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If you don’t open yourself up to hope and connection, people can’t hurt you. Like her mother and father had done all her life.
It had been her guiding principle most of her life, something she had internalized without her knowledge. Only Yana and Nush had earned a piece of her heart, chipping away at her resolve one day at a time. But Aristoshadshattered her tender heart once.
What was the guarantee that he wouldn’t do it again? That he wasn’t already doing it with his remoteness and distance?
But she couldn’t run. Not this time. She couldn’t act out of fear and the compulsive need to avoid hurt at any cost. That’s how she’d ended up with such loneliness, such a deep void in her life.
“Mira?” Aristos said, moving toward her immediately. The scent of the spilled coffee from his shirt made the ginger chai come back up her throat. Though it had more to do with the woman wiping the stain than the coffee itself. “You look pale.”
“Hmm?” Mira said, her mind insistently replaying the intimacy between her husband and his PA of years.
She didn’t doubt Aristos at all. She’d never do that again. But that didn’t mean she liked the status quo either. It wasn’t irrational to not want...that woman near him. Not when Mira recognized the adoration in her eyes.
Aristos’s touch on her shoulder jolted her. She met his gaze and swallowed the excuse that rose so easily to her lips. To deflect away from her own fears, to pretend that things didn’t hurt, to suppress her own needs had been her default for so many years. But not anymore. “I need to speak with you. Now. In private.”
His hand cupping her shoulder with a tenderness she was beginning to hate, Aristos frowned. “You have that cranky look in your eyes. I’m sorry we tired you out.”
Mira jerked away from his touch and regretted the gesture when his mouth tightened. “I’m not a child whose energy you have to manage.”
“The pilot is on hold if Mrs. Carides wants to return, Aristos,” his PA piped up from behind him.
Mira closed her eyes, fighting the urge to scream like a banshee. Suddenly, she wished her sisters were there with her. Nush would have hugged her while Yana would have dragged that woman out of here by her hair. That image made it easy to reach for the frayed threads of her composure. “I said I want to speak with you.”
“You have a meeting in fifteen minutes.” Elena piped up again, not crossing the line but hovering over it, testing and pushing.
Mira simply stared back at Aristos, uncaring of what he saw in her face.
“I think we’re done for the day.” While his words were humorous, the steel in his voice was enough for his PA to walk away on the very next breath.
The tap-tap of her heels and the closing of the doors should’ve sounded triumphant to her ears, and yet all Mira felt was flayed open.
She closed her eyes, wary of meeting his gaze, her heart thundering in her chest, locking away stupid tears. Before she could arrest it, one lone tear swept down her cheek and she didn’t even have it in her anymore to care that Aristos was catching her in another vulnerable moment. It seemed all her false armor had fallen away.
A finger caught the tear, while another lingered at her jawline, a tantalizing caress that every cell in her wanted to lean into. “I never realized it would be near impossible to make you happy,” Aristos whispered, a remote, distant thread of something like longing in his words.
But that couldn’t be true when they both knew he alreadyhadher.
She hurriedly scrubbed at her cheeks with her knuckles.
“The coffee spill was an accident, Mira.” His soft tone belied the gray storm in his eyes. The tendons in his neck stood out. “I know how little you think of me, but there’s nothing but professional—”
“I don’t.”
Conviction rang in her voice, crystal clear. She was done hiding—from him and herself. Slowly, the bleak fury in his eyes abated.
“I was wrong that day. But I didn’t think...thattoday.” When he just frowned, she took a deep breath and plunged ahead. “I returned because I promised I would. I returned because I’m pregnant. But Aristos, more than anything, I returned because I want this to work between us. For at least as long as that contract stipulates,” she added at the last minute, taking the easy way out.
One step at a time...she reminded herself.
His nostrils flared as if he wanted to say more but he closed his eyes. Deep brackets straddled that mobile mouth and she couldn’t help notice how exhausted he looked. He worked such long hours and constantly watched over her, his energy so dynamic that she’d forgotten that he’d been in a major accident not two months ago. Come to think of it, he’d been pushing himself brutally the last three weeks as if a demon was chasing him.
“Then why are you upset?” he asked before she could bring that topic up. Really, she should’ve made a list—it was the only way to feel a little in control while everything about her life, everything about her, was in constant flux.
“I’m not upset so much as bracing myself to...”
“To what?”
“To tell you what’s going on in my...heart.”
