‘No... I think that was caused by the doctor telling us that we’re having twins.’
‘Twins?’ Holly squealed in excitement. ‘When are you due?’
As the friends shared due dates, because Holly was expecting her second child, they went downstairs by a service staircase and settled down with cool drinks in the orangery with its tall shady plants and softly playing indoor fountain.
‘Vito told me about the will and that you were planning to have a child with Apollo,’ Holly confided then.
Pixie sighed heavily.
‘And you broke the rules, didn’t you?’ Holly whispered, anxiously searching Pixie’s tense little face and shadowed eyes. ‘You went and fell madly in love with his fancy-ass yacht.’
Pixie didn’t trust herself to laugh or speak and she jerked her chin down in confirmation.
Holly groaned out loud.
‘I wanted a child and because I wasn’t very good at...er...dating I thought that Apollo could be my best chance of ever having one,’ Pixie admitted very quietly. ‘I should tell you now...we are separating after the party.’
‘Is it really that cut and dried? I mean, even Vito, who generally assumes the worst of Apollo when women are involved, thinks that there’s no way that Apollo would have slept with Izzy Jerome. She’s Jeremy’s kid sister and sisters are off-limits between friends. And Apollo has uninvited Izzy from your party,’ Holly completed with satisfaction.
‘Izzy Jerome was on the guest list?’ Pixie gasped in dismay.
‘She’s not any more,’ Holly emphasised. ‘I don’t think he is involved with her. She’s very young, you know, still a teenager.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Pixie lifted her head high and sipped at her drink. ‘The best way forward for us now is for us to go our separate ways. That was planned from the start.’
Holly shook her head. ‘I can’t believe you signed up for that. I thought you hated him.’
Pixie said nothing because there was a sour taste in her mouth. Only days had passed since she had planned to tell her friend how very different Apollo was from his public image but recent events had proved her wrong in all her assumptions. In truth she supposed that she had stupidly idealised Apollo to justify the reality that she had fallen in love with him.
‘Let me see what you’re wearing tonight,’ Holly urged in a welcome change of subject.
Pixie took her up to the bedroom to show her the long scarlet dress in its garment bag. ‘Apollo had it designed and I don’t like it much...it’s a wee bit slutty, don’t you think? I have no idea what he’s wearing.’
Holly skimmed a thoughtful fingertip over the black corset lacing round the bust line. ‘Gangster’s moll?’
‘Well, at least there’s no fairy wings included,’ Pixie commented flatly. ‘But there is a very ornate piece of valuable jewellery which he brought back from London and he evidently expects me to wear it with the costume.’
Pixie opened the worn leather box on the dressing table and listened to Holly ooh and ah over the fabulously flamboyant ruby necklace and drop earrings. She turned her head and glanced back at the red dress again. There was something about it, something eerily familiar but she couldn’t pin down what it was.
Dressing for dinner, she donned the costume. She decided it was fortunate that pregnancy had swelled her boobs because the gathered, dipping neckline positively demanded a glimpse of bosom. She tightened the laces, noting with wry appreciation that she finally had the chest she had long dreamt of having. But like her marriage to Apollo, it was an illusion, she thought morosely, for when she had finally delivered her twins she would probably return to being pretty much flat-chested again.
Apollo strode in and she stopped dead to stare at him. He was tricked out like a pirate in tall black boots and fitted breeches with a white ruffled shirt and a sword. And being Apollo and fantastically handsome, he looked spectacular and electrifyingly sexy.
‘I gather that I’m a pirate’s lady,’ Pixie guessed.
‘A pirate’s treasure,’ Apollo quipped. ‘You’re not wearing the rubies.’
He extracted the necklace from the box and handed her the earrings. ‘This set belonged to my mother. It hasn’t been worn since she died. I had it cleaned and reset for you in London.’
The eye-catching rubies settled coolly against her skin and she slowly attached the earrings, watching them gleam with inner fire as they swung in the lamp light. ‘Thanks,’ she said stiltedly.
A very large dinner party awaited them on the ground floor. With surprising formality Apollo brought his relatives forward one by one to meet Pixie. There were innumerable aunties and uncles and cousins. She marvelled at his calm control under stress and his polished manners. He was essentially behaving like a proud new husband. Nobody could ever have guessed that that dream was already dead and buried. It had been a dream, she reminded herself doggedly, a dream that could never have become reality with Apollo Metraxis in a leading role.
In the ballroom she watched Apollo socialising and frowned. It wasn’t fair that she could barely drag her eyes off his tall, powerful physique; it wasn’t right or decent that she still felt his magnetic pull. And Apollo dressed up like a pirate was pure perfect fantasy. The arrogant tilt of his dark head, the breadth of his shoulders, his narrow waist and lean, tight hips, the long muscular line of his thighs in skin-tight pants. Her mouth ran dry watching him and her weakness filled her with self-loathing.
Apollo, meanwhile, was in a filthy mood. The planning had gone perfectly but the timing had gone seriously askew. He should have known better; he should have known not to waste his time trying to be something he was not. Since when had he been romantic? What did he even know about being romantic? And in any case, she hadn’t even noticed, which said all that needed to be said. He had taken the cover of her battered romantic paperback and had the outfits copied. Even the costume designer had gazed at him as though he were crazy and he felt like an idiot for going for the pirate theme. Even so, he wasn’t going down without a fight.
‘I’m no good at slow dances,’ Pixie protested when Apollo slowly raised her out of her seat and took her away from Holly, whom she had clung to throughout the evening.
‘So, stand on my feet,’ Apollo advised, wrapping her slender body into his arms with the kind of strength she couldn’t fight without making a scene.
Murderously conscious that their guests were watching them, Pixie pressed her face against his chest and breathed in deep. He smelled so good she wanted to bottle him. Her fingers spread across his powerful shoulders and she drifted in a world of inner pain, wavering wildly between hating and craving and loving. She had missed him so much when he was away from her in London and now she had a whole future of missing him ahead of her.
‘I won’t agree to a separation,’ Apollo breathed softly above her head.
‘I don’t need your agreement. I’ll just leave.’
He went rigid in her arms and missed a step. Pixie was fighting back tears, reminding herself that they were in the middle of a party, that they were the centre of attention as much because she was a new bride as because the bridegroom had been outed as a cheat little more than forty-eight hours previously.
‘I’ll buy you a house in London...but you stay safe here until I have that organised for you.’
‘I don’t need your help.’
‘I’ll call you when I’ve set up the house and you can fly out and give me your opinion.’
Pixie swallowed back a sudden inexplicable sob because, without warning, Apollo had stopped fighting her and had backed off. Instead of feeling relieved, she felt more lost and alone than ever. They really were splitting up. Their marriage was over.
* * *
The three weeks that followed were a walking blur for Pixie. Apollo had left Nexos as soon as the last of their guests had departed. He had not attempted to have another serious conversation with her. Those last words exchanged on the dance floor, with her ridiculous threat to just walk out, lingered with her. Yes, she could walk out, she conceded, but she couldn’t just walk away from her feelings, the painful feelings that accompanied her everywhere no matter where she was or what she was doing. She couldn’t stop thinking about Apollo or fighting off the suspicion that she had condemned him on the basis of his reputation rather than on the evidence.
So preoccupied was she that she barely noticed that her bouts of sickness were fading away. She had to move into maternity clothes rather sooner than she had hoped because most of her fashionable outfits were too fitted to cope with her swollen breasts and vanishing waistline. She purchased new clothes online, loose-cut separates picked for comfort rather than elegance. With Apollo absent she discovered that she didn’t care what she looked like. He phoned every week to civilly enquire after her health, and when he asked her if she could join him in London on a certain date her heart sank, because once he showed her the house he expected her to occupy she assumed that the dust would settle on their official separation. Evidently he had accepted that their relationship, their intimacy, was over now.
And wasn’t that what she had wanted? How could she move forward without putting their marriage behind her? Apollo had denied infidelity but he hadn’t put up much of a fight against her disbelief, had he? But like a sneaky snake in the grass in the back of her mind lurked the dangerous thought that she could, if she wanted, offer him a second chance. She was so ashamed of that indefensible thought that it woke her up at night in a cold sweat. She understood that her brain was struggling to find a solution to her unending grief and sense of deep loss and she knew that the forgiving approach worked for some couples but she knew it would never work for her. Nor would it work for a male like Apollo, who needed strong boundaries and punishing consequences because he wouldn’t respect anything else.