It was Gabriela’s quiet command that brought a halt to it, her dark eyes flickering from Nell’s suddenly pale face to her son’s cold, closed one. The old lady resorted to mumbled Greek as she bustled back to her coffee tray, leaving a tense silence in her wake.
It screeched in Nell’s head like chalk across a blackboard—a white chalk that had scraped itself across her cheeks. She wanted to jump up and run out of the room but she didn’t think her trembling limbs would make it. So she stared down at the brimming cup of strong black coffee she balanced on its saucer and tried to swallow the lump of humiliation that was blocking her throat.
She’d known that her useless marriage was public property so why should she feel so upset that Thea Sophia was so willing to remark on it?
Xander shifted in his chair and she flinched a look at him from beneath her eyelashes. His eyes were fixed on her, narrowed and intense.
The lump in her throat changed into a burn as tears decided to take its place. In desperation she turned to Gabriela.
‘How—how long do you plan on staying?’ she asked in a polite voice that came out too husky.
Her mother-in-law was looking at her in dark sympathy, which hurt almost as much as Thea’s thoughtless words had done. As Gabriela opened her mouth to answer, Xander got there before her.
‘She will not be staying.’ It was blunt to the point of rude.
Nell ignored him. ‘It w-would be nice if you could stay a few days,’ she invited. ‘W-we could get to know each other better—’
‘My mother does not do getting-to-know-you, agape mou,’ Xander’s hateful voice intruded yet again. ‘She lives a much too rarefied life, hmm, Madre?’
Gabriela’s lips snapped together then opened again. Like Nell, she was grimly ignoring her sarcastic son. ‘I am afraid I cannot stay,’ she murmured apologetically. ‘I came because I need to discuss some business with my son.’
‘Just business?’ he mocked.
Nell couldn’t take any more, ridding herself of the coffee-cup, she jumped to her feet. ‘What is it with you?’ she flashed at the sarcastic devil. ‘Trying to have a polite conversation with you around is like living inside a tabloid newspaper—full of sarcasm and innuendo!’
‘That just about covers it,’ Xander agreed.
‘Oh, why don’t you just shut up?’ she cried, making Thea Sophia jerk to attention, and Gabriela’s eyes opened wide. ‘You know what your problem is, Xander? You are still that resentful little boy who swam alone in the sea. You forgot to grow up!’
‘I forgot to grow up?’ Xander climbed to his feet. ‘Where the hell have you been for the last year?’
‘Right where you put me until I decided I’d had enough of it,’ Nell answered fiercely. Cheeks hot now, green eyes alight with rage.
‘So you decided it would be fun to drive you car into a tree?’
Fun? He thought she had done it for fun? ‘Well, we all know what you were doing because you featured in the newspapers so prominently,’ she tossed back. ‘Would you like me to tell them what I was doing while I was having fun crashing my car?’
‘Watch it, Nell.’
Now he was deadly serious. You could cut the tension with a knife. Nell’s chin shot up. Xander towered over her by several intimidating inches but she faced up to his threatening stance.
Shall I tell them? her angry eyes challenged him while their audience sat riveted and the desire to unlock her aching throat and shatter his impossible pride to smithereens set the blood pounding in her head.
His face did not move, not even by an eyelash, hard, handsome and utterly unyielding like a perfectly sculptured mask. The cold eyes, the flat lips, the flaring nostrils—he was warning her not to do it—daring her to do it.
The pounding changed to a violent tingling. Taking Xander on was becoming a drug that sang like a craving she just had to feed. Her lips parted, quivering, and that stone-like expression still did not alter even though he knew it was coming—he knew!
Then another voice dropped cool, calm, curiously into the thrumming tension, ‘Helen, darling, did you know you are bleeding from the base of your foot …?’
CHAPTER SIX
NELL broke vital eye contact with Xander to glance dazedly down at her foot, where, sure enough, blood was oozing onto the base of her strappy mule. The sharp stone on the hillside, she remembered, and was about to explain when Xander struck, seizing the opportunity to scoop her up off the ground!
‘Get off me, you great brute!’ she shot out in surprised anger.
‘Shut up!’ he hissed as he carried her from the room.
‘I have never seen such fire,’ Thea Sophia gasped into the stunned space they left in the tension behind them. ‘The child has been as quiet and as sweet as a mountain stream all the time she has been here.’