Page 71 of Friends Who Fake It

Their son.

A son she’d kept secret from this man because she’d felt she had no other choice. Because she’d had to. And now he was standing before her, asking her to tell him about their time together and she wanted to – she wanted to tell him that they’d fallen in love! Except it was a lie.

He hadn’t loved her.

He’d been using her. Having fun with her. Toying with her. A last indiscretion before he married the love of his life.

And he still was toying with her.

His wife was out there, and he was whisking women up to his hotel room on a hunch. Once a cheater, always a cheater.

“We met at the theatre and you asked me back to your hotel room. We slept together. The end.”

“No, not the end,” he contradicted, moving closer to her. “What was I seeing? Who was I with?”

Her exhalation was impatient. “Les Miserables. You were alone.”

He frowned. “It doesn’t sound likely.”

“You had bought the ticket on a whim, you said,” she grudgingly answered, her mind drifting back to that night. To the way he’d shrugged and laughed and she’d thought he was the most charming man in the world. “You were walking through Covent Garden and a hawker had offered, you’d agreed. You’d never seen it and decided life was too short not to have new experiences.”

She felt him reject that idea. “That sounds overly sentimental.”

“Yes.” She smiled, wistfully, then sobered. “Anyway, that’s all there is to it. What we shared was nothing special.” The words stuck in her throat. “I was one of many women for you.”

“And was I one of many men in your life?” He prompted, coming to stand in front of her, so close that she could have closed the distance between them simply by taking a large gulp of air.

“T-That’s not really any of your business,” she muttered, her cheeks flaming. “Whatever we were was over years ago. Now you’re just a stranger to me.”

He ground his teeth together, his jaw moving with the action. “I don’t believe that. You looked at me and ran a mile. In my experience, people don’t run when they don’t feel. So? What happened between us?”

“Why do you care?” She demanded, turning the tables on him out of a need for self-preservation. “You’re married. How would your wife feel to know you’re out chasing up the ghosts of lovers-past?”

“My wife is now my ex-wife,” he said and Ellie’s eyes flew to his, her body reacting to that announcement with a surge of relief strong enough to knock her to the ground.

“What? When?”

“We divorced soon after we were married,” he murmured. “A couple of months.”

A couple of months? She would have still been pregnant.

The past swirled around them, a whirlpool too difficult to escape from. Why hadn’t his mother called her?

Besides, it didn’t matter. He was a liar and a cheat. So? Hadn’t he deserved to know about the baby? Her conscience demanded. It was one thing to keep the secret when she’d believed she was saving his marriage. Quite another now there was no marriage.

She was at a fork in the road. In one direction, was a reality in which Joshua had a father – and Xavier was in their lives. Xavier who she would never trust, who she would always hate, who would never remember her. But Joshuawouldhave a father.

And the alternative? She could walk out of this hotel room, keeping her secret, keeping Joshua to herself, knowing that Xavier and his parents deserved that fate.

Her heart was heavy.

It was a decision that her conscience dictated as easy, but for Ellie, there was no black and white answer. She needed to think. She needed to talk to her twin sister Eleanor – who always saw things clearly.

“I can’t be here,” she said with a shake of her head. “I need to go home.”

“Why? Why can you not stay and fill in the gaps for me?”

“Because,” she murmured, moving away from him as though he were on fire. She stalked towards the door, grabbing her clutch purse up as she went, pain in every step.

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