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She searched his gaze, as if she could plumb it and find more. Because that question had been for herself. For her selfish hope.
“Tell me you get it, Mira.” Looming over her, he shook her shoulder none too gently, his eyes carrying that haunted look she hadn’t seen in a long while. “Tell me you understand that my actions have nothing to do with you and...the children.”
Relief stole her breath and panic she hadn’t let herself feel until now made tears pool in her eyes. They slid down into her hair, leaving her trembling.
“Shh... Mira. Shh...” Leaning over, Aristos managed to gather her up until she was sitting by his side, his arms enfolding her shoulders in a tight grip. “I’m sorry,agapi mou.”
“Don’t... Don’t you dare call me that,” Mira retorted.
And still hope lingered in her breast. Audaciously so. It was an endearment that he had never used before—he was only offering it as an apology and yet it soothed the tender edges of her heart that had taken a battering the other day.
He crooned at her temple, words Mira couldn’t understand, the warmth of his body an inviting cradle around her. “Mira, tell me what I can do to make you believe that I regret my words.”
The answer came easily. It was the one place where they’d always met as perfect counterparts. And Mira needed the magic of his touch now. The magic of his worship, his want, his wondrously skilled hands upon her.
Because she wanted to believe that Aristos would continue on this journey with her. Because if that’s all he could give her, she would live with it. She would make do and build a family and pour all her love into it.
“Touch me. Kiss me. Give me so much pleasure that I forget the fear, Aristos.”
The warm press of his mouth was a brand against her temple and Mira pushed into it. “First, you will tell me why you tremble like a leaf,yineka mou.”
When she’d have protested, he pressed his finger to her mouth.
A shuddering exhale left her and she struggled to not kiss the rough pads of his fingers. To not draw that digit into her mouth and suckle on it until it rendered him as mindless and lost as she felt already.
“Give me this, give me your fears, Mira, and I promise I will never let them touch you again.”
Mira pressed her head into his chest, and let out a groan when his fingers found her lower back. When he held her like that, when he touched her like that, she felt no fear, only hope spreading through her like sunlight.
“When I told you I had to sort through a lot of things, I wasn’t lying. OneTech and Nush and the company’s interests, Caio had in hand. But the house and Nanamma’s jewelry and other pieces of his estate, Thaata left all of that to me. Nush had already left with Caio to Brazil and Yana was at a shoot in Bali. I was completely alone in the house that had loved me more than either of my parents ever had. I went through every room in the house, sorting through decades of accumulated stuff. It began happily enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“My grandmother never threw away a single thing of mine. Every card I ever made them, every silly bracelet I spun, every essay and poem I wrote, every Halloween costume I ever wore, every Diwali craft she and I made together—she kept everything. Every single thing. But in all of it, in the mountains of stuff, there wasn’t a single photograph of me with my parents. Not a single one.
Something possessed me and I searched like a mad woman. I went back to the storage unit and opened every box again. I found nothing. I spent weeks lingering there, walking the empty house like some kind of wraith, trying to remember her face. My mother’s face.”
Mira closed her eyes, the same resolve filling her again. “Until I woke up one morning and threw up the meager breakfast I had. I got a blood test done the same day, went to see my doctor the next week and because I’d left it so late, the doctor could detect two heartbeats already. The moment I came home, I threw up again.
“I... I have never been so scared, Aristos. Never. Not when I held Thaata’s hand in mine and knew he was slipping away. Not when my father left me outside a bar for hours when I was seven because he’d gotten drunk inside and forgot all about me.”
His hand cradling her cheek, the warm press of Aristos’s mouth against her temple was an anchor calling her back to the present. “It was strange, the confluence of those two things. I realized for the first time that I was so...lonely. And that I didn’t have to be. That I’d done that to myself.”
But the hollowness of the memory was fleeting when Mira grabbed his hand and brought it to her belly. She found his gaze in the darkness, refusing to shy away from the moment, from her own heart. “From the moment I boarded the plane to return to you, I knew what I wanted in my heart.”
“What,yineka mou? Whatever you ask for, it’s yours.”
Your heart. Your love. You.
Instead Mira said, “I want to burn down that stupid contract. I want us to make vows to each other again, just for ourselves. I want us to be a real family...”
His sudden stillness stole away her words.
Fear slithered through her veins, but she wasn’t going to turn back now. “And if that’s not what you want, if you still want to stick to our five-year rule, then I want out now. I’m sorry for changing the rules on you midgame, sorry that I’m not the sensible, practical woman you bet on, but I—”
“Yes. Yes. Yes,” he whispered against her mouth. “Yes, for burning down the contract.” And then Aristos was kissing her.
Kissing her as if his life depended on it and yet, it wasn’t hard or urgent or just full of lust. It was a promise given in reverent touch. His mouth left hers and trailed all over her face, even as he whispered words she couldn’t understand. And then returned to her mouth again and again, as if it were a shining beacon in an ocean of darkness. And every time he returned to her mouth and kissed her again, Mira discovered something new in it.
