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And she’d moved into the villa, believing she could help heal the family’s grief only to learn that nothing she said or did was going to endear her to Athena or Stacia.
“But when you bought Villa Liakada, I’d made friends in Athens, built a life for myself. You took it all away.”
“And thought I was doing you a favor in the process,” he said with a self-deprecating twist to his handsome lips.
“Yes.”
“I hurt you.”
Many times. “Yes.”
He winced, his own expression revealing a vulnerability she wasn’t sure she could believe. “I have always wanted you to be happy in our marriage.”
“I’ve found contentment.”
He leaned down, pressing his forehead to hers. “Damned by faint praise.”
“It could be worse,” she admitted, whispering because she felt like there was a fragile bubble of intimacy around them she did not want to break.
“I could be a philandering abuser,” he said with pure self-derision she had never seen him point at himself. “Believe it, or not, but I need to be something better in your life than that.”
Suddenly that bubble was suffocating, and she couldn’t stand being in his arms, held like something precious when so many times she had not mattered to him at all.
She pushed against him, but he resisted.
“Let me go, please.” She needed to breathe.
He released her, his expression one she did not want to try to interpret right then.
She stood and moved to where her book sat on the table by the chair she’d been in earlier. Needing something to do, she slotted it back into the bookshelf. “I think we married too quickly, without really realizing what the other person wanted.”
She didn’t claim they were both too young, because Polly had been twenty-seven and Alexandros had been thirty-two.
They’d met when he was in the States. She’d done the desserts for a meeting he attended, and somehow the middle-class pastry chef had bumped into the billionaire.
That first meeting had been electric, and she hadn’t even hesitated when he’d asked her to dine with him the following evening. She’d fallen for him hook, line and sinker. And she’d thought the tsunami of emotions had been two-sided.
Six weeks later, they were engaged and he was headed to Asia for more business talks. They saw almost nothing of each other in the three months leading up to the wedding, but she’d thought their phone calls, texts and emails had built a foundation she could rely on.
She met her mother-in-law at the wedding rehearsal.
Athena had been reserved, but not overtly hostile. She’d worn black, claiming she was still in mourning for her deceased husband. Since he had died only a little over a year previous, Polly had believed.
Since then, she’d had cause to wonder that color choice for the mother of the groom.
Their month-long honeymoon had been bliss, but then her real life as the wife of an old-money Greek billionaire began. And it had not been anything like a fairy tale.
Polly stood there, staring at the spines of the books she hadn’t had time to read and wondered where they went from here?
Alexandros clearly wanted to improve their marriage.
She didn’t know if she could trust him enough to open herself to trying.
“If you had it to do again, would you have married me?” he asked her, having come up behind her without her realizing.
He laid his hands on her shoulders, turning her around so their gazes met. His was filled with a nameless emotion. Hers, she knew, would be wary.
Because she felt wary.
