by Lucy Monroe
Polly hadn’t been alone though.
Alexandros had made it possible for her parents to come over from the States to stay the last two weeks of Polly’s pregnancy. Her mom had been with her every minute and her dad in and out of her room during Polly’s long labor.
Her father had returned to his job a week after Helena’s birth, but her mom had remained another month. All at Alexandros’s request, she reminded herself.
Considering how often her OB had suggested Polly cut back on her schedule, she probably should have expected Dr. Hope to tell Alexandros off for how tired Polly was, how she was clearly not being taken care of like she needed.
But the litany of reminders of how many ways in which Polly did not get the TLC she so desperately craved from her husband came as an unwelcome shock.
And in a wholly unexpected moment of out of control emotion, Polly ranted, “I don’t know why everyone has to rub in the fact that my husband doesn’t care enough about me to take even the most rudimentary care! Don’t you think I know that? I’m doing the best I can.”
Only maybe she wasn’t. Maybe Polly needed to take a step back from her pride and let some of Alexandros’s money do what he wasn’t ever going to. Take care of her.
Dr. Hope looked pained. “I know you are, Polly.” She cast a very pointed look at Alexandros.
“I do not think she was saying these things to rub it in as you say, yineka mou. She was saying them to me, to tell me what a selfish louse I’ve been, so maybe if enough people say it, I will listen.”
“You’re not a louse.” Though sometimes she thought of him as a rat. Was that any different?
Polly turned her head away, because looking at her husband hurt right then, and she’d thought she’d come to terms with the limitations of their relationship. But he was rewriting the rules and she just didn’t know why.
The rest of the visit went better with Alexandros asking all the questions any concerned husband and second time father-to-be might do. Dr. Hope unbent enough to answer every question patiently and without further condemnation.
Polly waited until they were in the car, the privacy window closed between them and the driver to ask, “Why are you being so nice to me? I just don’t understand.”
Then she had such a horrible, terrible thought, she couldn’t breathe for a few seconds. The one area of her marriage she’d never worried about, was suddenly in doubt. The one thing she thought they got right. Maybe wasn’t right anymore.
She didn’t know why she’d never worried about it before. Maybe because he’d always been such an attentive lover. Maybe because he’d told her he abhorred infidelity and she had believed him. Maybe because she simply had never been able to imagine him as a cliché… The powerful tycoon philanderer.
But right now, with him acting so strangely, with her hormones and emotions all over the place from her pregnancy… Polly did wonder.
Sitting up straight, her body rigid with stress, she accused, “You’ve taken a pillow friend. That’s what you Greek tycoons call them, isn’t it? You’ve got a mistress and you don’t want me to divorce you when I find out!”
“No.” He looked like he wanted to laugh, but then seemed to all of a sudden realize she was very serious and how bad that was for their marriage. “No! Polly, you are the only woman I have touched intimately since our first date.”
“Can I believe you?”
“Have I ever lied to you?”
“Yes.” Pain of an entirely different kind racked her pregnant body. “Your sister warned me, but I thought she was talking nonsense. Trying to hurt me like she found such sport back when I used to let her get to me.”
Alexandros could not believe what he was hearing. “I have failed spectacularly in the husband stakes, but I have never lied to you.”
He could not even deal with what she was saying about how Stacia had treated her because the fact his wife did not trust him was instantly, glaringly obvious. This was not hormonal raving. Pollyanna did not believe him.
“You have,” she disagreed.
“When?”
“When you asked me to marry you. You said you would do anything you had to to make me happy.”
And clearly in her mind, he hadn’t. “I thought giving you anything you wanted would make you happy.”
“But you don’t. Not the things that matter.”
And finally, after five years, he might be starting to understand the distinction. “I’m working on it.”
“But you lied then. You lied when you said you loved me.”
“I did not lie. I just didn’t understand what I needed to do to keep those words true. And I do love you.”
She laughed like that was a great joke, only she didn’t sound happy about it.
“You are my wife, by my choice. I am not lying.” The words sounded hollow to his own ears as he realized just how stopped up the ears were they were falling on.
“A man does not treat a woman the way you’ve treated me when he’s in love with her.” Pollyanna sounded so certain in her own mind, so sure of her interpretation of the years of their marriage he knew denial would be useless.
He said it anyway. “A man too focused on his business and keeping peace within his extended family does.”
A man still grieving the loss of his father and afraid of how close he’d come to losing his mother. Despite how much he wanted to fix what was broken, those words would not leave his lips. Alexandros had never been an emotionally vulnerable person.
It was not his nature.
It was not how his bigger-than-life father had taught him to be.
Unimpressed with the words he had managed to utter, Pollyanna shrugged, turning her head away, and he knew the words again had fallen on deaf ears.
Or maybe they had been the wrong ones.
“I will change,” he promised. Had already started changing, but he didn’t expect her to trust that.
“Not on my account.”
“Naturally on your account, but on mine too. I want what we had in the beginning.”
“It’s dead.”
He didn’t believe that, but clearly he hadn’t just failed, he’d destroyed the fragile bonds of trust between them. All right. Okay. He’d taken over businesses that looked like they could never be revived. Some of those companies were his biggest earners now.
Let the rescue bid for his marriage commence.
When they were going over her schedule during breakfast on Wednesday, without another unexpected turn-up of Alexandros, Beryl told Polly not to worry about preparing for travel to her appointments with the doctors that Alexandros had set up.
Apparently, he had arranged for the appointments to take place at the mansion. There was already a massage table in the room off their personal gym, used by both her and Alexandros’s personal trainers.
She wondered if Alexandros knew that Polly had stopped seeing her personal trainer the second month of her current pregnancy.
And then reminded herself she didn’t care. Polly did what she had to in order to keep the peace, but no more. She’d built a life for herself in Greece that resembled the life he expected her to lead, but was not actually that life.
Except for a very superficial resemblance.
She was on charity committees, but not the flavor of the month, only the ones that really resonated with her. Most did not have the wherewithal to throw the glittery balls her mother and sister-in-law were so fond of. She’d made friends from those charities, not others from Alexandros’s set, but normal people who cared enough to sacrifice time and money for causes they believed in.
Polly wore designer clothes and used a car and driver like Alexandros insisted. But she donated from her wardrobe twice yearly to charity auctions and only bought exactly what she would need for each season. Her walk-in closet never getting more than half-full. Her driver was
a retired veteran with a disability that still allowed him to drive, but not a lot else to earn a living. Her car was the same one bought for her use the first year she married Alexandros.
Alexandros arranged for a new car for her every other year and she donated them for the use of the directors of the charities she knew needed them most.
Polly attended only the functions with her husband that she could not get out of and never gave up dinnertime with her daughter. She didn’t fight about it; she simply didn’t show up, and her husband had learned that time with their daughter was sacrosanct to Polly.
She wasn’t unhappy. She loved being a mom. Loved her husband even if she knew he did not really love her. She did believe he was faithful. That moment in the car had been all pregnancy hormones, but he’d taken her seriously and that in itself had been a novel experience.
It had also cemented the belief she already had that he would not take a mistress.
No matter what Stacia said, Alexandros Kristalakis was not the type to keep a pillow friend.
He never broke his word on purpose. She didn’t trust him, not because she thought he lied to get what he wanted but because he lied without meaning to, and that was in her view even more dangerous.
Polly knew that she and Helena were important to him, if not of utmost importance.
It was more than a lot of women had.
Maybe not all that Polly had wanted, or even believed she had when she agreed to marry the Greek tycoon, but not a bad life.
She looked across the table at her daughter and smiled. No, not a bad life at all.
Polly and Helena were in their saltwater pool, playing before lunch, when the sound of an arriving helicopter sent Polly’s gaze winging upward.
It was Alexandros’s helicopter, but she was sure he wasn’t on it. It must be the transportation he’d arranged for the doctors. Her appointments weren’t for another two hours though. Perhaps they needed time to set up?
She could have cut her time in the water with her daughter short, but there was a housekeeper to meet them and make sure they had what they needed.
Going back to the game intended to increase her daughter’s comfort with putting her face under the water for swimming, Polly dismissed the arriving helicopter from her mind.
“Now, that is a beautiful sight.” Humor and masculine appreciation filled her husband’s voice.
Startled into immobility, Polly stared at the apparition standing on the pool deck. “Alexandros! What are you doing here?”
At the same time as she spoke, her daughter realized who was there and tried to leap away from her mother and toward her father, arms outstretched. “Papa!”
Six feet four inches of sartorial masculine gorgeousness leaned toward his daughter like the effect of salt water on his suit was of no concern.
Swooping Helena up as a maid strategically wrapped a towel around the little girl, he gave Polly a slashing grin. “I’m having lunch with my two favorite females and then working the rest of the day from home.”
Like a landed fish, Polly stood there her mouth opening and closing, but with no words making their way past her lips. What was he doing here? His favorite females? Really?
“Not if your mom and sister are in the running.” Polly snapped her mouth shut so hard, her teeth clicked.
She had not meant to say that. Hadn’t made a comment like that since before Helena’s birth. Not after he’d told her that the world did not revolve around her, that Polly would have to get over her unnatural jealousy of his family if their marriage was going to work.
Instead of getting angry as he used to do, her husband gave her another heart-stopping smile. “There is no competition, yineka mou. You are my wife and Helena is my daughter. No one is more important to me.”
“Since when?”
But he just smiled again, shook his head and said, “Are you getting out? I thought Helena needed lunch so she could nap.”
“She does, of course. We were only playing for ten more minutes.”
“By all means, stay in the water. I like the view.”
She looked down at her pregnancy-distended belly in the simple, but bright one-piece Polly had purchased for swimming in her final months before their baby’s birth. What was there about this view for him to like? In that way? Because he was giving her a look over their daughter’s shoulder that sent sensations she preferred to keep confined to their nights in bed together zinging through her body.
Regardless, the opportunity to swim a few laps without having to watch her daughter was all too appealing. Polly spent as much time in the pool as she could because it relieved the pressure in both her lower back and pelvis.
“If you’re sure you’re okay with her?” she asked him.
“Of course.”
She didn’t ask again, just turned and took a standing dive into the water, pushing for the other end of the pool.
Reveling in the freedom to swim unencumbered, Polly did a few leisurely laps before climbing out of the pool and grabbing a towel. She could have stayed in longer, but she couldn’t stay away from the sweet tableau of father—suit jacket and tie now missing—and daughter—wearing her little terry cover-up—talking earnestly on one of the loungers closest to the pool edge.
Polly hated breaking it up, but she had to, or the sweet little girl would turn into a hungry, tired little terror. “Time to get dressed for lunch, poppet.”
“But Mama…” Helena whined.
And Polly knew that tone. Definitely time for lunch and then nap.
“Come. Dora will help you dress while I help Mama.”
“You’re going to help me get dressed?” Polly asked delicately.
The heated look that came her way made her really wish they didn’t have plans to eat with their daughter in a matter of minutes. “Ne.”
Alexandros carried Helena inside and up the stairs, handing her off to Dora when they reached the landing and putting his arm around Polly to walk her to their bedroom.
“Why did you come home again today?” she asked breathlessly as they stepped inside the sanctuary.
He turned her around to face him. “Because I wanted to.” Then he kissed her and she forgot the question and everything else. Just that quickly.
It was always like this. Polly could not resist the physical temptation of her husband. Not for a kiss, or for more. She never had been able to. Even more, she could not resist the emotional connection she felt to him during times of physical intimacy.
She knew it didn’t go both ways or he could not spend as much time traveling as he did.
Because if it was up to Polly she would never have willingly spent a single night away from him.
He pulled her still-damp body right against him, letting her feel how quickly he had responded to the kiss. His hardness pressed against her and she wanted nothing more than to move to the bed so she could explore the hard male body she found such delight in.
Clever masculine fingers were peeling her swimsuit down her arms, exposing her breasts. Already beaded nipples tightened nearly painfully as the air brushed cool against wet skin.
He cursed before cupping her. “You are so beautiful.”
“Pregnant,” she said wryly. “Fat.”
“Ypérochos, énkyos, dikos mou.”
When they’d first married, she hadn’t spoken any Greek, but she’d taken pains to learn. Because now she lived in Greece and it made communication easier, but mostly? Because he used Greek in bed and she’d wanted to know if he was saying he loved her. He didn’t, but he did say stuff like this and it went straight to her heart.
Gorgeous. Pregnant. Mine.
“Yours.” She had no problem admitting a truth she’d never been able to hide.
“Dikos mou. Gia pánta.”
Forever? Yes, she supposed she was, but she didn’t say it. “We have
to get dressed,” she said with real regret.
“I need to get undressed and you need a shower,” he corrected.
But she shook her head. “I’ll have to shower after lunch. We’re going to be late to the table as it is.”
“We can phone down. Dora can see to Helena’s lunch, yineka mou.”
“No. Our daughter is expecting us.” Helena saw less of her father because of her sleep schedule than Polly saw of her husband. “It wouldn’t be fair to her.”
“And what of us? Is it fair to eat lunch when we want each other so much?”
“Didn’t you once tell me that anticipation made it all the better?” He’d been talking about the nights they had to spend apart, when they both missed their physical intimacy. “If we’re fast, we can share a shower after lunch and before my appointments.”
“We will take as long as we need after lunch with our daughter.”
And presumably the doctors could wait on the billionaire and his wife. Polly simply shook her head again. She could argue polite behavior after lunch too.
Helena was excitable over lunch, showing off for her papa and pushing to stay up and play rather than take her nap. “But I not tired, Mama.”
“You need your rest, poppet.”
“But Papa will be gone when I wakes up.” Helena burst into floods of tears.
Before Polly could pull her cumbersome body to her feet to go around the table to comfort her daughter, Alexandros had said a not very nice word beneath his breath and leaped to his feet. He pulled their daughter into his arms and promised in both Greek and English that he would be there when she woke from her nap.
Helena’s sobs only increased and Alexandros looked at Polly, his expression stunned.
“I don’t know why she’s crying like this,” Polly admitted, hating that helpless feeling that was such a normal part of parenting.
Their daughter kept chanting Mama, but when Polly got up and came around the table to take her, she clung to Alexandros with all the strength in her little body.