Chapter 49
Xavier
Selena looks as perky and perfect as her home is when I roll up. I pre-warned her, of course, by text that we needed to talk. She leads me through to a library on the ground floor where a pot of coffee is waiting and her parents, mercifully, are not.
I will, of course, tell her parents. But I owe it to her to deliver this news privately first.
‘I didn’t expect to see you today,’ she says, pouring out the coffee. She passes me the first cup.
‘I know.’ I stand in front of the fireplace.
I can’t sit down to have this conversation.
‘Selena, I realise this will come as a shock, and I’m truly sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t marry you.
Not next week, not ever.’ As delivery methods go, this one is firmly on the sledgehammer end of the scale, but needs must.
She puts down the pot with a rough thwack. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘I’ve met someone.’ I shrug. ‘It’s all happened quite quickly, but I’m in love with her, and I want to spend the rest of my life with her. Not only can I not marry you, but I can’t ask you to marry a man whose heart belongs to someone else.’
Okay, so maybe that was a little disingenuous. After all, I have no intention of giving her the option. But I’m desperate to make her see, by any means possible, that she’s better off running for the hills than ending up with me.
Her face has drained of all colour. I’ve never seen her so lost for words. Selena has been bred as the ultimate society darling. She has an elegant rejoinder for every occasion. But now she looks as though I’ve clubbed her over the head with a croquet mallet, which I suppose I have.
‘You have got to be fucking kidding me,’ she says quietly, slowly, and so ominously that I’m actually scared, even while a small part of me perks up at the thought of having a frank conversation with her for once in our lives.
‘I’m not. I wish I was.’
‘We’re getting married in five days. Five.’
I grimace apologetically. ‘Well, not anymore, but I appreciate the timing is unbelievably shite.’
‘You can’t do this to me. You absolutely can’t. I won’t allow it. How the fuck would you think you could pull a stunt like this and get away with it?’
I open my mouth to attempt an answer to her almost certainly rhetorical question, but she presses on.
‘You’ve had three decades to pull the plug on this, you entitled, presumptuous shit, and you think today is the right time to do it, huh?
’ She abandons any pretence of pouring herself a coffee and pushes to her feet, hands going to her hips.
I’m distraught at having fucked her over so royally, but I’m seriously glad she’s giving me a hard time.
I don’t think I could have borne it if she’d patted my shoulder and given me a frosty that’s all right, darling.
‘Like I said, the timing is horrific.’ I twist to put my cup and saucer on the mantelpiece so I can give her my full attention.
‘But don’t you think that’s part of the problem?
They’ve had us in this arrangement for so long that we’ve grown up thinking it’s normal.
And let me tell you, it’s not normal. We don’t love each other, and—’
‘Who the hell said anything about love?’ she cries. ‘This is business. And you don’t walk out on a business deal that’s been almost thirty years in the making because you’ve got cold feet at the last minute.’
‘I told you, it’s not cold feet. I fell in love, and suddenly the prospect of sacrificing my entire life’s happiness because our parents hatched some kind of nut-job deal when we were infants seemed a lot less attractive. No offence,’ I add hurriedly.
‘Who the fuck is this woman who’s made the scales fall from your eyes, then?’ she taunts me. ‘Do I know her?’
‘No. Not really.’
She pounces on that. ‘Oh. So I know her a bit?’
‘You met her very briefly at Harry’s party.’ I pause. ‘It’s Flora’s… friend, Ivy.’
There’s a moment of blankness as she processes this. Then she barks out a not-at-all-amused laugh. ‘You have got to be fucking kidding me.’
I’ve never heard Selena swear. Never. The liberal dropping of F-bombs feels like a red flag as to her state of composure—currently dropping like a stone—and I suspect I’m right to be scared of what she’ll do and say next.
‘I’m not kidding,’ I say stiffly.
‘That little… the one in the black dress who was having some sort of crisis?’
‘Yes.’
She licks her lips. ‘Wow. What a pathetic fucking cliché you are. Well, she looks like a walking blowjob, so I suppose it’s no great mystery, but Jesus, Xavier. You’re willing to walk away from everything for some little gold-digger?’
I don’t know who the hell the woman in front of me is right now. Nor do I appreciate her tone towards Ivy.
‘I’m willing to walk away for her. She’s not a gold-digger, not in the slightest. And, with respect, you have no idea what she and her family have been through.
None.’ It’s time for the next bombshell.
‘Anyway, if she was after my money, she’d be sorely disappointed, because Pa just cut me off.
Full stop. No title. No inheritance. I’m no longer the eligible guy your parents earmarked for you. ’
She stares at me in horror. ‘I can’t believe you. I thought we were in this together—maybe not in love, but as a team. I thought we had the same values. This is your birthright! How can you just walk away from it?’
‘I think,’ I say slowly, trying to remember just how left-field all this must seem to her, ‘we’ve both inherited our values from our parents, and we haven’t had much opportunity to really examine them.
Not truly. I know I’ve certainly been pretty passive around it all, and that’s not okay.
I don’t want a loveless marriage, and I don’t want it for you, either.
Look at you. You’re beautiful and accomplished and an incredible businesswoman.
You deserve a guy who’s absolutely obsessed with you. ’
‘How incredibly noble. And such convenient timing, setting me free.’
I shrug. ‘You’ve got me. This is all self-serving, but I mean it. We should both have told our parents to fuck off years ago.’
‘Well, we didn’t, and meanwhile, the wedding that Tatler called “the wedding of the decade” is supposed to be happening next week, and you may as well have jilted me at the fucking altar for all the good this little visit is doing, because I am going to be humiliated.’
The colour has returned to her face, and her eyes are glittering. She really is beautiful, in a cold, pristine way that’s so different from the soft warmth of my Ivy. I called it exactly right, though: humiliation, not heartbreak, is the main emotion Selena’s grappling with here.
‘I know, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to help out. I can make a statement, if you like, though an explanation might be more damaging. We can say it was your decision, maybe? Though—’
She holds out a hand. ‘For God’s sake, shut up and let me think for a minute. Jesus.’
I still can’t quite believe that it’s taken me breaking off our lifetime engagement to see her as she truly is behind the society mask. Honestly, I like her a lot more when she’s handing me my arse than when she’s in inscrutable ice-queen mode.
She paces around the room, arms crossed and ponytail swinging.
‘I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.
If we don’t say anything, everyone will know you dumped me.
If we say I finished it, I’ll be the entitled little bitch who doesn’t know when she’s onto a good thing.
There’s literally no good way to handle it. ’
‘Do you care what the public thinks, though?’ I ask, grimacing because I know what a stupid question it is even as it’s coming out of my mouth.
‘Of course I care what the public thinks! We have a brand to run. Perception is reality. And you walking away right at the last minute, after you’ve had your whole fucking life to pull your fucking finger out, is the worst thing you could possibly do to me.
It’s a million times worse than us never having been together in the first place.
No, a billion. I’ve made this wedding my entire personality.
I even played dress-up at Belvedere for bloody Tatler—which I knew was tempting fate, by the way, and I still went ahead and did it—and now I’m going to be a total laughingstock.
The press will have a field day.’ She wipes a tear from under her eye, and the enormous de Vere diamond I gave her in front of three hundred guests on my twenty-first birthday flashes on her hand.
I can’t bear it. I may not completely understand why Selena puts so much importance on image—though her upbringing is a pretty big clue—but I can appreciate how much genuine pain she’s in.
We both went along with this engagement for our own reasons, but if she saw our alliance as important enough, covetable enough, to sacrifice her freedom for it, then the dissolution of that alliance would, I expect, feel like the most crushing loss.
Presumably, she doesn’t want a reminder that the value of such an alliance relies on optics and not actual fundamentals, so I pivot.
‘I can understand how distressing calling off the wedding will be for you and your parents, and I’m not trying to understate that. But a wedding and a marriage are two very different things, and I honestly don’t think either of us would have been happy long-term, for what it’s worth.’
‘You know, Xavier, I really don’t need you preaching at me just to make yourself feel better.
You’ve well and truly fucked me over. I’ve worked my arse off my whole life to be taken seriously, and you’re going to make a mockery of all of it just because you can’t tell the difference between your brains and your dick.
I’ll always be the woman Xavier de Vere as good as jilted at the altar, so you can fuck right off.
Go find my parents and then get the hell out of here. ’
She pulls the ring off her finger and throws it square at my chest. ‘And take your stupid fucking heirloom with you. I’m sure you’ll be needing it for your precious Ivy.’