Chapter 19

NINETEEN

B ang .

The sunlight streaming through the drapes was at just the right angle to feel like a bullet to the brain. I rolled over in the plush covers of my third-floor bedroom at Parkvale, only to wince as the pressure in my head pierced the other side.

Ow. Yeah.

My head was throbbing.

“Jesus,” I muttered as I rolled onto my other side, away from the firing range. “Frankie, you freaking lush. How much did you drink?”

“I lost count after your third champagne.”

Xavier’s deep voice perked me up, but only just. I stared at the wall, at the ornate white wainscoting that bordered blue silk wallpaper. The question wasn’t whether he was correct. It was whether I was imagining his voice, too.

My conscience had a funny way of sounding like everyone else but me.

I rolled back over, scooting out of the sun’s glare, then opened one eye to find the man himself sitting on a velvet-upholstered chair next to the bed, knees wide while he balanced a bouquet of lovely pink roses on them.

“She lives,” Xavier said softly with a wry smile. He held out the flowers, ragged stems wrapped with a flour sack and a ribbon.

I took the flowers shyly, holding the sheet to my chest when I realized I was wearing nothing more than my underwear. Apparently, I’d just stripped down and hopped right into bed last night without a care about who might find me.

“Thank you,” I said as I pressed the roses to my face.

They were fragrant and sweet—the perfect thing to chase away a hangover. I wondered if he had picked them directly from the garden himself. The idea warmed me, even if it was unlikely.

“Did you ever come to bed?” I wondered, noticing that he was still wearing his tuxedo pants and white shirt from last night.

The top three buttons were undone, revealing a bit more of his tattoo than usual, and his shirttails were out and wrinkled. His feet were bare, and the ends of his bowtie were loose on either side of his collar, where a bit of his tattoo said hello. Dark circles ringed his eyes, and his hair was a bit mussed. Regardless, he still looked as edible as ever. Maybe more than when he was polished and put together.

Xavier shook his head. “I didn’t sleep,” he admitted. “The ball lasted until nearly four in the morning, and Frederick and I stayed later trying to get the Earl of Ketchley to invest in a wind farm. I heard you found your way here at a reasonable time, though, even if you were quite…animated…with the staff.”

I cringed, remembering some of my comments to the butler. And to Elsie, for that matter. Not my finest hour. I had been the very definition of an Ugly American.

“I’ll tell Jeeves—I mean, Benson?—I’m sorry,” I said. “God, I really was awful.”

“Bledsoe,” Xavier corrected me gently. “And don’t worry about it. I’ve called him worse. We pay him very well to put up with us.” He shrugged, turning to look out the window. “When I got home, I just sat in the other room until I thought you’d have slept enough. Smaller house. Nosier staff. Thought it best to avoid gossip.”

I laid back on the pillows, rotating the bouquet in my hands. “Since when did you start caring about gossip?”

He glanced at a pile of papers, obviously thinking about the headlines. They were the ones I picked out. “Since when did you?”

“Since they started printing lies about our daughter.” And me, though I couldn’t quite bring myself to say so.

Xavier shrugged. “I told you, they’ve been doing that about me since I was a child, too. But I don’t like them printing rubbish about you and Sof either. Or maybe it’s just that I see how much it affects you, and I don’t like that.”

I frowned. “Then why don’t you do anything about it?”

His brow furrowed with confusion. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I tell you about it, and you don’t seem bothered. You say you’ve experienced it all before and to pay it no mind, like it doesn’t affect me that people all over this country believe I’m a liar and a thief and a terrible mother.”

Xavier scowled at the papers. “What do you want me to do, Ces? Chase down the reporters who print it and threaten them with their lives?”

“I want you to care as much about your family as you do about a chef messing up your soup or threatening some guy who likes me!” I tossed the flowers onto the bedspread and sat up fully. I was the one who had been a mess last night, but now he looked awful contrite. “Why do you do that?” I pressed. “Lose your temper that way? Especially at the ones like the chef who are just doing their jobs? It’s like there’s an on-off switch with you. You either don’t care at all, or you treat people like scum.”

Xavier looked up, blue eyes nearly the color of the sky outside my window. “Why did you last night? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you be rude to anyone, but poor Bledsoe took the brunt, didn’t he?”

I swallowed sheepishly. “I said I was sorry. I was drunk, for one.”

“Come on, Ces. It was more than that.”

I considered. “Fine. I was mad. Really mad. At you, mostly. But also at…I don’t know. All the people who treat me like I’m nothing. The newspapers. The hostess last night. Imogene and your stepmother. All those people who have watched me down their patrician noses, waiting for me to mess up for the last several weeks, maybe the whole time I’ve been here. Bledsoe was just the really snobby cherry on that particular sundae.”

Xavier nodded. “Well, then you’ve some idea of how I’ve felt my entire life.” He blinked. “Really, really mad.”

“Not right now,” I pointed out. “Now you’re sitting there like once again, none of it matters.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.” He shook his head, then shoved a hand through silky, bedraggled hair. “I’m always angry, Ces. Most days, I spend my time trying to shove it down. And the only way to do that is to numb myself. Act like I don’t care.”

“Even with me?” I wondered. “Even with us?”

“No.” Xavier looked up, expression softened. “That’s how I knew, you know,” he said quietly. “With you, with Sof, the world is just…quieter somehow. With you, I feel so much more than anger. With the two of you, I only felt peace.”

“Until now,” I finished for him. “When that world is shoving its way in.”

He examined me for a long moment, then got up and moved to sit next to me on the bed. “Only if we let it, babe.”

I allowed him to gather me into his broad chest and stroke my hair like a child. It felt good. But like everything else he’d been offering of late, it felt like a tease.

And it wasn’t enough.

Tell him , I thought to myself. Tell him what you want. Tell him not to dance with Imogene. Tell him you need him to stand up for you. Tell him that you can be there for him, support him, love him no matter what. But tell him that you need all of that, too.

I wanted to say so. I really did.

Instead, I changed the subject.

“My brother’s getting married,” I said.

“To the de Vries girl, right?”

I nodded. “October. In Italy.”

“Good for him. She’s a catch. You’ll enjoy Italy too. Especially the food. You’ve family there, right?”

“Some distant cousins, yeah,” I murmured.

He hadn’t, I noticed, said we .

“It’s fast, I know,” I continued on, mostly to ignore my own perceived awkwardness. “But they love each other. My brother especially. Matthew loves Nina more than anyone. I’ve never seen him like this before over a girl. So fierce with her. He would do anything for her.”

I waited for Xavier to say something. I didn’t know what. Maybe I wanted him to tell me he understood. That he felt the same about me and Sofia. That he thought about doing the same thing with us, whisking me away to a chapel and making us the real family he knew we should be.

Again, I wondered why I was so eager to march down the aisle. Xavier and I had only been together officially for, what, a few months?

The idea, though, wouldn’t let go.

Maybe it was because things were different when you had a child together. Maybe it was because I’d believed him when he said he wanted to be together for good. Maybe I’d let myself jump too far when he said he wanted to leap together.

Whatever we were doing, though…that wasn’t leaping. I felt like I was falling from a cliff alone.

“They’re moving to Boston,” I told him. “At the end of the month.”

“Oh?” Xavier asked as he fingered the edge of the sheet around my back. “What’s going to happen to his house? Will they sell it?”

I shook my head against him. “I don’t know yet. I don’t know what Sofia and I are going to do. But we have to decide soon.”

He seemed to think about that for a long time. “It’ll be all right, Ces. You’ll figure it out.”

I waited for something more. For him to take the opening. Tell us to stay here, tell me he’d come back to New York with us, tell me something that suggested his investment in our future past the end of August.

“Well, send him my congratulations. Like I said, she’s a catch.”

I sat back up to look at him. “You sound like those people out there talking about you.”

Xavier snorted. “What do you mean?”

“Do you have any idea how many women I heard talking to their daughters about how to ‘land’ you last night? I realize the Season isn’t strictly about matchmaking anymore, but there were an awful lot of mamas there trying to make their daughters a duchess.”

Xavier just started laughing. “Never. And I only meant, good for them both. Your brother seems like a nice bloke, even if he did punch me in the eye.”

“Well, you dishonored his sister,” I pointed out. “He was duty-bound to sock you.”

“What would he do if he knew I was dishonoring his sister on a nightly basis?” Xavier offered his trademark shark grin.

But it didn’t do what he wanted.

“Stop,” I said as he nuzzled into my neck, inhaling deeply.

“Never. Been waiting since last night, and I didn’t even get to peel that dress off you. God, you smell good.”

He was joking. I knew he was joking and relished in his touch as much as he clearly did mine. But the allure of the joke was fading, and I was too shy to say it. Just like I was too shy to ask him all the things I really wanted to ask. Things like, have you thought about honoring me and your daughter instead of dishonoring me all the time? Would you ever want to run away to Italy or France or even Japan, if that’s what you want, to do something crazy like elope?

Would you actually want me to be your wife? And Sofia to be your real daughter, not just the accident everyone thinks she is?

But when I opened my mouth to speak at last, Xavier only captured it with his, delivering his patented kiss that knocked nearly every thought out of my head as he rolled me onto my back.

Nearly.

“Xavi, I said stop,” I said, pushing him off me completely.

He backed off with a groan, though he couldn’t stop his gaze from slipping down to where my nipples, evident through the thin sheets, were making it very clear that even if my brain wanted to stop, my body definitely did not.

Traitor.

“Xavi,” I said sharply, then snapped in front of his face. “Up here, please.”

He rolled his eyes but did readjust his gaze eventually. “Fine. What?”

“You can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what? Worshiping my girlfriend? Come on, Ces, it’s the only good thing going for us right now.”

“What, sex? That’s all? Xavier, I am not a consolation prize. Or a security blanket.”

He recoiled. “I never said you were! But it’s better than these sad-sack, everything’s wrong conversations, don’t you think?”

My mouth dropped. “Are you serious right now?”

Xavier shrugged, sitting back onto his heels on the mattress. I yanked the sheets farther up my chest and sat back against the pillows, eager to get as far away from him as possible.

“These are real issues,” I told him. “Real shit we are dealing with right now. These things affect my life. Sofia’s life. In a matter of weeks, too. And you couldn’t care less.”

“That’s because on top of your ‘real issues,’ I’ve got a boatload of my own, Francesca,” he shot back as he got off the bed. As if he, too, wanted space between us. Well, that was fine with me. “In case you missed it, my uncle is practically on death’s door. I’ve got a thousand-year family legacy to protect that suddenly means more than it ever has in my life. I’ve got family members circling the whole thing like vultures, and on top of that, I’ve got a daughter to get to know. I don’t have time for stupid gossip and your brother’s wedding and all your fucking insecurities! I just don’t!”

By the time he was done with his tirade, I would have thrown just about anything in the room at him to get him to stop. At last, the truth was out. I didn’t have to suspect anymore that Sofia and I were at the bottom of his list of priorities. He’d just spelled it out for me, clear as day.

“Your Grace?”

The butler’s quiet knock sounded on the other side of my bedroom. Xavier moved to open it, then looked at me.

“Don’t. Open. The door,” I gritted through my teeth. “We are still talking.”

Xavier glared at me for a long minute. Then he turned and twisted the knob.

Bledsoe popped in, took one look at me in the bed, and averted his gaze completely. “Mrs. Crew wished me to remind that you are due at the polo pitch in approximately ninety minutes, Your Grace. Benjamin has the car waiting in the front drive.”

“Thanks, Bledsoe. I’ll meet him out front.” Xavier closed the door, then turned back to me. “Look?—”

“Don’t,” I said sharply, staring down at the sheets. I absolutely would not cry right now.

He opened and closed his mouth several times, followed by a similar action with his fists. He looked like he wanted his heavy bag in the room but would have to settle for a pillow.

“I’ve got to go,” he said carefully. “The earl is going to be at this event too, and Frederick is actually all right talking polo. There will be members of the royal family there. We can’t miss it.”

“Of course you can’t,” I told him, my lower lip trembling. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

At this point, I really didn’t.

“I’ll send Ben back for you and Sof,” Xavier said. “The match is at noon. She’ll like the ponies.”

At that, I finally looked up. “You can’t possibly think we are coming to watch you ride a horse and hit a ball with a stick after the shit you just said to me.”

He stood there for a long time, then served me with a gaze that just about broke my heart, twisted as it was with confusion, love, pain, and yes, anger. And the anger, as he promised, was always there.

“You’re the only ones I want there,” he said quietly. “Do with that as you like.”

Without waiting for an answer, he left.

I just buried my face in my hands and sobbed.