Page 44 of A Nine-Month Deal With Her Husband

But being with Millie meant being vulnerable, opening himself up and taking a chance she wouldn’t hurt him.

Olivier and Anders, walked towards him, dressed, like he was, only in board shorts. They both wore dark sunglasses and Ben wished he’d thought to pick up his own before leaving his luxury room. His eyes felt as though they were being slowly roasted on an open fire.

‘Ben, we are flying out just after lunch. What time are you leaving?’ Anders asked when they stopped to speak to him. Ben looked up at him and shrugged. It was Christmas Eve tonight and he was supposed to fly to the UK, but he hadn’t thought of an alternative arrangement.

‘I’m not sure,’ he told Anders. ‘I might hang around for another day or two and solo celebrate your last few days of being an unmarried man.’

Anders, always so serious, tapped his temple with his index finger. ‘I’ve been a married man, in my heart, since I met Jules. These few days with my friends are just a nice break and not a goodbye to my old way of thinking.’

Ben looked up at him, as his words settled on his skin. He understood what Anders was trying to say—he’d married Jules, emotionally, five years ago and all they were doing with their wedding was making it legal and celebrating their love. He and Mille had made things legal a long time ago, but they’d only discovered each other on an emotional level recently. She’d said she was in love with him, he knew he loved her.

He just didn’t know if love wasenough.

Anders told them he had to find some aspirin for his pounding head and left him and Olivier alone. His cousin dropped to sit on the sand in front of him and extended his long legs. He leaned back on his hands, beach sand covering his fingers.

‘On a scale of one to ten, how rough are you feeling?’ Olivier asked him.

‘Fifteen,’ Ben replied.

‘Is that from the booze or because you walked out of the gala concert and left Millie to watch it alone?’ Olivier asked, keeping his tone low.

Ben jerked his head and immediately wished he hadn’t. He groaned. ‘How do you know that?’

‘I’ve seen the articles. You stormed out of the concert hall into your waiting limo, Millie returned to her seat. And every paper, printed and on-line, published a photograph of a devastated-looking Millie sitting next to your empty seat.’

Ben cursed and rubbed his face with both his hands. When he’d left the Harpa Concert Hall, desperate to get away from her and his feelings, he hadn’t considered that the gala concert was one of the most covered events of the year, that social diarists and journalists from all over Europe attended the event.

Millie’s speech was a big deal. His coming on to the stage to support her, and the intimacy of the gesture, would’ve raised theirIs love in the air?suspicions. His bolting, just a half-hour later, would’ve added fuel to their journalistic fire.Dammit.This situation had gone from bad to worse to terrible.

‘Millie had to fight her way through a group of journalists outside your house when she left for the airport,’ Olivier told him. ‘There were more photographs of her in the papers.’

‘How did she look?’

‘Hard to tell because she was wearing enormous sunglasses and a floppy hat.’ Olivier shrugged. ‘But pale. She looked pale.’

Ben cursed again, keeping his tone low because kids were running past him and he didn’t want them to learn words they shouldn’t.

‘So, what happened, Benedikt?’

Ben told him about their fight, that he’d started to stutter, his terror when emotion swamped him. He couldn’t allow emotion back into his life because if he did, he would start to stutter again and he refused to allow that to happen.

Olivier tipped his head to the side, looking confused. ‘So, you started to stutter at the beginning of your argument with Millie?’

‘Mmm,’ Ben replied, feeling twelve again. He dragged his foot through the sand.

‘So you stuttered, told her you couldn’t be with her and left, right?’

‘No, we argued. She told me she loved me, that we could be together, that she didn’t care about my stutter,’ Ben explained. ‘Can we stop talking about this now?’

‘No,’ Olivier retorted. ‘And you argued for how long?’

Been shrugged. ‘Ten minutes, fifteen? Twenty? I can’t remember, we both had a lot to say.’

‘And did you stutter while you were arguing with her?’ Olivier asked.

The question punched Ben between his eyeballs. He stared at his cousin as the importance of his words sank in. ‘No. I was fine.’

Olivier rolled his eyes at him. ‘So you had a quick relapse, but kept fighting with her because a couple of sentences came out wrong? You broke her heart over acoupleof sentences?’

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