AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Even knowing that relief for his current state was far away, he still enjoyed the near-painful clench of his aroused body at the sight and sound of her. At least, he seemed to have gotten one thing right.
His wife seemed to love the upscale Italian restaurant he’d commandeered for the rest of the evening. She’d had two servings of the pasta primavera, and a slice of dark chocolate cake. His appetite, on the other hand, had deserted him the moment he’d realized he’d hurt her.
“I feel horrible about the poor people who’d been waiting in line for hours to eat here.”
“You were hungry and we couldn’t risk your sugar falling too low,” he said, with a shrug that told her the topic was over. “You shouldn’t have waited that long to tell me you were hungry anyway.”
“But so were they,” she said, looking around the empty restaurant with a kind of horror. Leave it to Mira to find the gesture horrible rather than romantic. “Couldn’t we have eaten without throwing them out?”
He shook his head. “My security can’t isolate threats among so many. It’s the downside of being a—”
“A playboy that has women all over the world panting over him and sending him skeevy gifts like their underwear?” she quipped, some of her natural assertiveness and composure returning.
He sent a silent thanks to the steely strength at the core of her.Christos, he preferred this strong, resilient, no-pulling-punches Mira to the quiet, withdrawn Mira she’d been in the short drive to the restaurant. Her reflection in the dark-tinted window glass had shown him how stricken she’d been.
She hadn’t done it as payback for his own behavior of the last few weeks. He knew that as well as the vanilla scent that was lodged in his very cells. She’d truly been disturbed by “his ploy,” as she called it.
He tried to ignore the heat rushing to his cheeks. Another irony of his life: he had the interest and obsession of women world over and yet not from the one he’d wanted most of his adult life. “How did you know about that?”
“How did the media learn about the contract we signed without a third soul’s knowledge? Or were there three souls involved already?”
Elena, of course. He bit back a curse. How had he been so sloppy with his trust? More importantly, how had he not realized how fragile Mira was? For the first time in years, Aristos thought of everything Mira had shared as a teenager with him—being abandoned by her mother as a baby, dealing with her alcoholic father, the requirement of perfection and strength they had imprinted on her—and still, she’d managed to love her grandparents and her sisters wholeheartedly.
But sharing the pain only offered a momentary solace, as he very well knew. So why had he imagined that all those past hurts wouldn’t dictate her actions in the now?
A thoughtful expression took over her face as his own weighty thoughts consumed him. “Aristos?”
“Yes?”
“It will be like this when the babies are here too? With the security team trailing us everywhere? Will they follow us for checkups and playdates and first day of school and...whatnot?”
“Yes. It’s an unfortunate downside. I’ll do everything to make sure you and the babies are not exposed to the media. But in terms of safety, the team has to be there. There’s an unhealthy interest in my life and I can’t take the risk of it touching you.”
“Some of it could be minimized if you didn’t court it with your stunts,” she added, a sneaky twist to her mouth.
He was so glad that she was sparring with him again that he let it slide. “Since we’re on this topic, let’s talk about what you’ve planned for the future.”
“The future?”
“Yes, the future. We both know you probably drew out a five-year, ten-year and twenty-year plan for your life and the babies, Mira. I don’t want you to leave the country when the five years are up. I don’t want to have my...children across the ocean thousands of miles away.”
Her head jerked up and her mouth trembled. But in this, he refused to budge. Refused to let her stubbornness win in any way.
“I wasn’t planning to.” When she finally looked up at him, there was something in her gaze that arrested his spiraling temper. “Can we not discuss this right now please? I... You’ll only get a defensive response the way I’m feeling right now.”
“And your career?”
The shadows instantly left her. “You know, Stella and I were talking about that. The other day, even Nush asked me if—”
“I’m the one you should be discussing our future with. Not my cousin or your sister.”
“I would have if you had been available, Aristos. If you’d given me the slightest encouragement to talk about the thousand things I want to say to you and share with you and...” When she spoke again, her voice was soft, small. “Whatever’s going on in that head of yours, you shut me out. You were working out of some damn checklist as if me and this pregnancy are some special project. That’s not how this works. That’s not what I need.”
He felt as if she’d struck him and yet she was doing nothing but being honest. Behaving exactly as he’d wanted her to behave and act for years. “I don’t know how else to be, how to be...what you need right now. I just can’t.”
She reached for him, her pink-tipped fingers running over the veins on the back of his hand. Her touch, the open guilelessness of her expression, stunned him. “That’s more honesty than you’ve given me in three weeks. And as for my career, my hands and my brain and my...my life feels incredibly full. I’m going to look into getting certified to practice here, in Greece. But even that is a...vague plan for the future. I’m not giving up my career per se, but I’m going to put it on hold. I... I want to be a hands-on mom, for at least a few years. Give or take ten.” She scrunched her nose, her smile turning a little stretched as he stared at her in silence. “Does that make sense, do you think? I mean, you did say I shouldn’t worry about finances right now.”
“It makes perfect sense.”
