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As he stared at her full face with those intelligent eyes and stubborn nose and painfully lovely mouth under the brilliant strips of light the cut glass chandelier threw on her, Aristos felt one of his own assumptions crumble to dust.
Just because she could bury her hurt and other emotions deep inside didn’t mean she didn’t feel them as strongly as he did. He hated when people made assumptions about him and yet he’d done the same to her.
“I’m glad you ate before your appetite was ruined by...this. By me.”
She grimaced and reached for the glass of water. “I’d have eaten even if I wasn’t ravenous. I can’t let your mind games mess with the care I need to take.”
He deserved that, he knew. And still, that comment made him...resentful. Like a schoolboy who’d been denied his treat. “This pregnancy, those unborn babies mean the world to you already, don’t they?” The words left his mouth before he could control them.
A frown marred her face. “Why do you say it like it’s a bad thing?”
“I didn’t,” he lied.
“I don’t want to fight anymore tonight,” she said, not quite meeting his gaze. “Please, Aristos.”
He took her hand in his then, across the table. She was warm and soft and he couldn’t help but trace the plump veins at her wrist. He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed the center of her palm. Emotion held him in one of its hard grips and he forced himself to breathe through it.
It was relief, he supposed, that even though he’d hurt her, she was here. She was staying. She was...where she belonged.
Whatever she saw in his face, her question seemed to be designed to pull him back to the now. “You never gave me an answer about...Elena.”
He let her distract him, knowing that she needed his reassurance, glad that in this, he wouldn’t fail her. “Her days with me have been numbered ever since I saw your face the evening you arrived and the way she challenged your authority in front of everyone. She crossed too many lines. I knew then it was time to send her away.” He couldn’t stop bitterness from drenching his words when he said, “I did wonder if you’d ever speak up, let me defend myself.”
“So you were just throwing her in my face by having her at the mansion every day and enjoying the show?”
“Only partly,” he said. “You have to remember that Elena has been with me for more than a decade. It takes time to decouple her from that position.”
“I hope you’re not firing her though. That seems unfair.”
“She’s moving to another team.” He studied her with that intense scrutiny, shadows masking his thoughts from her. “I guess I should say thank you for believing me,” he said with arch sarcasm. “Even though I’ve never given you reason to distrust me.”
“That’s not...” She caught her words just in time and looked away.
That’s not what? What had he done that she forever doubted him? That she cast him in such black light?
Aristos waited to see if she’d pick up the gauntlet he’d thrown down yet again. And yet when she didn’t, when she once again refused to discuss the past, it bothered him less than it ever had before. Maybe because he finally believed that Mira was committed to this life with him.
But he wasn’t sure if he would ever stop wondering why she’d abandoned the idea of them so easily. If it would always prick like a thorn lodged deep inside, festering there.
They were heading home to Carides mansion in a chauffeured car, instead of taking the chopper, as Aristos really did have to call into a meeting. The drive was two hours long and Mira dozed off to the sound of his deep voice lulling her into comfort.
She woke with her head neatly supported by a corded arm in dark silence. And the shoulder strap of her dress at her elbow. And her breasts smushed against a corded bicep and she herself lying half across Aristos’s lap.
“Sorry,” she said, wiping her mouth with her hand. Thank God, she hadn’t drooled on him.
“You kept shifting on the seat trying to find a comfortable position.”
“Thank you.”
“Are we back to that kind of politeness, then?”
“You started it,” she said, and then sighed. “My throat’s parched.”
Having finished a bottle of water, she straightened her sundress and pulled the jacket he’d draped over her shoulders tighter around her. The moment she settled onto the opposite seat, Aristos pulled her feet into his lap.
She jerked as the warmth from his calloused palms instantly lit a fuse somewhere else in her body as if there were wires attached. When she looked out the window, she noticed that they’d left the city behind long ago. And with each mile they put between his work and them, she felt a little better.
“You never told me why we were touring those estates,” she said, suppressing a groan by the skin of her teeth.
