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He tried to swallow his acidic response but it slipped out anyway. “I don’t think you’ve given thought to what drives me, Mira.” He thrust a hand through his hair, suddenly feeling too tight in his own skin. “If you had, you’d not run away from every mention of our past, as if it haunts you.”
Every inch of satiety and satisfaction left her face, leaving confusion and pain behind. “That’s not...” Ever the brutally honest woman, she swallowed her lie. “I just... I like our present so much better than the past. I like that we discuss things when we fight. I like that we’re both compromising and communicating what we need.”
She came to him then and kissed his mouth with a breathtaking reverence that threatened to bring him to his knees. “I love our life, Aristos. I love what we’re building together.” She sighed against his lips and looked into his eyes. “But you’re right that I haven’t been the dutiful wife. Not learning what is important to you, not realizing how much pressure you’re under after your injury, not realizing your head is scattered in so many spaces. That’s on me. I’m sorry, Aristos. Truly.”
He waved her apology off—it wasn’t the thing he wanted anyway.Christos, he had hoped he’d learned some semblance of control around her. But he found himself floundering at the most trivial of things.
He wanted to push her still, demand she tell him why she’d broken their engagement all those years ago. Demand that she give him closure. Maybe she hadn’t loved him. Maybe she’d been scared of being tied down. Maybe, maybe, maybe... He could think of a thousandmaybes. And yet the little boy in his head whispered it had been something to do with him.
That it was him she had run away from.
Why else would she hide from it?
It seemed however hard Mira tried the past wouldn’t leave them alone.
“I just... I feel like we’re in a bubble, safe from the world and everything else.” She tried to explain to him because he deserved to know the reason behind her reluctance. “I don’t want it to burst. I don’t want—”
He frowned. “Nothing that you and I don’t want will happen,pethi mou. This life is ours.”
“But we don’t live in a complete vacuum. Others influence our thoughts and actions, however much we’d like to believe our will is our own.”
Turning her around so that she could face him, he searched her gaze. “You’re not just being your usual self-sufficient, antisocial self, are you?”
“You make me sound like a crotchety old woman who hates everyone.”
“That makes me feel special, knowing that you don’t hate me.” He grinned and pressed a quick, hard kiss to her lips that left her panting. Thank God his good humor had returned. “I do know you have no interest in playing the billionaire’s socialite wife or even in simply sitting back and enjoying your privileged life when you can give something valuable back to society.”
Her large eyes widening, Mira opened her mouth in a soft gasp. “Do you remember every word I ever said to you?”
“The important ones at least. The ones that made me think, made me see the world a little differently. The ones that made me a better man.”
“I don’t know...”
“Did you delete the memories of every moment we spent together all those summers? Was it so ghastly?”
“No, of course not,” she said, pressing a finger to his lips, forestalling his questions as she always did.
She searched for some other topic to divert his attention and shamelessly used the one that came to her. “The other night, how did you know I should drink juice to make the babies active again?” Even now, Mira felt the thread of remembered fear shake her. Two days ago when she hadn’t felt the babies kick for a whole two hours. She had no one to ask about it. She’d panicked and left a message for her gynecologist but she had been unable to sleep.
Aristos had stumbled out of bed and had come back ten minutes later with a glass of orange juice. Mira drank it unthinkingly and then not half an hour later, the babies had started kicking. She’d fallen asleep smiling, cuddling into Aristos without question.
“I called Tia Sophia.”
“Stella’s mother?”
“Ne.”
“In the middle of the night? She must have been shocked.”
“Not really. I had already spoken to her a couple of times. Met her for coffee outside of Leo’s knowledge.”
Mira met his gaze in the mirror, her own shock evident in her wide eyes. Tia Sophia was Stella’s mother, the only one among his five aunts that had ever shown genuine interest in Aristos. At least, that’s the impression Mira had always gotten. And yet, Aristos had never let the older woman close. Had chosen to keep all of his extended family at a distance. It was credit to Stella and her stubborn tenacity that she had made any headway with him at all.
“Why?”
His broad shoulders shrugged, even as he ran his fingers over her arms. Touching her, anchoring her. And if she were being fanciful, even loving her. But she wasn’t going to be fanciful and ruin the happiness she had found in this new, fragile hope between them.
“I heard you mention it to Yana, how much you missed your grandmother, how you wished she were alive today. How mothers and grandmothers and aunts pass down generations of wisdom and advice about pregnancy... So I called Tia Sophia. She said she is more than happy to share whatever wisdom she has with you.”
