Page 103 of Friends Who Fake It

He seized on the ambivalent, guilty tone in her voice. “Much older?”

She nodded slowly. “He was thirty.”

“thirty?” his brows lifted. “And you were?”

“Sixteen.” She swallowed.

“Jesucristo,”he swore angrily. “He was old enough to be your father.”

“Yes,” she admitted with a soft shift of her body, uncrossing and then crossing her legs beneath the table. “But I didn’t care. He was unlike anyone I’d ever met. Smart and funny and sophisticated and so interested in me.” She grimaced. “I was an idiot. I fell for his lies completely.”

“What happened?” Xavier asked, the question strangely urgent.

Ellie could remember the bitterness of the day with clarity. “He lost interest after we slept together,” she said stiffly. “He dropped me home the next morning and didn’t even say he’d call me.” Her face was pale, her eyes showing remembered hurts. “My parents were livid. They couldn’t believe I’d spent all night out. My dad threatened to press charges but I was sixteen. Our being together wasn’t criminal. It was just… criminally stupid.”

“Yes,” Xavier agreed, the word bit from between his teeth.

“Apparently I have terrible taste in men,” she said in a watery attempt at humour. He didn’t find it amusing. He was all ice and stone, staring at her, waiting for her to speak.

But what more was there to say? On a small sigh, she pressed her fork into a crispy piece of potato.

“From then on, any boy that I so much as talked to, my parents presumed I was sleeping with. They were so embarrassed by my actions and convinced I had chronically ‘loose morals’. So when I came home pregnant and refusing to tell them who the father of the baby was, they weren’t exactly surprised. Nor were they in any mood to be sympathic and supportive.”

“So they kicked you out,” he surmised grimly.

She nodded, that painful weekend one she didn’t like to revisit.

“And now? What part do they play in your life? In my son’s life?”

“None.” She sipped her wine. “Nell and I don’t speak to them. They couldn’t forgive me for getting pregnant and refusing to have an abortion, and they couldn’t forgive Nell for supporting my decisions.”

His face was like iron, all harsh angles and planes, strong and fierce. “They wanted you to terminate?”

“Yes. Or even put him up for adoption. And I thought about that. I really did.” She lowered her gaze, feeling anxious at the very idea now. “But the moment I felt Josh move in my tummy, I knew he was my baby. That I’d keep him no matter what.”

His eyes were narrowed as they rested on her face, his bitterness impossible to miss.

“I was twenty years old and terrified. But I knew I would love our baby with all my heart, and I did. I have. I do.”

Xavier was very quiet while these statements met his ears, and then he nodded. “I believe you love him.” He said finally. “I think you are a good mother and that he’s very attached to you. It’s the only reason I’m seeking to marry you rather than eviscerate you in family court and take him away.”

Now it was Ellie who flinched, his words like lashes of burning rope against the base of her spine. “You’d never succeed,” she said with more bravado than she felt. Her insides were quivering. She was a mess. She remembered the threat of the ambassador, talk of the embassy, and knew he had every gun in his arsenal to do exactly as he’d threatened.

His smile was grim, a cynical gash that did nothing to soften the vice-like grip of disapproval on his handsome face. “If I had died in that accident,” he said, the words calm despite their alarming content, “would you have told my parents about the child?”

She startled, thinking of Maria and Roberto with renewed anxiety. “How would I know who your parents were?” She asked, dropping her hands to her lap and fidgeting them there.

“They were at the hospital with Arabella. I presumed you’d seen them?”

“I… no,” she lied, her eyes unable to meet his. “Perhaps they’d stepped out. I wasn’t there that long.” She was agitated and uncertain, trying to keep track of all the things that were in her head. Why hadn’t she told him the truth about his parents? Why didn’t she do so now? Why didn’t she throw it at his feet that she had been warned off, offered money in exchange for silence, by his parents, and that when she called to tell them she was, in fact, pregnant, they’d made it almost impossible?

Because she knew the pain of parental estrangement. She knew that every day started with a keening sense of regret and grief – to mourn parents who are still living is something she wouldn’t wish on anyone. Even Xavier.

“If you were dead,” she returned to the original question rather than go down a road that would lead to more lies and evasions. “I imagine I would have told them, yes. There would have been no marriage to protect. And I could have told them without having to live with the consequences,” she added, as an afterthought.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, suffering this fate.” And she pushed her chair back, too upset now to eat, despite the ravenous hunger that had set upon her when first she’d entered this mausoleum. “I was twenty years old and terrified,” she said, swallowing hard. “You were a billionaire who used me for sex and then went off and got married. What the hell was I meant to do?”

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