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“But you did not wish to marry well?”
“I wanted to marry a man I loved, not a bank account.”
“Then it should please you to marry me. If the words you spoke at Chez Renée were true, I can give you both.”
“They were true then,” so much so that parts of her heart were still cracked and bleeding after the abrupt way they’d broken up, “but I don’t love you anymore.”
“I refuse to believe a woman of such strong character could fall out of love at the first sign of adversity.”
She was beginning to have a horrible suspicion he was right, but she wasn’t about to feed his smug pride admitting it. “I wouldn’t call you ejecting me from your life with the force of a rocket launcher so you could marry another woman the first sign of adversity.”
“Yet I did not marry her.”
“Because your brother beat you to the punch.”
He sighed. “You are sure I would have married her otherwise?”
Why was he asking her that? Of course she was sure. He’d made his position very clear that last meeting in Paris. “Yes.”
“If I told you I had already decided not to go through with the marriage, you would not believe me, hmm?”
Was he saying that? No. This was just another one of his subtle manipulations. “Don’t tax your personal integrity making the claim. You’re right. I wouldn’t buy it.”
“And yet I had hired a detective agency to find you within days of you leaving Paris.”
“I waited for you to change your mind for a whole week, Dimitri. You didn’t even call. I can believe you started to consider the consequences if I’d told the truth about the baby, but I don’t think you were prepared to call off your wedding because of it. I didn’t matter to you then, and I don’t matter to you now. It’s all about the baby and I’m not stupid enough to forget that.”
His hand gripped his wine glass very tightly. The same hand that still wore a bandage from the night he’d come to Madeleine and Hunter’s party.
“How did you cut yourself? I never asked.” Her mind had been on other things that night.
He carefully put his wine glass down, staring at it as if it held the answer to an important question. Then he looked up at her and she gasped.
His eyes held a torment that was haunting.
“When Madeleine told me you were dead, I crushed the glass in my hand.”
CHAPTER SIX
DIMITRI’S statement hung in the air between them like a bomb that had not exploded, but still might.
“You were that upset at the prospect of losing your child?” She had not considered Dimitri’s emotional involvement with their baby. Which wasn’t all that surprising considering she’d seen him as an emotionless monster for the past three months.
His jaw tautened. “If it pleases you to believe so, yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
He inclined his head. “With your background, you should understand the importance of our child being raised in his home country of Greece and as a Petronides.”
That was more like it. Dimitri wanted his son because family pride demanded he be raised Petronides. “I understand the importance of loving my baby for his own sake, not the sake of family pride. Whether he’s raised a Dupree or Petronides, he will still be worthy of my love. Can you say the same?”
Dimitri’s features took on the cast of the Iceman. “Apparently you do not believe me capable of any level of emotion, so why should I bother answering?”
She’d hurt him, wounded his sense of self and for some reason, she simply couldn’t bear that. “I didn’t mean—”
“Leave it. Do you want dessert?”
“No.” She couldn’t eat anything now.
“Then we will return to the suite. If we are to have yet another argument, we will do it in privacy.”
The drive back to his hotel was a silent one. She felt guilty and kept telling herself she shouldn’t, but the feeling remained. Just because Dimitri did not love her did not mean he was not capable of loving his son. She’d had no right to imply that it did.
She was still trying to work up to an apology when he let them both into the suite a half an hour later.
“Dimitri, I—”
“I said leave it.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’m tired.”
His admission of weakness stunned her.
His lips twisted wryly. “You think I cannot get exhausted like the next man? We all have our limits, pethi mou.”
He hadn’t in the twelve months she’d lived with him.
“I have not slept well for the three months I have searched for you,” he further shocked her by admitting. “I believed once I found you, everything would fall into place. You would agree to marry me. We would be on the next plane to Greece so you could meet my grandfather. I believed I would have to assuage your anger, I did not expect to find a woman who hated me.”
“I don’t hate you,” she averred, “I told you that.”
“You do not wish to hate me for our child’s sake. I understand this, but you do not want to marry me. You do not trust me. I am at a loss where to go from here. Just as you saw modeling as the only solution to your family’s financial difficulties, I see marriage as the only workable solution to our situation.”
It was her turn to sigh. “I know you do.”
“And I am sexually frustrated.” His laugh was harsh. “I don’t like going without.”
She didn’t know if she could handle Dimitri in this strange mood. She was used to him taking charge, demanding. His admissions of weakness surprised her silly. “It hasn’t been that long, surely?”
“I have not made love to another woman since the night I told you I was marrying Phoebe.”
For a hopelessly oversexed male like Dimitri that was a lifetime. No wonder he wasn’t himself. She didn’t know why he had abstained, but something deep inside her was fiercely glad he had. “I see.”
“I doubt it, but maybe you will someday.” All tiredness disappeared from his expression to be replaced with predatory sensuality. “You could help me out.”
She backed toward her bedroom. “I think I’ll make an early night of it, t-take a shower, m-maybe read a book.”
He’d already proven she couldn’t resist him physically. She wasn’t about to stick around and offer herself as the main course to end his months long sexual fast.
She took the image of his primitive smile with her as she closed the door to her bedroom. She pushed the lock in for good measure and took her first unhindered breath in five minutes. She couldn’t let him make love to her again. She was too vulnerable to him and she needed to think. She wouldn’t be able to do that with any sense of clarity while under the influence of his passionate nature.
Her eyes closed, Alexandra rinsed the lather from her hair, enjoying the feel of hot water cascading over her body from three different directions.
The luxury of the spa shower had even won out over a long soak in the oversized, jetted tub. Two showerheads shot warm showers of water toward her body from chest height while another sent down a gentle spray from above her head. She felt completely pampered in the glass and tile enclosure.
So pampered that she was almost able to push her chaotic thoughts away, but not quite. Somehow, she had to work things out with Dimitri. He had as much right to love their son as she did and more importantly, their child had a right to two loving parents if possible. Dimitri had made it clear such an eventuality was possible, but he did not love her.
Was it right though, for her to make her child pay the price for her own unfulfilled dreams? And their son would pay a price if she refused to marry Dimitri. He would be born outside the bonds of matrimony. For many that would not matter, but among his Greek family and future business associates, it would.
Her own mother might never accept him. While that made Alexandra furious, she knew there was little she could do to turn around a lifetime of conditioning. Her mother’s belief system was as ingrained as a fossil in rock.
In his fossil research, her father had often been forced to leave rock sediment on one of his specimens because to remove it would be to destroy the fossil. She didn’t want to destroy her mother. She didn’t even want to upset her. Because despite her mother’s irritating habit of seeing the world only from her own point of view, Alexandra loved her and wanted her to be happy.
Wishing she could brush her troubling thoughts away so easily, Alexandra swiped the water from her eyes and opened them…to blackness. She blinked, but no light penetrated the darkness surrounding her. Had there been a power outage? Didn’t all the larger hotels have generators?
Suddenly the stream of water pulsing down on her head ceased. The two other showerheads kept going however, leaving her feeling disoriented. She fought down panic as she reached out to touch the tile of the wall for a sense of reference and touched bare flesh instead.
