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“Only you weren’t fixing it. You were running yourself ragged doing all the same old stuff.”
She couldn’t deny that. Polly had her own measure of pride and hadn’t wanted to admit she wasn’t physically up to the same schedule she’d always kept. “If you’ve hired a nanny behind my back, we are going to have some serious words,” she warned him.
“It would almost be worth it to see you engaged enough to actually argue with me, but that is not something I would do.”
“You want me angry with you?” she asked. This was the second time he’d alluded to wanting that and she was trying to understand why suddenly he wanted her to revert to how she’d used to be.
Willing to argue every time she didn’t agree with his autocratic view of the world. Angry with him more often than she’d ever wanted to be.
Because she kept expecting him to treat her like he loved her.
She didn’t have those expectations any longer.
“No.” Which did not surprise her. “I want you real with me, and I’m only just now realizing how long it has been since I saw the real Pollyanna. Only in the same way I have realized that there are an honored few that already do.”
“What do you mean?”
“My brother. His new wife. The few you call friend and not acquaintance.”
He’d left off her family, but maybe that was because he realized bringing them up would only point out how differently her parents and siblings treated Polly to how his own mother and sister did. “None of them call me Anna.”
And at its most basic level, that was the dividing line.
“So, all I have to do is call you Pollyanna to get back into the charmed circle?” he asked in that seductive tone he usually reserved for the bedroom.
Heat climbing her cheeks at her body’s instant reaction to it, she said, “I don’t know what circle you’re talking about.”
But she did. He meant the people she trusted, including those few she’d learned she could rely on since moving to Greece.
Her husband, she had learned not to trust.
“Yes, you do.”
“Yes, I do,” she admitted.
“I call you Anna.”
“Yes.”
“You do not like it.”
“It is not my name.”
“It is a nickname.”
“That your mother finds more acceptable than my real name. Yes, I know.”
“You have never asked me to call you Pollyanna instead.”
She shook her head. Was he rewriting history now? “That is not true.”
He stared at her, his mouth open to refute her words, but then he must have remembered. Because he went oddly pale. “You told me Anna was not your name and you would prefer if I would not use it.”
“But your mother had made it clear how very lowbrow she found my real name.”
“So, I called you Anna around her.”
“Not just around her.”
