CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Xavier’s POV

I waited outside her building for about two more minutes after she went inside.

I had done that unconsciously.

The light in the ground floor window of her building came on about few seconds after she disappeared through the door and I watched it without examining too carefully why I was watching it.

I had used her first name deliberately when I greeted her goodnight. It wasn’t a slip.

I had seen the mild shock in her before she reached for the door handle, the awareness earned the recognition.

She had gotten out anyway. And walked to her door without looking back, and I think that was the correct response to a moment charged considerably longer and closer than either of us had planned.

I pulled away from the kerb and rejoined the evening traffic.

***

The drive back to the penthouse took longer than usual, there were roadworks on the main route, a diversion that added fifteen more minutes to my drive time. It took me through streets I didn’t normally use, the city showing me a different version of itself than the one I moved through by habit. I drove without the habitual background noise I usually filled my drive time with.

Then, my mind drifted to Aria again.

Looks like my mind is doing a lot of drifting these days.

I thought about the way she had sat in the passenger seat without the self-consciousness people sometimes carried in spaces they associated with wealth and status.

She had simply sat beside me in the car, filled with pleasant aura, like she’s been designed to be by my side. Talking about her son and her work and the tube timetable with the straightforwardness of someone who had never learned to edit herself for her surroundings.

It made me… ehm… restful. Like someone I want.

But wants, in my experience, had always carried a charge, the tension of a person reaching for another person at the other side of his world.

What I felt in the car had all of that awareness neither of us seems to want to birth. But underneath it was a more quieter feeling that felt docking at the destination port.

Like a room adjusting to a temperature it preferred.

I pulled into the penthouse parking structure, took a deep breath and got out of the car.

***

Upstairs, I dropped my jacket over the back of the chair nearest to me and went straight to the bar cart in the corner of the sitting room.

My hands found a bottle of scotch in the neat row of the bar. I poured the amber content in the whiskey glass with detailed attention. Like the same order I defaulted to when I needed to think without the noise of a glass that required attention.

My legs carried me to the window. I stood looking out at the city the way I had stood looking out at it the night, staring at the stars and counting unconsciously.

I took a sip of the scotch and let it sting my tongue for a moment before swallowing.

Aria’s POV

I dropped my bag on the couch and went straight to the kitchen. I was beginning to feel hungry.

Bryan had been at Arthur’s for since the last weekend, one of his regular stays.

The apartment was quiet in the way it only got when Bryan was away, a stillness that felt different from peace, more like absence wearing peace’s clothing.

I filled a glass of water and gulped it down, still standing at the kitchen counter.

One thing I had learned about Xavier Beaumont was that he never pushed.

It was not the most ordinary thing in the world but somehow, the feelings felt like a mutual thing.

But, he was engaged to Ivanna Sinclair.

I knew that now. He belongs to someone else. To another woman.

And I know better now that Ivanna is not a woman I should cross.

A woman who had looked at me with a smile that belonged in a different category from warmth. The look in her eyes were enough reason to stay clear.

That was the reality I had been holding onto alongside every other chemistry that seemed to have happened between me and Xavier.

I went to the fridge to get some beef to make fast food.

It’s good to have a good paying job, I no longer worry about how to stretch my salary to get enough groceries. All thanks to Arthur too.

Thinking about it now, I still don’t know how I failed to realize Arthur and Xavier could be family. Even, with the *Beaumont* family name.

I accepted it as a mistake on my own part.

The sensible version of me who had survived five years of single motherhood through sheer, unglamorous practicality had a clear position on this.

I had a good job, the best job I’d had since I dropped out, at a company owned by a man I could not afford to complicate my professional life with.

I had worked too hard and given up too much to let a charged silence undo any of it.

The other version of me who had apparently survived five years of single motherhood with its feelings entirely intact despite her best efforts remembered exactly how it felt when he looked at me with those sexy grey eyes of his.

I pushed off the counter and went to check if the front door was locked.