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“You never said.”
“You never said I couldn’t.”
“Of course you could. This is your home. You could redecorate the entire villa if you wanted to.”
She shrugged. “I spend my time in here and in the nursery. I don’t need to redecorate anywhere else.”
“That my wife, who spends more time here than anywhere else, restricts her living to a few hundred square feet of thousands does not speak well of your comfort in your home.”
He was just now noticing? But she smiled. “I use the pool. And the dining room of course, and the breakfast nook.” She preferred the smaller sunny room, even if the decor was just as generically modern as the rest. “And the terrace. Helena and I spend a lot of time on the terrace.” She’d had a play structure installed at one end for her daughter and her daughter’s friends to use when she hosted the playgroup.
“I noticed you don’t use the media room for watching movies with Helena.”
“It’s too much. We’ve used it to host a movie afternoon for her playgroup.” The parents had been impressed, but the littles hadn’t found the theater style seating as comfortable as piles of pillows on the floor of the still admittedly formal drawing room.
Instead of looking happier at her list of the places in the villa that Polly and Helena used, her husband’s face took on a pained expression. “It’s your home. You should feel comfortable everywhere.”
“Childproofing rooms that were decorated with a then childless billionaire in mind hardly seems worth it when Helena and I are perfectly content to use the areas best suited to her needs.”
“I never considered the childproofing aspect.” He frowned. “You said it was decorated with me in mind, not you.”
“Obviously.” Polly would never have gone for all the marble and neutral shades. And knowing she was pregnant, though not having shared the news yet at the time with him, she would never have put so many expensive objets d’art on display where tiny fingers could reach them.
He winced. “It is your home,” he reiterated. “It should reflect your taste.”
“That is not what you said when we moved in.” He’d been livid she hadn’t appreciated his effort in hiring a popular interior design firm to do the entire house at great cost.
“Perhaps I’ve learned something in three years.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter anymore.” She’d gotten used to living in a mansion that felt like a high-end hotel.
“The existence of this room says otherwise.”
“I wanted a place that felt like home.”
“And the other ten thousand square feet of the villa?”
“Feels like one of Zephyr and Neo’s hotels.” The property developer duo didn’t socialize as much as others in their position. Both were firm family men with lovely wives that had befriended Polly her first year in Greece.
The friendship had come as a double-edged sword. P
olly loved spending time with the Stamos and Nikos families, but seeing the devoted husbands and fathers that both Zephyr and Neo made was hard when her own billionaire didn’t seem to get how to manage that feat.
She couldn’t just dismiss his neglect and business-oriented priorities as the necessary challenges of a man in his position when she saw others who handled their family lives differently.
Even now she clung to the consolation that Zephyr and Neo had a very different background from Alexandros, and neither had a snooty family to pacify.
Displeasure creased Alexandros’s handsome features. “In other words, transitory.”
She’d never thought of it that way, but maybe he was right. “Maybe.”
“Our marriage is not temporary.”
“Your mother and sister both wish otherwise,” Polly acknowledged wryly.
It was something she would have not have said even before yesterday, but he had stood up for her in a way he never had and she felt some of the confidence she’d had early in their marriage returning.
The grim set of his lips said he got her point. “I should have set them straight about the way they treat you a long time ago.”
