LITMIR.BIZ

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yes. Your family.’ He picked up his coffee and sipped it, wincing slightly at the weakness of the brew. Her background had added to her general unsuitability as a Kanellis wife. She came from the kind of dysfunctional family which had been completely outside his experience. Her mother had never been married and her three children had been fathered by unknown and absent men. The ramshackle, gypsy-like quality of Lexi’s home life had appalled him—but even that had not been strong enough to take the edge off his hunger for her. He had brushed aside suggestions that two people from such differing backgrounds might never find any mutual areas of compatibility and had married her anyway. ‘How are they?’

      Lexi’s eyes narrowed with suspicion because there was an odd note in his voice and it was alarming her. Xenon didn’t usually enquire solicitously about her family and he certainly didn’t drive nearly two hundred miles in order to do so. In the past she might have asked him why he wanted to know—when she was still in that honeymoon phase of believing that things like that mattered. When all their dreams had been intact and lying ahead of them. But she had moved beyond that phase a long time ago and his opinions were no longer relevant.

      ‘They’re okay,’ she said.

      ‘Really?’

      She met his eyes and gave a sigh of resignation. ‘Look, you’ve obviously got something on your mind—so why not just come out and say it?’

      There was a pause. ‘I’ve seen your brother.’

      ‘My brother?’ she echoed in alarm, because this could only mean trouble. Hiding her sudden sense of fear, she composed her features into an expression of mild interest. ‘Which one?’

      ‘I think you know very well which one. Jason.’

      Lexi’s heart was now going, thud, thud, thud. Jason. Of course. Jason who had been trouble from the moment he was born. Still she kept the tremble from her voice, trying to make her question sound as indulgent as the question of any caring sister. ‘What did he want?’

      Xenon put his cup down with a small sound of exasperation, watching as her heavy-lidded eyes suddenly became hooded. ‘Let’s dispense with the air of innocence, shall we? You’re not stupid, Lexi. What do you think he wanted?’

      The invisible hand which was clenched around her heart grew even tighter and Lexi knew that the time for pretence had passed. ‘Money, I’m guessing,’ she said numbly.

      ‘Money!’ he agreed. ‘That thing he can’t do without. The one thing he’s never bothered to earn himself throughout his useless, idle life.’

      ‘Please don’t insult him.’

      ‘Oh, come on—isn’t that taking sisterly loyalty a little too far? Since when did the truth become an insult—or have you spent so long avoiding it that you just don’t see it any more? And maybe here’s a truth you really should take on board.’ His body stilled and his eyes grew watchful. ‘Don’t you see that giving him everything he wants has helped make him the man he is today?’

      Furiously, she shook her head and glared at him. Because how would someone like Xenon ever understand? Xenon who had been born into a world of lavish wealth. He hadn’t known what it was like to come home from school to an empty fridge. To have to cut a hole at the top of your shoes because you’d outgrown them.

      In Xenon’s world there had been relatives—far too many of them in her opinion—and servants, who had all doted on him. He’d never had to go to the police station to bail out his drunken mother and then to lie about it to social services, terrified that the family would be split up if the truth ever emerged. He’d never had to hold a terrified and sobbing child who had woken up from yet another nightmare to discover that the real world could be infinitely worse.

      ‘You don’t understand,’ she said.

      ‘Oh, I think I do,’ he said coldly. ‘Jason has found that the well of easy money you’ve always provided has run dry—so who better to turn to than his wealthy brother-in-law?’

      The thudding of her heart increased. ‘What does he want money for?’

      ‘Why do you think? To mop up the mess he’s made of his life with his gambling addiction.’

      Lexi closed her eyes as a terrible sense of inevitability crept over her. She’d tried everything to help Jason with his gambling habit. In the early days she had sat down and talked to him and he had lied through his teeth and told her he’d quit. She’d believed every word he’d said as she’d signed over yet another cheque supposed to help put him back on the straight and narrow. Or maybe she had just wanted to believe it. Later, she had paid for the first of many visits to the rehab clinic—until he was kicked out of the last one for starting up a poker school with his fellow patients.

      She opened her eyes to find Xenon studying her. ‘I expect that you told him no and sent him away,’ she said. ‘In fact, I’m rather hoping you did. The last counsellor I spoke to told me that I should “withdraw with love”.’ She saw the perplexed look on Xenon’s face as he heard the term and she remembered how disparaging he’d been about people who had sought professional help for their problems. ‘It means you have to stop giving him money and bailing him out. It’s supposed to make him take control of his own life.’

      ‘Actually, I didn’t send him away.’

      ‘You didn’t give him money?’ Her voice rose in alarm. ‘That’s what’s known in the business as “enabling”.’

      ‘I don’t give a damn what it’s known as!’ he bit out. ‘I’m more concerned with the consequences of his actions.’

      Her fear growing by the second, Lexi blinked at him from behind her glasses. ‘What are you talking about?’

      ‘I’m talking about the fact that Jason has borrowed money. Lots of it. Against your name—and against mine as it happens, since we are still legally married and the Kanellis connection is like liquid gold.’ Resolutely, he ignored the horrified widening of her eyes. ‘He has built up the kind of debts which made even my eyes water—and I’m no stranger to large sums of money—’

      ‘How much?’ she butted in.

      He told her and Lexi blanched because she didn’t have that kind of money. Not any more.

      ‘And the kind of people he’s borrowed it from tend to get rather...angry if they don’t get their loans back,’ he continued.

      Lexi’s hand flew to her mouth. She could feel the hot rush of breath against her fingers as Xenon’s blue gaze iced into her. ‘What are we going to do?’

      Xenon nodded as a grim feeling of satisfaction washed over him, because that was the first sensible thing she’d said. We. ‘It looks like I’m going to have to pay off his debt for him—’

      ‘But—’

      ‘There’s no alternative, unless you happen to have the money sitting stashed away. That is, unless you want his pretty face altered out of all recognition?’ His eyelashes suddenly narrowed, so that his eyes looked like shards of blue ice. ‘These people can be dangerous, you know.’

      Lexi knew about danger. She’d grown up surrounded by it. And hadn’t that been one of the best things about her sudden fame—that she’d been able to escape from the dark and seedy side of life? The last thing she wanted was for Jason to be catapulted back to that place, where nothing seemed safe. She looked at Xenon’s hard features, realising that he was offering to help. ‘Thank you.’

      ‘Don’t thank me until you’ve heard what it entails,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay off his debt for him—but this time, he doesn’t go back to his old life and repeat the same old pattern. And neither does he go into some fancy clinic where he uses that abundance of Gibson charm to manipulate his counsellors.’

      ‘So what are you proposing he does?’ she questioned. ‘Apply for a personality transplant?’

      ‘Nothing quite so drastic. My solution

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