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“Yes.”
“But you said I had two weeks.” And she’d asked for more and he’d just ignored her.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to live out of a suitcase at the local hotel in the interim.”
Amazing. He was beyond self-assured. He was scarily confident of getting his own way, but then wasn’t she letting him have it?
“How did you know I would come to you?” Much less that she would agree to his deal.
“You made the appointment with my secretary last week.”
“But still … you made all these plans in a week?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
“Let me rephrase. It does not matter.”
“Seriously?” It was all she could do not to roll her eyes at him like a teenager, but really, did he have to try so hard to bring that out in her? “You haven’t gotten any less arrogant in two years.”
“Why should I?”
“Life usually handles that for most people.”
“My life has shown me that I must make the things happen that are necessary.”
“Mine has shown me that no matter how much I want some things, no matter how hard I work, I’ll never have them.”
“What has left you so disappointed?” He asked as if the answer really mattered to him, when she knew it couldn’t.
“You wouldn’t understand.” He really, really wouldn’t. And with that, she realized it was time for her to escape. She pushed at his hip and chest. “I need a shower.”
“You have time.”
“Weren’t you on your way out the door?”
“Perhaps I will put off my first meeting of the day.”
“No.” She practically yelled her denial. “My plane—”
“Leaves in a few hours, I know. And you’ll want to give your sister the news.” His eyes traveled over Chloe’s curves under the thin sheet, saying without words what he’d rather she spend her time doing.
“You know too much,” she grumbled.
“There was a time when I didn’t, to my own detriment.”
“I can’t imagine it.”
“Neither could I, but it did happen.”
“When?”
“You need to ask?”
She blinked. “Yes.” Did he think she was a mind reader?
“The birth control.”
“But you did know about it.”
“Not until shortly before we left New York for our final trip together to Athens.”
“By then, I’d stopped taking it,” she shared with gallows irony she wasn’t sure he’d get.
“What?” For the first time in their acquaintance, her ex-husband, the mighty Ariston Spiridakou looked 100 percent gobsmacked. “But then you could have been …”
“Pregnant when I left you? Yes, for a month I was very much afraid I was.”
A month during which she’d been terrified she’d allowed herself to become pregnant only to discover that the man she loved and had called husband felt nothing for her. She could have waited to make sure, but she’d known if she didn’t leave while he was out of country, the chances of her doing so at all dropped dramatically.
When she’d discovered she wasn’t pregnant, she’d been in equal parts relieved and devastated.
No excuse to go back to him, no stay in her bid for building a new life without him. It was about that time she’d stopped eating and a couple of months later that Rhea had staged her intervention, encouraging Chloe to return to the West Coast, where she’d gone to art school and fallen in love with a different type of life.
“But you were not?” His face leached of color and the hands on either side of her hips fisted in tension.
“Do you really need to ask?”
“You could have …”
“No, I could not. You really can be an idiot, Ariston.” With that she shoved him out of the way and jumped from the bed, uncaring of her nudity, as done with their conversation as she had ever been.
The great big stupid idiot.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ARISTON watched his ex-wife storm into the en suite with a sense of utter shock coursing through him.
She’d stopped taking the pill about the same time he’d discovered she’d been using it. What terrible timing.
She had intended to fulfill her part of their marriage contract—she’d just clearly had her own timeframe for doing so. As he was famous for telling his CEOs, a bit of communication would have helped.
And she was angry with him?
He shook his head, not for the first time, at the vagaries of the female psyche and his ex-wife’s in particular.
She could have been pregnant when she left. That infuriated him, but it also confused him. Why leave before she knew whether or not she was? Why stop taking birth control, thereby showing intention to make their marriage long-term only to end up leaving after all?
