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 skintight 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.
Pixie arrived back in London late afternoon in late December with Hector in tow. A limo met her at the airport and whisked her back to the penthouse apartment. Apollo was flying in from LA and had told her that he would not be arriving until shortly before their scheduled meeting. That was why it was a surprise for Pixie to be curled up on a sofa with her dog in front of the television and suddenly be told by Manfred that she had visitors. As she stood up Hector bolted for cover under a chair.
A tall man with prematurely greying dark hair walked in with an oddly self-conscious air but Pixie’s attention leapt straight off him towards the highly recognisable youthful blonde accompanying him.
‘I’m Jeremy Slater and I apologise for walking in on you like this but my sister has something she has to say to you,’ the man told her stiffly. ‘Izzy…you have the floor…’
The tall, slender blonde fixed strained blue eyes on Pixie and burst into immediate speech. ‘I’m really sorry for what I did. I set Apollo up as cover. I knew he was married but I didn’t think about that. I’m afraid I was only thinking about what suited me.’
Pixie was frowning in bewilderment. ‘You set Apollo up?’ she repeated blankly.
‘I knew that if I was spotted with Apollo, the paps would assume that we were together and that they wouldn’t look any more closely into who I was staying with in that building,’ she spelled out tautly.
‘What my sister isn’t saying,’ Jeremy interposed drily, ‘is that she has been involved with a famous actor, who keeps an apartment in Apollo’s building. As that man is married, both my sister and he wished to keep their relationship out of the public eye.’
‘I didn’t intend to cause anyone any trouble,’ Izzy said pleadingly.
‘But you weren’t too concerned when you did cause that trouble,’ Pixie pointed out, her stomach churning with shock. ‘I can see that I have your brother to thank for this explanation being made.’
‘I couldn’t stand back and let Apollo take the fall for something he didn’t do,’ Jeremy declared cheerfully. ‘He’s been guilty as charged so often and I’m certain that that means that he suffers in the credibility stakes.’
‘Yes,’ Pixie agreed, her face hot with shame because even she hadn’t really listened to Apollo when he’d said he was innocent.
She hadn’t asked the r
elevant questions and she hadn’t asked if he could prove his story. In fact she hadn’t given him a fair hearing in any way and in retrospect that acknowledgement humbled her. In common with any other bystander she had indeed assumed that he was guilty as charged, but she had had much less excuse than other people because she had lived with Apollo for months and knew that he was something more, something deeper than the heartless womaniser he appeared to be in public.
Jeremy and Izzy departed soon afterwards with Jeremy remarking that he hoped they would soon meet in more sociable circumstances. His sister, however, said nothing, probably guessing that Pixie never wanted to see her again if she could help it.
After that visit, Pixie went to bed but of course she couldn’t sleep. She had never trusted Apollo and had essentially regarded her distrust as a trait that strengthened her. Only now was she seeing the downside of that outlook. Looking for the worst and always expecting the worst from a man was not a healthy approach and it was unfair. Even worse, using distrust as a first line of defence had crucially blinded her to what was actually happening in their marriage. She should have recognised how far Apollo had already drifted from his original blueprint for a marriage that was a business arrangement. Time after time he had done things, said things that defied that blueprint and she had ignored that reality. After all, she had changed—why shouldn’t he have changed too?
*
The next morning it was a struggle for Pixie to eat any breakfast. She had forced a separation on Apollo and had voluntarily given him back his freedom. She had well and truly proved to be her own worst enemy. Pride and distrust had driven her into rejecting the man she loved. Could he forgive her for that? Could he forgive her for misjudging him?
Would her misjudgement and their marriage even matter to him now? After all, his inheritance would soon be fully his because by the time their children were born he would have met the exact terms of his father’s will. Nowhere in that will did it state that Apollo had to be still living with his wife.