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"What?"
"That you cannot live like a normal person. If you run out of milk, going to the grocery store means taking a whole entourage of security and staff?"
"First, I don't care for dairy milk. Second, I would never think to go to the grocery store. Helen would be appalled at my choices, I am sure."
She'd heard him call the housekeeper, Helen. "Your housekeeper, not your cook?"
"Helen rules the house," he said with a shrug. "Even Etienne would not think to oppose her."
"Etienne is your chef?"
"He is. He makes an even better moussaka than Mama, but if you tell her I said so, I will deny it."
Rowan laughed as she knew she was meant to.
"Your divorce has become final?" he asked, apropos of nothing.
Though considering she'd told him she wanted sex with him, maybe not nothing.
"Yes, last week." Since she'd been married in the USA, she'd filed in a US court, but it had still taken over a year to finalize.
Her ex had not been cooperative. Lucky for her, his infidelity had been easy to document and the divorce laws in her home state favored her petition. She also hadn't asked for maintenance, or a financial settlement.
The prenuptial agreement she'd signed had dictated certain financial arrangements she'd been happy to forego for her freedom from the marriage. The judge presiding had not agreed and had ordered a fulfillment of the contract to the letter.
Cyrus and her own family had been livid, but now she had a nest egg. She was still deciding how much of it she intended to keep, and how much she would donate to causes close to her heart.
With her degree in human resources, Rowan was perfectly capable of supporting herself, if not in the lifestyle she'd known growing up or during her marriage, in one she found comfortable.
Lysander smiled at her answer. "Good."
"That's not the usual response I get." Mostly people told her they were sorry. She was sorry too, not to be divorced, but that she'd ever been duped by Cyrus to begin with.
Lysander shrugged. "You were not happy in your marriage even before you found out that Cyrus had broken his marriage vows."
"That's a very old-fashioned way of putting it," she said.
"I am an old-fashioned man in some ways. I believe promises are meant to be kept. It is why I never intend to marry."
She didn't believe for a minute he was engaging in idle chit-chat. He was warning her. Sex might be in the offing, but commitment wasn't.
"Don't worry, Lysander, I'm not looking for another husband." Rowan didn't believe all men were lying cheaters like her ex, but Lysander had been right. She hadn't been happy in her marriage long before she'd learned of Cyrus's ongoing and frequent extra-marital bedroom activities.
"I don't think I'm cut out for marriage," she told Lysander with more honesty than was probably smart to engage in. "I didn't enjoy having myIconstantly subsumed by thewe."
"I do not believe all marriages require that, but I am by no means an expert, having never been married and being the product of a relationship that was never going to include that particular element."
"Did that bother you?" she asked, wondering even as she did so if he would deign to answer.
It was a cheekily personal question.
"There were times in my life it bothered me a great deal," he said surprising her with his honesty. "Now is not one of them."
"What changed?"
"I made a place for myself in the world where it does not matter."
"I would have to agree." Lysander wielded influence his brother and even his father could not hope to match.
