“Because I can pass up the chance of time in your charming company?” Fiero quipped, but a smile crossed his lips despite his mood. Max and Luca were two of his best friends. Along with their cousins, who had been raised with them, so that they were almost like one family.
“Because you’re like a bear with a sore head.”
“Marriage isn’t on the cards, believe me.”
“But you’re sleeping with her?”
Fiero whipped his head around as though it had been snapped, and a laugh sounded from the pool. Max was there, his arms braced on the coping, his teeth white against his tan.
“Think you hit the nail on the head there, bro.”
“Do you mind?” Fiero took another drink from his beer.
“So you’re not?”
“Sleeping with her?” Fiero repeated, then stood, frustrated beyond belief. “That’s none of your goddamned business.”
Max was no longer smiling. “If you’re not, why deny it?”
“Because my sex life is private. Not for you two to speculate on.”
He closed his eyes and thought of Elodie and only certainty filled him. Certainty that he wanted her, certainty that regardless of what anyone else said or thought, he would make love to her in a matter of hours. His body was already anticipating that pleasure, filling with longing and need.
“For the last two months, all we have heard is how you’ll never forgive her, how there’s a special place in hell for women like her.”
Fiero’s face felt hot and he wished, for some reason he couldn’t fathom, that he could draw those words back, could leave them unspoken. “I cannot justify what she did.”
“I can’t say I blame you,” Max grunted from the table. “It’s sheer good luck that you even know about Jack now.”
A blade ran the length of his body. “I do not consider that ‘good luck’. She almost died.”
“And if she hadn’t been hit by a van and wound up in hospital, you’d have no idea you had a son out there.”
“I am profoundly aware of that, believe me.” Fiero’s voice whipped around the terrace.
“So what do you want from her?”
“From Elodie? I want nothing.” He spoke the words emphatically, wondering why they tasted strange in his mouth.
“You could offer her a financial settlement,” Max proposed. “In exchange for sole custody.”
“Money?” Fiero disputed with a humourless laugh. “You think she wants money?”
Neither brother spoke.
“If that were the case, don’t you think I would have heard from her before now? She could have begged a fortune in custody demands. A house. A trust fund for Jack. A stipend for herself. She has asked me for nothing, even now.” He swallowed, the reality of that something he hadn’t fully considered until that moment. He frowned. “I’m doing my best to work this out.”
Luca stood up and paced towards the pool, shucking his shirt as he went before diving in. He emerged on the other side, his eyes roaming Fiero thoughtfully.
“Look, Fiero, you’re not thinking straight if you are doing anything other than lining up custody papers and pushing her out of his – and your – life.”
Everything inside of Fiero rejected that. “She’s a good mother.”
“So? A better mother than Emilia is nanny?”
Fiero’s eyes flashed and even in that moment, as his temper was invoked, he wondered at his desire to defend Elodie, to protect her as a bear might a smaller, defenceless creature.
“We are not the best judges of this,” he said through gritted teeth. “Our own mother was hardly a paragon of maternal virtue. Elodie is. She loves Jack. She’d do anything for him.”