'You didn't have to take duty to such extremes-'
'He's my half-brother!' Xander expelled in hoarse-voiced fury. 'Half my own flesh and blood!'
'I know I am a very selfish woman,' his mother said shakenly. 'I know you see me as a spoiled, vain, useless waste of space. But it is happening again, isn't it?' She looked helpless suddenly. 'You are willing to sacrifice me for them just as your father was willing to do the same thing.'
'No,' Xander uttered gruffly.
'You already threatened it, Alexander,' she wearily reminded him. 'Your father did the same.'
'Hence the dramatic overdose aimed to pull him back into line again?' Xander said hardly. 'If that isn't extreme then I don't know what is, Madre. Now I've made you talk about this, am I to wait with bated breath for you to use the same emotional blackmail on me?'
His mother went white. On a gasp of horror at his cruelty Nell shot to her feet. 'Xan-'
But Gabriela got in first. 'I have my regrets, Alexander,' she told him stiffly. 'And I can now feel the cutting pangs of remorse for denying your father the right to know his other son. But if you believe I have not been punished very adequately for my sins then you're wrong. When Demitri died I lost a major part of myself. I still miss him so much.'
'You know,' Xander drawled, 'I would respond kindly to that blatant attempt to play on my sympathies if it was not for the fact that only minutes before Nell came in you were still refusing to sacrifice your ego for the sake of our marriage.'
Gabriela accepted this final indictment with a wry little smile. 'Ah, that sin called ego,' she drily mocked herself then turned to go.
'No, don't go,' Nell begged huskily. 'You both need to resolve this...'
Gabriela looked into her daughter-in-law's anxious face then at Xander's rock-like stance and offered up a grimace. 'You are a sweet person, Helen. You will make a good mother to my grandchild. Let us hope that my son will be a good father, for I think he forgets that I was not the only parent to leave him for another love.'
Then she walked away, leaving Nell staring helplessly after her while Xander continued to stand there like a cold, hard, stubborn fool!
'Go after her.' She swung on him urgently. 'She's your mother, for goodness' sake. You love her, you know you do, faults and sins alike!' When he still didn't move from his stiff stance, 'If you let her go now you will never see her again because the both of you are too stuffed full of pride to give a solitary inch! I thought you were bigger than this! Xander, please...!' she begged painfully.
But she didn't need to add the last part because with a tight, angry growl of blistering frustration he spun and strode after her, leaving Nell staring after him feeling very much as if she'd just been run over by a pair of trucks.
She watched his hands reach out to grasp Gabriela's narrow shoulders, watched through a deepening glaze of tears as he turned her into his chest. She caught the tones of thick, gruff, husky Italian, felt her heart quiver as the proud Gabriela broke her control on a muffled sob.
Then she turned away and began to shake like a leaf, still too befuddled by what she had been told to even attempt to sort it out in her head. She made for the kitchen, leaving mother and son alone to mend their differences while she attempted to do something really normal like setting about making coffee but feeling so at odds with herself and with Xander that she didn't hear him arrive at the door.
'OK?' The husky question came from behind her. Stiffening her spine, she pressed her lips together and nodded, not sure she wanted to look at him until she'd made up her mind if she hated him for putting his mother through that ordeal, or loved him for doing it for her.
'No more nausea?' he questioned when it became clear she wasn't going to speak.
'I'm fine,' she managed, fingers fiddling with the slender white china cup she'd set out ready for her coffee. 'Would you like a drink?'
'Not if you're planning to poison it,' he said drily, then hissed out a weary sigh. 'Nell, we need to-'
'Your telephone's ringing.'
And it was. They both listened to it for a few fraught seconds, Nell with her eyes squeezed tightly shut on a tense prayer that he would just go and answer the damn thing. Xander, she was sure because she could feel it, piercing the vulnerable tilt of her neck with grim intent in his gaze, wanted her to turn and look at him.
'Easy on the belladonna,' he instructed heavily after a moment and went back to his office, leaving her wilting though she didn't really know why.
A few minutes later she was bracing her shoulders and carrying two cups of freshly made coffee into his office. Xander was still on the phone with his dark head resting back against the chair's leather upholstery, and his eyes were closed. He looked tired, she noticed, dragged down and fed up. As she walked across the expanse of floor towards the desk she saw his lashes give a flicker and quickly looked away.
'Ejharisto, ' he murmured as she put one of the cups of coffee down in front of him.
She managed a brief upward glance at his face before turning away again.
'Stay,' he husked, showering her in tingling tremors. 'Sit down, relax, drink your coffee. I will be only a few more moments here.'
Sit down, relax, drink your coffee, Nell repeated silently and sank into the chair by his desk and wondered why she was still feeling so at odds with him when everything had been explained-hadn't it?
He was talking in Greek, she noticed, sitting up now and swinging his chair slightly with his eyes lowered to where a set of long fingers hit intermittently at the computer keyboard lying on the desk. His deep voice was quiet, asking low key questions with no hint of sharp command evident, as if someone had switched off his normal incisiveness.
The phone went quietly back on its rest. Strumming silence followed. Nell felt it so deeply inside that she tensed.
He picked up his coffee cup and looked down into it. 'How much belladonna?'
'Two spoonfuls,' she answered.
'Still not forgiven, then.' He grimaced a wry smile at her then lifted the cup to his lips and drank. The way that he did it was so much like a man willing to take his poison that she shot like a bullet to her feet.
'Stop it,' she stabbed at him.
'Stop what?' He looked at her.
'Making a joke of it.'
'Of what?'
'All of that-stuff we've got through today.'
'Are we through it?'
She frowned at the question, her tightening nerve-ends forcing her to discard her coffee-cup before she spilled it down herself. 'Y -your mother is your mother.'
'Is that supposed to make some sense to me?'
'Sh-she is what she is and you have to accept that.'
'I do, as much as I can do,' he reminded her. 'Next problem.'
The way he said it as if she was in a business meeting made her start to seethe. She jerked round to face the other way.
'I don't like you.' That was a problem, she thought. 'Sometimes...' she then added grudgingly because it was crazy to deny that she liked him in bed-loved him in bed.
Loved him all the time, she extended unhappily, but loving didn't have anything to do with liking, did it?
'You hurt people and don't seem to care when you're doing it.'
'Are we still discussing my mother?'
'No, me,' she said huskily.
Silence met that announcement. Nell folded her arms beneath her breasts and stared down at her feet.
'You should have told me the truth about Vanessa.'
'You should have told me the truth about Marcel.'
'That was different.'
'Why?'
'Because he wasn't an issue when you married me. Vanessa was and once you knew it you should have told me the truth straight away instead of letting me spend the next twelve months imagining you in her arms instead of mine!'
A sigh sounded behind her. The next sound was the creaking of his chair as he came to his feet. Her chin hit her chest when he came to stand right in front of her. Without saying a word he clamped his hands to her waist and lifted her up to sit on the desk. Next her thighs were summarily pushed apart and he was wedging himself between them, then her arms were firmly unfolded and lifted round his neck.
'OK,' he said. 'Now that we are more comfortable I will explain...I fell in love with you within about two seconds of you walking through your father's front door...'
Her chin shot up, green eyes wide with shock and disbelief. 'Got your full attention now?' he mocked. 'Ready to hang on my every word with bated breath?'
'You never did love me then, or you would not have left me on our wedding night believing what I did.'
'You are referring to that memorable time when you stood there in your bridal gown, shouting at me and looking so heartbreakingly beautiful, hurt and young?' He uttered a sigh. 'It was either leave you there or toss you on the bed and ravish you and-trust me, agape-you would not have survived the kind of ravishing I had in mind right then. I was mad with you for believing that trash-mad with myself for not seeing it coming. Do you think that Vanessa is the only skeleton a man like me has lurking in his closet? I've had women trying to foist their babies on to me and women trying to blackmail me. I've had them sneaking into my bed in the dead of night and crawling through windows in an effort to get to me.'
'Oh, don't be modest; do tell the rest,' Nell drawled acidly.
'You think I like being every greedy gold-digger's dream catch? Why do you think ·my security is so tight? Would you like a ballpark figure on how much it has cost me to keep such stories out of the Press over the years? Give anyone of those grasping women a glimpse at more money and they would be singing to the Press today. Vanessa was the exception. She was not my skeleton, which made those computer printouts you showered at me all the more annoying because I did not feel I had the right to break the promise of silence and protection I had made to my father on his death bed.'