you for being unavailable.’
‘But I want to,’ I say in a small voice.
‘I know. Me too.’ He tightens his grip on my hand as we hit the last step.
Classical music is wafting elegantly out of the kitchen. It seems an appropriate soundtrack for this most sophisticated of houses, but I don’t remember Xav turning any music on when we got here. Maybe Shelly, their friendly part-time housekeeper-cum-chef, has turned up, which could be awkward if—
Oh fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
We round the large archway that leads from the hallway through to the massive kitchen to a sight so appalling that my blissed-out brain can barely compute it: Flora and her mother, the fucking Duchess of Oxford, sitting at the island with a pile of what look like glossy fashion magazines.
If I wasn’t undergoing full-body paralysis from the sheer horror of it all, I think I’d actually laugh, because their faces are a picture as their jaws drop open like stones. They stare at us; we stare at them, all of us in shock. I’m sure my and Xav’s expressions are just as gobsmacked as theirs.
My first suggestion my deer-in-the-headlights brain serves me up is to make a run for it.
Like, to anywhere. Back upstairs, out the front door—anywhere that is not this shitshow in this kitchen.
But Xav, it seems, has my number, because he tightens his grip on my hand even as I sense him straightening up to his full height next to me.
‘Ma. Flora. What a pleasant surprise.’
Luckily, I’m still too dumbstruck to speak, because I would absolutely guffaw at that one. Here we are, clearly naked under our robes, even more clearly having just screwed each other’s brains out, yet Xav can still conjure up his inner duke on demand.
‘Xavier.’ His mum’s tone is as flat as her expression.
She doesn’t grace me with a verbal acknowledgment—shocker—but boy, does the filthy up-and-down look she gives me speak every word I assume her breeding stops her from saying out loud.
I also assume those unspoken words include gems like trollop and slut and gold-digger.
Flora, bless her, breaks the standoff. ‘Oh my God, guys!’ Her expression has shifted from gobsmacked only to gobsmacked and seriously chuffed.
She’s staring at us like we’re a gift she didn’t see coming.
I couldn’t adore her more in this moment, even if, unlike her mother, I suspect she’s forgotten all about her soon-to-be sister-in-law.
I give her a tiny, embarrassed smile that’s more of a grimace, really.
If there was an awkward-as-fuck scale, which there should absolutely be, we’d be breaking the dial on it right now, surely.
I still don’t trust myself to speak. I feel too mortified, too exposed, and I also recognise amid my total panic that nothing I could say right now would make this calamity better.
Instead, I glance up at Xav. He looks stern and humourless, and it’s scary and reassuring and sexy all at once.
‘We didn’t expect you,’ he says to his mum, and he manages to make it sound like a scolding, which frankly I applaud.
‘That,’ she says, dragging her purse-lipped attention away from me and over to him, ‘is altogether too obvious.’
‘If you have something to say, Ma, then say it.’
Holy fuck. How is he so good at this, at turning the tables when he’s been caught so blatantly with his hand in the common little cookie jar?
Unless this is a standard upper-class thing and they are all instinctively bred to turn a blind eye whenever anyone gets caught fucking the help. I could be invisible right now.
‘What you choose to do before you walk down the aisle is entirely your own business,’ his mum says with God knows how many centuries’ worth of passive aggression bred into her voice.
‘On that we are in full agreement.’ Xav’s tone is marginally airier, but he’s holding my hand so tightly that my bones may snap. Painful though it is, I’m glad of the firmness of his touch anchoring me.
They glare at each other for a few long moments while Flora shoots me a sympathetic scrunch of her face and I just stand here like a lemon.
‘Flora,’ Xav says eventually, ‘why don’t you take Ivy upstairs and keep her company while she gets dressed?’
‘Sure,’ Flora says too quickly. She jumps down from her barstool and practically runs over to me. ‘C’mon, Ive, let’s leave these two to it.’
I attempt to extricate my hand from Xav’s iron grip, but to my surprise, he leans in and kisses me slowly, sweetly on the temple.
‘I’m so, so sorry,’ he whispers before he releases my hand.
I give him a little not here shake of my head. ‘It’s fine.’
It’s anything but fine.
I sprint upstairs, Flora hot on my heels, and bolt into Xav’s bedroom, shutting the door behind us. ‘Oh my God.’ I cover my face with my hands, slumping back against the door with a dull, defeated thud. ‘Oh my fucking God.’
‘Hey.’ She pries me off the door and wraps her arms around me, and I collapse against her. Right now I am absolutely not above letting a nineteen-year-old comfort me. ‘It’s okay.’
‘I’ve never been so mortified in my life,’ I mutter into her very nice-smelling hair.
I’m aware, as I’m saying it, that mortified is too simple a word for what I’m feeling.
I’m not ashamed of what we’ve done, not in the slightest, but I’m humiliated and blindsided.
I feel small. Xav and Flora’s mum made me feel small down there: small and irrelevant and foolish.
My blissed-out bubble has been burst, and being reminded so blatantly that I’m nothing more than Xav’s dirty little secret has given me the ick.
Seeing us through his mum’s eyes reduces us to shallow, sordid fucking, even if what we just shared in the bathroom next door was anything but.
Even if it was quite the opposite.
‘Here. Come and have a seat,’ Flora says, gently releasing me and leading me over to the bed. At the sight of our clothes through the double doors, strewn all over the bathroom floor in our haste to get naked with each other, she lets out a girlish little giggle. ‘Oh, wow.’
‘This must be so weird for you,’ I say as I plonk myself down on the long padded bench at the foot of Xav’s nice big bed, the emotional cocktail swirling around in my tummy growing even more potent.
‘I’m definitely not the person to worry about right now.
’ She sits down next to me on the bench and takes my hand.
‘And if Ma hadn’t been here, I would have thought seeing you and my brother all flushed and matchy-matchy in your bathrobes was the sweetest sight ever.
’ She gives me a friendly nudge with her elbow. ‘Weird, but sweet.’
I stare down at our joined hands and risk a sideways glance at her. She’s smiling at me. ‘Really?’
‘Really. I mean, I’m pissed off with him for thinking he could steal you away from me, but come on. You’re adorable together. Anyone would think so.’