Page 80 of Friends Who Fake It

She exhaled a breath she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding.

“You can be in his life,” she was spurred to offer, so relieved by his agreement that she found she wanted to offer him something in exchange. Perhaps this was going to be amicable and straight-forward after all.

“Oh, I will be.” He crossed his arms over her chest and afrissonof warning was back, filling her mouth with the taste of adrenaline.

“Fine then.” She swallowed, telling herself to relax.

“I’ll have my jet prepared for departure this evening. My assistant will come to collect him around five. Do not bother to pack a bag; I can buy whatever he needs.”

It wasn’t a question. Nor were they sentences that made any sense. “What are you talking about?”

“You’ve had the pleasure of raising our son for three years. Now, it is my chance to do the same.”

The world shook beneath her feet. “What?”

“You have had him for three years. I want my turn.”

“Your turn? He’s not a… a toy that we can share, Xavier!” She said, the words calm despite a growing sense of panic.

“No, he’s a child, our son, and he’s a person I should know intimately already. Does he like clowns or loathe them? Does he enjoy playing outdoors? Is he funny? Does he like to laugh? What does his laugh even sound like?” Each question had a bullet-like precision, landing squarely in her stomach with a wrenching, bloody burst.

“I deserve to know him as well as you do.” He spoke calmly but every line in his body was tense.

“And you can get to know him,” she insisted, ignoring the trepidation that was hovering in her mind. “I have no plans of keeping you from him.”

He arched a brow. “That’s hardly true. If I hadn’t discovered his existence for myself, I wouldn’t be standing here now, would I?”

A flush of shame heated her cheeks. “I would have told you about him.”

He swore in his native tongue, a word that needed no translation. He didn’t believe her; it was obvious. “Or would you have gone to greater lengths to hide him from me?” He prowled around the kitchen bench, stalking towards her, and she was powerless to move. “You had so many opportunities to be honest with me last night. You could have told me the truth about him, and us, but you didn’t. You ran away and I believe you had every intention of continuing to run.”

She didn’t reply; she couldn’t. Her teeth were chattering inside her mouth.

“Didn’t you say as much? That you would run away from me as often as it took?”

His lips were compressed in a line of furious disapproval. “But you didn’t mean thatyouwould run. You meant that you would take our son, and would run from me, didn’t you?”

Had she?

“You meant that you would run and hide, with my child? As you’ve been doing these past three years?”

She shook her head on instinct, even when she couldn’t say with certainty what she’d meant, nor what she’d intended.

“So tell me, Elizabeth. Why should I not do exactly that? Why should I not take our child and hide him from you? Why should I not inflict the same loss on you as you’ve seen fit to hand me? All because I hurt your pride by sleeping with you when I was engaged to another woman…”

“Stop it,” she said angrily, and desperately. Panic had turned the blood in her veins to ice. The idea of what he was proposing made her want to throw herself on the floor and curl into a ball. “Just stop.”

“I will not stop,” he was relentless. “I will take him and I will keep him until your debt is repaid.”

“He’s not a pawn!” She shouted, and she reached behind her for something to hold onto, her fingers curving around the handle of the fridge. “He’s our son!”

“Yours andmine! My flesh and blood that you concealed and would have continued to conceal! My God, how can you live with what you’ve done?”

She was shaking all over.

“You think it does not matter? That it is not such a big deal? Then see how you like it.”

“Stop threatening me,” she demanded, lifting a hand and rubbing it over her eyes as though she could somehow erase this visage from her eyes. It didn’t work.

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