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“Why should I not crow my success to him and my cousins and to the world that has always stood against me? You got what you wanted. Why are you denying me what I wanted out of this?”
Mira grabbed the glass of water and threw it in Aristos’s face before she even realized she was doing it. Fury and hurt were like twin jets of flame, rocketing through her. The sound of the glass hitting the table and then the floor at her feet was like a deafening explosion in the silence.
“Is this all a joke to you, Aristos?” Her voice wobbled but she refused to let a single tear through.
“Far from it,pethi mou.”
“Then when are you going to act like it?” The question shot out of her like an entreaty. But that was personal. To fix her mistake, to bring things between them to an even keel, she’d beg Aristos, if needed. But that weakness began and ended with her. Not with her children. Her voice was rock steady when she said, “My...babies will not be your achievements to be shown off to the world, or some cardboard puppets that you will manipulate beyond belief for the grand, great Carides name.”
Only when the words were out and her breath shook out of her in a raw, jagged exhale could she bear to meet Aristos’s gaze again.
He hadn’t even wiped the water she’d thrown on him. It plastered his wild hair to his skull. One lone drop dripped from his temple, flew down the slanted slope of a sharp cheekbone and then slipped past a tight jawline. “As for me and you, you’re not just some...sperm donor and I’m not just a convenient womb...”
And then it struck her—the painful truth he’d been dangling in her face since the moment she’d arrived but she refused to accept. Had hope made an utter fool out of her? “You still consider us bound only by the contract?”
“Yes,” said Aristos, before he could swallow the urge. Before he could become weak.
Whatever little color was there fled Mira’s face but she didn’t break or bend. If anything, her chin lifted in direct challenge to his rejection of the hope in her voice.
“I’m just reminding you how particular you were about the clauses and subclauses,yineka mou. Reminding you that as my children, there will be certain expectations of them too.”
“They’re ours, Aristos, the best parts of the both of us. And whether you accept it or not, I know that you’d never manipulate them or neglect them or do anything that would harm them in the smallest way,” she said with a simple conviction that threatened to take him out at his knees.
“Once you had no faith in me. Now, you have too much, Mira.”
“I know what I know,” she said simply. Her chest rose and fell, that quiet dignity of hers wrapped around her. Her voice didn’t waver one bit when she said, “So that night, at my grandfather’s house, you were performing per our contract’s demands?”
There was that stupid spasm in his chest again, with nowhere to go. But he wasn’t going to let the avalanche of emotions trying to bury him win.
Kairos’s filthy words hadn’t hurt him, but they’d released his worst fear. Released a reminder of the rejections and struggles he’d faced even before Leo had found him. Of the pain he’d felt when Mira had left without a word all those years ago.
If he didn’t clip the tenuous wings of hope spreading through his chest right now that he couldn’t seem to contain when he was near her, if he didn’t cauterize himself against that very hope, it would leave him wingless.
Untethered. Powerless.
Because a part of him still couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t leave again. A part of him was still terrified that he would fail as a father. A part of him wondered if she and those precious babies would find him as worthless as his mother had found him. And he simply couldn’t take that chance.
“I’ve never hidden the fact that I’ve been lusting over you forever, Mira. Maybe your recent grief and loss made it appear more to you. Itwasexplosive but please let’s not rewrite history and make it more than it was.”
She nodded, even though they were both aware that he’d hurt her. “Then we have to agree to disagree over that night. For me, it wasn’t fulfilling a contract. It wasn’t the set course we’d decided on for our marriage. It wasn’t just sex.”
A sudden breeze from the open French doors threw tendrils of her hair away from her face. It also plastered her cotton dress to her body, taunting him with the outline of her belly. Her skin, always silky and smooth, seemed to shimmer in the afternoon light. And her eyes—they shone with a conviction and a fire that would scorch him if he let it.
Reaching him, she kissed his cheek—a soft buss of tenderness that threatened to undo him. Nuzzled that silky-smooth jaw against his harsh stubble, as if he were a wild horse she hoped to tame. Made his gut tighten with thick, slumberous want. But it wasn’t just that. Her arms came around him, and her belly grazed his side, and his distasteful words seemed to burn through him.
“That night was something I reached for after years of loneliness, something I wanted desperately. It was real and beautiful and as necessary as breath. And the thing is... No one else would have been enough, Aristos. It had to be you.” Pulling back, she caught his gaze again, trapping him, pinning him, forcing him into a stillness that had never been possible for him, except with her. “Our babies...” She grabbed his hand and placed it over her belly. His heart gave a thunderous thud against his chest, rattling in his rib cage like a bird trapped, thrashing to be let free. “...were conceived under the magic of something raw and real. And that’s the way I’ll remember it for the rest of our lives.”
“Are you running away again, Mira?”
Leo Carides’s softly spoken question halted Mira’s frenzied packing.
Throwing another pair of pants into the traveling bag, she turned to find her grandfather’s oldest friend hovering over the threshold. “Come in, please.” Scrubbing a hand over the trail of tears that seemed to have no end, she faced him. “To answer your question, no. I was going to camp outside his office though.”
“I have been informed he hasn’t been to work in three days.”
Three days since he’d been gone... Where was he, then?
Leo walked past the bed to the veranda, poured water into a glass and beckoned her close.
