‘But you don’t buy someone you barely know an apartment!’ Elvi bleated, so disconcerted by what he had told her that she could think of nothing else. ‘Obviously I assumed you’d rented it for me and I planned to let you know that I was back living with my family, only I hadn’t got around to it yet....’
Xan wasn’t listening although his attention was locked to her. He noticed that she had gone back to wearing her own clothing, tacitly rejecting the new wardrobe he had also given her, but just at that moment he didn’t care. Indeed, given even the most minimal encouragement, he would have carted her off to the bedroom, unbraided her beautiful hair and laid her out like a banquet for his delectation. One look at her flushed face, evasive blue eyes and the curves no top in creation could have concealed and he was painfully aroused and...and obsessed again? He froze and then swung round to close the door behind him, utilising that moment to suppress his baser urges.
‘You’d better come in,’ Elvi muttered belatedly. ‘I’ve got something to tell you—’
Xan moved warily to the threshold of the living area and lodged there, carefully maintaining his distance. ‘So, tell me... I sent my limo round the block. I wasn’t expecting to be here for long.’
‘I’m... I’m pregnant,’ Elvi announced in a hoarse undertone.
Deprived of speech and reaction for possibly the very first time in his life, Xan stared back at her in unconcealed shock, his strong features tightening and paling as the gravity of her admission sank in on him.
‘I wouldn’t have got in touch with you again for anything less serious,’ Elvi added defensively. ‘You thought we didn’t have anything to worry about but we do...’
‘Yes, clearly,’ Xan agreed, struggling to come to terms with her announcement at the same time as he came up with a solution. It was the way he worked. He saw a problem and he immediately set out to fix it and fast. A baby, the kind of little entity he had imagined would enliven his middle age, rather than his wild-oats-sowing years. Bang went his perfectly planned future! But thinking on his feet was second nature to Xan and flexibility was a key skill. There had to be a resolution that would cover their situation.
‘I don’t want a termination and I don’t want to put my child up for adoption either,’ Elvi declared, deciding to lay all that out for him upfront before he got any ideas.
‘I suppose the odds of conception were more promising than I was prepared to contemplate,’ Xan commented reflectively, stalking deeper into the room as he pulled out his phone to let his driver know that he would be a while. ‘I am one of seven children, after all.’
Her knees wobbling as her extreme tension faded, Elvi dropped down like a stone into a leather seat and clasped her hands tightly together on her knees. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘We’re adults. We’ll deal with it,’ Xan asserted without hesitation.
Elvi resisted the urge to admit that she didn’t feel much like an adult at that moment because she was in unfamiliar territory and apprehensive of a future as a single parent. Both admissions, however, sounded defeatist to her. Even worse, all the angst in the air was preventing her from taking any pleasure at all in her conception. Instead of feeling excited at the prospect of becoming a mother for the first time, she felt guilty, as though her body had done something it shouldn’t have done.
Xan was thinking at top speed and already acknowledging that there was no magical solution to their plight. A child would be born, his child, his responsibility. But regardless of the support he gave to his child’s mother, he would only be an occasional parent, who received scheduled visits. He would never be fully involved because he and Elvi would be leading separate lives.
And that would be where the problems started, he conceded reluctantly. He was very much aware of the consequences children suffered after a relationship breakdown when parents led separate lives. It had most often been Xan, as the eldest, who had been required to deal with his siblings when any of them had gone off the rails as adolescents. His father had been a useless parent, his priority always to move on selfishly to the next new woman in his life, leaving the children of his past relationships to sink or swim alongside their resentful, embittered mothers.
Xan knew he could walk away and be a parent from a safe distance, leaving Elvi to deal with the burden of childcare. But if he did that, he would be no better than the father he had despised. In any case, he wanted his child to have everything he and his siblings had been denied: stability and security and parents who watched over them. If he didn’t want a parade of stepfathers or stepmothers disrupting his child’s life he had to be tough and accept that he had only one sensible option open to him, he reasoned tautly. And unpalatable as the prospect of marriage might appear, there was, nevertheless, nothing more attractive to Xan in that moment of hard realism than the concept of having the right of unrestricted access to Elvi. For that benefit, he acknowledged, he was willing to make considerable sacrifices.
‘We should get married,’ Xan breathed harshly, shaken by the inescapable conviction that marriage offered a security for his child that he could not achieve by any other means.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Elvi mumbled straight away, thinking he was trying to lighten the atmosphere with an ill-judged joke.
Xan settled hard dark golden eyes on her. ‘Marriage is still the best framework in which to raise a child.’
‘But you don’t want to marry me!’ Elvi countered impatiently. ‘So why talk about it?’
‘Let’s not get into personal feelings,’ Xan advised very drily, noticing her bra through the filmy top, his body tensing like a schoolboy’s in response and decimating his pride. He swung away from that alluring view before continuing, ‘More importantly, we now have a child’s future to consider and we must do the best we can to ensure that our child enjoys the best possible start in life.’
Disconcerted by that unexpectedly serious assessment, Elvi glanced away from him uncomfortably. ‘People don’t get married just because they’re parents these days. I’m amazed to hear you talking like this.’
‘Elvi...’ Xan exhaled in an impatient hiss. ‘I’m talking like this because I know what I’m talking about! Children thrive only when they feel secure. In all the years I was growing up I never felt secure because there was nothing stable about my home life. It was constant upheaval and change and I had no control over it. A new wife or lover would move in, turn the house on Thira upside down with different rules and then it would happen again...and again,’ he told her in a roughened undertone, loathing the need to speak about such personal experiences.
‘What you’re really telling me is that even your father’s many marriages didn’t give you or your brothers and sisters security,’ Elvi pointed out ruefully. ‘So, how could us marrying possibly be the answer?’
Xan threw his arrogant dark head high, his jawline clenching. ‘Unlike my father, I’m willing to make the effort for it to work.’
‘But you said to leave personal feelings out of this and that doesn’t work either because a marriage is based on two people living together,’ Elvi argued. ‘And I couldn’t live with you.’
Xan stiffened in astonishment at that claim, a winged ebony brow climbing. ‘What do you mean? You couldn’t live with me? Why not?’
The look of outrage in his stunning golden gaze failed to intimidate Elvi, who believed that any talk of Xan marrying her was total nonsense. ‘Xan, have you forgotten how you behaved at your sister’s wedding?’ she asked tightly. ‘You got bored with me within forty-eight hours and wasted no time in switching your interest to Angie. You’re volatile—’
Xan gritted his even white teeth, incensed by the condemnation. He had had good reason to behave as he had but he was not prepared to share those reasons with her. ‘I am not volatile,’ he breathed, anger lacing his dark deep drawl with warning.
Elvi was tempted to tell him that possibly he bore more of a resemblance to his womanising father than he liked to think, but she resisted the urge because infuriating Xan would only create more problems. He couldn’t really be serious about his suggestion that she marry him, she reasoned in bewilderment.