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It didn’t really matter what she said, did it? Her father had asked her the same thing after dinner. But if she said no would it make any difference? She knew it wouldn’t. Both her father and Spiros would simply feel compelled to convince her what a good man she was getting in Dimitri. Why it was “best for her” to go through with the wedding. And really? She didn’t want to hear it.
“Is she?” Spiros asked, his voice tinged with something odd she made no effort to decipher.
“Yes.”
Another short silence. “You should probably expect Grandfather to put his oar in as well.”
“He and Mama will have to battle it out.”
“Not you too?”
“No.”
“Why not? Don’t you care what your wedding is like?”
“No.” It wasn’t her wedding. It was a business merger…a wedding others wanted…and she was going along with it, but it wasn’t hers. It could not be hers and have the groom be the eldest Petronides brother.
“Phoebe—”
“I need to go. Mother has more plans she wants to go over.” She was sure that was true, but was even more certain she had to get off the phone. Talking to Spiros was too detrimental to the sense of detachment she needed so badly to get her through the next few weeks.
She did not think her father or Theopolis Petronides would want a long engagement.
“I’ll talk to you later.” Funny…he sounded as numb as she did.
It must be a trick of her hearing. “Goodbye, Spiros.”
He didn’t know it, but she was saying farewell to a lot more than a simple phone call. She clicked the phone shut before he had a chance to answer or say anything else. It was time to start her campaign to rid herself of a love that had caused her far too much pain and brought not nearly enough pleasure.
CHAPTER FOUR
SPIROS left Phoebe yet another voicemail and then clicked his phone shut. For the past two weeks she had either ignored his calls or kept their dialogues short. She responded to one out of three e-mails with pithy notes that did not encourage further correspondence. Apparently she had decided to cool their friendship.
He should be glad. With the attraction he felt toward her, it was no doubt for the best for them both. But he missed her. More than he’d thought possible. And every day that drew them closer to her marriage to Dimitri, Spiros hurt more.
He couldn’t stand talking to or about Dimitri, he was so envious of what his brother had. Phoebe. So he avoided his family as assiduously as Phoebe avoided him.
He was worried about her.
She refused to discuss anything personal. He’d tried, wanting to somehow fix everything going wrong with and around them. But she’d refused. The one time, in desperation, that he’d brought up the kiss, she’d hung up on him and ignored any attempt to communicate for three days after. She was missing the spark that was so much a part of who she was and he didn’t know how to bring it back.
When he asked how the engagement plans were going, she told him they were fine as far as she knew. As if her marriage to his older brother had nothing to do with her. He couldn’t be nearly as sanguine.
Phoebe might say she was fine with the merging of their two families, but she obviously wasn’t. And there was nothing he could do about it. She shut him down when he tried to talk to her, refusing to acknowledge anything was wrong, and had managed to imply that her emotional state was none of his business.
He knew it was his own fault, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. For the first time since she was a year old he felt disconnected from her. He had never realized before how much he relied on their relationship, how much it meant to him. It all left him feeling helpless.
Something he had vowed to himself would not happen again after the death of his parents. He had been helpless in the face of his mother’s behavior, which had torn at the moorings of his family. Then death had snatched away the two most important people in the world to him.
Since then he had not wanted to give anyone the power to hurt him. He had maintained a certain emotional distance, even from his older brother and grandfather. But Phoebe had climbed the walls around his heart as surely as she had climbed his body like a jungle gym when he was a boy and she just a toddling baby girl. No matter how much distance she thought they needed, this was too much.
The prospect of her hurting and him having no way to fix it made him cranky as hell. His secretary hid from him, and the managers under his authority walked a wary path around him right now.
He was not used to getting this sort of treatment. Of the two of them, he had always been more personable and approachable than his brother. But he’d overheard one of his employees saying she would happily transfer to Dimitri’s division just yesterday.
Spiros sighed. Now, that was as good an indication as any that he was on the slippery slope to the most overbearing of Petronides male behavior.
And damned if he could do anything about that, either.
