in his eyes. Now his protector side is coming out for a different York sister.
“Was he flirting with her?” Xander asks, his voice low. “Did he flirt with Bella and then move to Victoria?”
I shake my head. “No. He was having a friendly conversation with Bella, and they had some interesting things in common. I could see where they could have a connection if they were allowed to follow it.”
“What do you mean, ‘allowed?’” Xander asks.
“That’s not the right word,” I say, thinking further upon it. “But I could tell Bella liked him. I get the impression she’s painfully shy, and she was actually laughing and talking with Camden, and he was engaging her back, taking an interest in getting to know her. Then it’s like she disappeared the second Victoria walked into the room. Camden took one look at Victoria, and that was it for him. He left the conversation with Bella, and I know it hurt her. I’ve been there in the past, where you get hopeful and excited and think you’ve met someone that could be different, and then you realise they aren’t into you. It stings.”
Xander looks away for a moment, his brow furrowed in thought. “I’m torn,” he finally says.
“Torn?”
He turns back to me. “While I like Tremblay, a part of me wants to bash him in the face for what he did to Bella and what he will do to Victoria,” Xander says. “I know what he wants with Victoria, and because she’s like my sister, I don’t like it. Believe me, if you hadn’t told me to mind my own shit, as you so eloquently put it, I wouldn’t have. I would have pulled him aside and said to leave her alone. But the fact that I wanted to do that made me feel like such a hypocrite. I see myself in him, Poppy. And I can’t tell you how much I hate that.”
Xander pauses for a moment, then continues. “I never thought about how the girl felt. All I wanted was to have fun. Flirt. If I liked a girl, I wanted to get into her knickers. I didn’t want to care about her. I never cared about how they felt when I never texted them. Or how I acted if I bumped into them again. I’d merely say hello and move on like I’d never had any kind of intimacy with them. I never thought of the collateral damage left by me being so damn selfish.”
Tears prick my eyes. My God, he’s become such a man.
“Are you crying?” Xander asks, a confused look filtering across his face.
“You are such a man,” I say, my voice surprisingly wobbly to my own ears as I speak my thoughts. “You’ve done more than change. You’ve become a superior man. A man who owns his mistakes. You don’t shy away from what you’ve done or who you used to be, and that is a hard, painful thing to do. You say a spine of steel is rare? What you have done is even rarer. You looked in the mirror and owned your past. It would be so much easier to ignore it. Run from it. But you ran to it, Xander. And I admire that more than you know.”
Xander is silent for a moment. Then he swallows hard, as if he’s trying to shove down a lump that has formed in his throat.
“Owning my past is hard,” he says, his voice gruff. “I’m ashamed of that man. And I know it’s going to be a long road before people can see who I am now.”
I touch his face with my free hand. He blinks in surprise but doesn’t resist my caress here on the path at Kensington Palace.
“They will see you,” I promise him, my voice strong. “Of that, I have no doubt.”
Xander takes my hand and places it over his heart. “All that matters is that you see me. As the man I am now.”
“I do,” I whisper. “I do see you.”
We resume our walk back to his cottage. Xander swings open the gate, and my heart is racing as we head towards the door. After that conversation we had, I want to show him how I feel with more than words.
Xander opens the door, and as soon as we are inside, his mouth is on mine. His kiss is slow. Caressing. His tongue explores my mouth with a reverence that makes my knees nearly buckle. I drop my tote to the floor as