Okay, that wasn’t what they’d originally planned—not what he’d intended or wanted—but that had been then.
..not now.
His expression changed. Now things were different. His time with Rosalie had changed him.
Had it changed his plans, his intentions as well?
Changed what he felt about marriage?
About Rosalie?
Into his head came what he’d said to her when she’d praised the lifestyle Panos and Maria enjoyed.
‘Sometimes when you have too much of something you enjoy it palls...’
He frowned. Was that true of his time with Rosalie? Would the time come when he had had too much of her, so that being with her palled?
It seemed an absurd question!
Do I really want our marriage to end when the merger is done?
His eyes flickered.
A baby would keep us together...
A child with Rosalie...
He turned over the thought in his mind.
Enticing. Appealing...
Perhaps, he mused, gazing up at the ceiling, lost in this strangely beguiling thought, when she joined him here he would draw her out on the subject... On the subject of not rushing to end their marriage. At all.
I need to know! To know what she feels—what she wants.
Surely he was not hoping in vain?
Memory was full within him—of the passion and desire in their lovemaking, the way her beautiful body clung to his, the heights they reached together every time! And it was more than when they were in bed—in and out of bed it was the same. Her smiles, her laughter, her kisses and her conversation... Surely it all pointed to the same thoughts, the same feelings, that were filling him more and more with every passing day...every passionate night...?
I want her with me all the time! Every day and every night! And I want her to want the same!
It was as though a light had gone on in his head, showing him things he’d never seen before...things that were now illuminated in a brilliant golden light. He reached for his phone to call her, to hear her voice, ask her to fly up here.
Before he could pick it up, it started to ring. He grinned. Was Rosalie telepathic as well as all her other manifold charms?
But as he answered, and heard the voice of his caller, his smile was wiped from his face.
‘Ariadne?’
He jackknifed upright.
Her voice came clear over the ether. Sounding fraught.
‘Xandros! I’ve got something to tell you. And it can’t wait. It just can’t!’
Everything in him froze.
* * *