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“Aristos, please listen to me—”
“I fell apart after you left. You wouldn’t take my calls... You wouldn’t reply to my emails. I almost boarded a flight without telling Leo, I was that desperate to see you. And then he told me what your grandfather said. That you realized pursuing your medical career was more important. That the engagement had been a mistake you felt pressured into. That you and I had nothing in common and you never wanted to see me again.”
“I was talking out of my own pain. I thought you...”
“Then why the hell didn’t you stand and fight?” His mouth became a study in bitterness, his eyes so dark that gray was nearly swallowed up by the black. “Everything you gave me, the trust and affection and love, you took it away in a minute. I felt like I had been orphaned all over again. I...thought I’d never be worthy of you. And to forget you, I threw myself into everything. Into law, into sports. I was determined to make you come crawling back to me.”
Tears poured down Mira’s cheeks, even as fear fisted her stomach tight. “I’m sorry. I can’t say it enough. But I love you, Aristos. I have fallen in love with you all over again and I’m not worthy of you. But I’ll prove to you that I—”
With one last look at her, Aristos walked out of the room. And Mira wondered, as a sob rumbled out of her chest, if she’d lost his trust forever this time.
It was pitch-dark in the bedroom when Mira felt a hand on her temple and immediately jolted into alertness. She grabbed Aristos’s wrist, her nightmare suddenly turning into reality when he said, “I will be back in three weeks.”
He was pressing a kiss to her forehead. She tried to get up but her body was already off-balance and awkward. She ended up reaching for his hand, turned sideways and then pulled herself to sit up on the bed. Even then, he adjusted the pillows at her lower back and Mira fought fresh tears.
“Please, Aristos. Don’t go. Not like this.”
He let her pull his hand to her face, let her nuzzle his palm, let her kiss the rough abrasions at the center of his big hand. Let her cling to him. “This trip has been scheduled for a while, Mira. You know that. This way, I can clear the calendar for when the babies come.”
“And what about me? I need you now.”
“You have everything I can give you, Mira.”
Her head jerked up, her every little fear turning into stark reality. His face was set in taut lines and there was a blank note, a resignation to his words, that terrified her.
“I have apologized a hundred times and I will, another thousand times. It wasn’t you I didn’t trust. It was myself. I’m allowed one mistake, Aristos.”
He said nothing, held her for what felt like a long while, until she fell into an exhausted sleep. And when she awoke the next morning, Mira had known immediately that he had left.
And while she wasn’t sure she could bear it if he tormented her for too long, she knew she’d wait him out. She’d wait out his anger, and his fury and his hurt and everything he was feeling.
This time, she wasn’t running. Whatever mood he came back in, whenever he decided to be back, she’d be here, ready to tell him what he needed to hear, to understand that she loved him.
With all of her. And that he was worth waiting for. Worth loving even if it took her an entire lifetime to prove it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THECALLCAMEwhen Aristos had just poured himself a glass of Scotch. He’d given up the pretense of working by noon. For the first time in his adult life, his head refused to cooperate. So he’d ordered his new PA to cancel everything on his plate, given half his staff a heart attack when he lost his temper at some innocent question and walked out of his office. Had spent the rest of the day running through his physical therapy routines, looking at his calendar over the next few months without really seeing it.
A harried Stella rushed on, speaking ten sentences where one might do, sending his heart into a tailspin, not unlike how his car had spun out of control. His glass fell from his shaking fingers as three words registered on his slow mind.
Mira was hurt.
His throat in his heart, Aristos yelled into the phone until Stella calmed down. Even then, his cousin couldn’t speak in rational, clear sentences. Mira had fallen, somehow and hurt her head, and had lost consciousness.
He gathered that much and that was more than enough.
True fear gripped him then. He hadn’t known anything like that, even as a kid fighting for survival. Only Stella’s continued reassurances at silence on his end, that while she had lost consciousness for a while and had a hard bump on her head, Mira and the babies were fine roused him out of it.
Even then, she had to repeat it a few times for it to sink through.
“Don’t go, Aristos. Don’t leave me now. I need you.”
Those words haunted him all through the short flight back to Athens and then the helicopter ride to Carides mansion. She had begged him not to go, she’d asked him to stay because she needed him but he hadn’t listened. Because what?
His ego had been hurt? His fragile feelings had been dented by her lack of trust in him a decade and a half ago?
What was she supposed to think when she found him drunk out of his mind, surrounded by scantily clad girls, talking shit about her to his cousin? After he’d promised to spend the night with her—their first night together, a special night they had been planning on for months and then disappeared without word?
