had become an obsession, rarely out of his mind. What the hell would she want to see him about? Probably some problem relating to her family, he reasoned grimly, recalling that he had urged her to contact him at any time and could hardly complain if she had decided to take him up on the invitation.
Can’t make it to lunch in time. Living in Oxford now.
Xan froze. She wasn’t even occupying the apartment he had bought her? What the hell was she doing in Oxford? He asked her to meet him that afternoon at her apartment, the one she wasn’t using, he clarified with controlled sarcasm.
It was ages before she assented with a grudging OK and promised to text him once she had worked out what time she would be there.
* * *
Elvi wouldn’t allow herself to dress up for her meeting with Xan. He was the father of her unborn child, not a lover, not someone she wanted to impress, not anything really. In jeans and a purple filmy top, her hair confined in a long braid that snaked down her slender spine, she caught the train and battled every intimate memory that tried to sneak back into her mind. But she had forgotten nothing about Xan from the way he liked to check stocks and shares and eat in silence over breakfast to the provocative blaze of his stunning golden eyes when he was hungry for her.
Had he reconciled with Angie Sarantos? Or had that flirtation simply been a symptom of his restive boredom in Elvi’s company? She allowed herself to think along those lines because it was realistic thinking and naturally she was curious. It was also best not to dwell in advance on Xan’s likely horror at the news that she had conceived because she was well aware that he had not seriously entertained that possibility.
She texted Xan as soon as she arrived at the apartment and anxiously paced the living area while she waited. The shrill of the doorbell took her by surprise because she had assumed he would have a key for the second apartment as he had had for the first.
‘Don’t you have a key?’ she asked as she pulled open the door and fell back a step.
‘No, this apartment is in your name. I have no right of entry here,’ Xan told her quietly.
‘Are you saying you bought it for me? An apartment?’ Elvi gasped incredulously as she went into instant retreat, intimidated by the height of him towering over her that close. Nor could she believe what she was hearing. He had moved her out of the other apartment to put her into a new one but she had no idea why. In any case, why on earth would he buy her an apartment?
Xan jerked a casual shoulder, dismissing the guilty conscience that had powered the purchase. ‘I wanted you to be secure—’
‘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.
