by Lucy Monroe
“While depriving my wife of the support she should expect from me.” He did not sound impressed by that concept.
She wasn’t either, but she’d learned to live with it. “No comment.”
“You used to tell me I spoiled them.”
“You did.” And he’d had his reasons, but yes, definitely spoiled.
“And yet, no matter how I provided for you materially, you never felt spoiled by me.”
“I needed different things from you.” Time. Attention. His willingness to stand by her side in a family confrontation.
“Needed past tense?” he asked.
“I learned to find contentment with what I had.”
He said an ugly word, and suddenly she realized he was seethingly angry.
“You’re furious,” she said, feeling fragile and not even sure why.
“Ne.”
Yes, she translated.
Polly bit her lip. “With me?”
Suddenly his face changed completely, and he pulled her into his arms without warning. “With myself. With my mother and my sister, who should have made you welcome, but instead did much to guarantee you found life here as my wife difficult. But mostly with myself, agape mou, mostly with myself.”
He kissed her then, his lips gentle and completely at odds with the emotion pouring off of him.
She responded, as she always did, allowing her body to melt into his, parting her lips for the tender caress of his tongue. They kissed for long minutes, the only sound in the room their shared breathing and their daughter’s sleeping snuffles over the monitor.
Finally, he pulled back and made a point of looking around her sanctuary. “I like it in here.”
“I do too.”
“I would like it if you brought this warmth into the rest of our home.”
“Would you?” She didn’t remind him again that he’d changed his tune.
Because the fact he had? Was something good.
“Not immediately and not all in one go.” He brushed a barely there kiss across her lips. “I do not want you exhausted by another project when we’ve worked to take others off your plate.”
“We?” she asked delicately.
“Okay, I made some unilateral decisions, but you looked relaxed and pink with health when I arrived. I do not think that can be seen as anything but a positive.”
Believing positive reinforcement might work as well with the father as with the daughter, she gave him a warm, approving smile. “I have enjoyed my more relaxed schedule.”
“Do you like the charity work?” he asked for the first time ever.
“You mean my job as your wife?” Because that’s what it was.
Once they’d gotten married and moved her into the family home, he had laid out a whole set of expectations for how she was going to live her life that she had not anticipated.
“Is that how you see it?”
“What else? You even give performance reviews,” she teased.
But it was true. Especially when they were first married, he’d make sure to take time to talk about what he felt she was getting right and what he thought she could improve on in her public role as his wife. Unfortunately, she’d discovered that public role took a lot more of her private time than she’d ever wanted it to.
In the beginning, she would have been happier if she could have gotten a job in her field, but his mother had thrown a fit at the idea of Polly working as a menial laborer, which is how she considered Polly’s formerly demanding career as a pastry chef. Later, Polly would have preferred more uninterrupted time to dedicate to being Helena’s mom.
“No, I do not think I have ever considered your role as my wife in the light of a job before.” And his tone said he didn’t like seeing it that way either. “As to what you call performance reviews, I was only trying to help you find your way in a very different world to the one you left behind.”
“It never occurred to you that it would have been a lot easier to find my way if I had been allowed to maintain what I could from my life in America.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I had been able to get a job as a pastry chef, I would have made friends more quickly and with workmates.” She pulled away from him and walked over to look out the window. “I know those weren’t the people you wanted me to make friends with, but I wasn’t raised in your rarified atmosphere and it would have been a lot easier for me to have some friends who understood my middle-class outlook on life.”
“I thought that in the long run you would settle in better if you made relationships in that ‘rarified world’ as you call it where you were now living.”
She spun back to face him. “Then why dump me in the back of beyond, taking me away from the friends I had managed to connect with?”
“I thought you would be happier in the country. You were raised in rural Upstate New York.”
“With you gone during the week and living in this great honking hotel?” she asked with disbelief. “No wonder your mom and sister considered the move the beginning of the end of our marriage.”
Only no one had counted on Polly turning up pregnant. It wasn’t as if she and Alexandros had been trying for a baby. They’d agreed they wanted to wait at least two years before they started trying, and Polly had grave misgivings about having a baby with him by the end of the first year of their marriage.
But she’d gotten the flu and her pills had been rendered ineffective. Not that she, or he, had realized it. Not until she’d started losing her breakfast.
“I do not know where Stacia got the idea that my buying this house was an indication that I saw our marriage as anything but permanent.”
Polly twisted her lips at how he ignored the truth of her comment as he had so often in the past. “Probably a combination of believing what she wanted to and the fact that for almost the first year after we moved here, you spent most of your work week in the Athens apartment and only came home on the weekends.”
And those had been shortened from Saturday afternoon to before dawn on Monday morning, when he’d fly out again. Polly had no intention of glossing over the reality of what her marriage had been like then.
Even she had wondered if he had intended the move as a way to make her a smaller player in his life, if not a prelude to the dissolution of their marriage.
“I was fighting the takeover and then working like hell to make sure it could never happen again.” Frustration laced his voice. “Everything my father and his father and grandfather before him had built was resting on my shoulders, but also the livelihood of tens of thousands of employees.”
CHAPTER SIX
HE’D BEEN DOING the best he could for his family.
Polly could see now that was how Alexandros had seen it. And honestly? She could not dismiss all those employees and their lives as being unimportant. He’d hurt her, but he hadn’t done it on purpose, and he hadn’t ignored her just to make another few million.
Moving her to the back of beyond and acting like he was doing her a favor? That was something else. Something maybe they still needed to work out between them.
Because she had missed the country, and she’d told him so, but she hadn’t expected that to result in being moved away from the friends she still missed, or the opportunities to cook in the soup kitchens that had offended her mother-in-law so much, or the easier access to him.
“But Stacia didn’t know that.” Neither had Polly, if it came right down to it. “She and your mother took your behavior to mean that you’d lost interest in our marriage. It’s natural they came to the conclusion that you only stayed married to me because I was pregnant with Helena.”
“But you know that is not true.”
Polly didn’t answer right away. Because she had believed that.
Just as she’d felt trapped in a marriage that was nothing like what
she’d expected or wanted it to be, she’d assumed he was equally trapped by her pregnancy. If Polly ever had considered divorce in that first year, those thoughts were stopped cold by the discovery she carried his child.
She’d owed her daughter the best form of stability she could give her.
Polly had always believed Alexandros had felt the same.
He stared at her, like reading her thoughts on her face. Maybe he was. Even her own mother told Polly she wore her heart on her sleeve.
Unless she was channeling her Anna persona, but that crutch had been harder to lean on lately.
With a curse, Alexandros strode across the room and swept Polly into his arms. Then he sat down on the love seat where Polly liked to give Helena a cuddle while she read to her daughter. This time it was Polly sitting on Alexandros’s hard thighs, his arms steel bands around her. Like he was afraid she’d disappear if he let go.
She dismissed the fanciful thought, and said, “I think me getting pregnant with Helena was a wake-up call for both of us.”
She’d realized her marriage was something she had to make work. And he’d… Well, she thought he’d realized pretty much the same thing.
“My wake-up call came last weekend at my mother’s home.”
Polly gasped.
It was the first time he’d referred to the family villa as being his mother’s home and not his as well. Even after they’d moved to the country, he referred to the family villa as home.
She was so stunned that it took a few seconds for the rest of what he said to sink in. And she almost smiled. Almost. Because it hurt a little. That she’d been right. That believing he wasn’t measuring up to his own brother as a husband had sparked the amazing transformation in Alexandros’s viewpoint toward his marriage and Polly.
“Nothing to say?”
“Not a lot, no.” She had realized she had to make their marriage work, even if it meant changing her own expectations, when she was pregnant the first time.
Regardless of whether or not his ego had prompted it, Alexandros had come to something of the same conclusion a week ago.
“Better late than never?” she tried.
He grimaced. “You consider your role of my wife as a job?” he asked, proving he was still stuck on that point.
“What would you call it when I have a list of duties to perform that have nothing to do with our personal relationship? When I have a set of expectations for how I must spend my days?” The bitterness in her own voice surprised her.
But he’d opened this Pandora’s box in their marriage.
She’d shut the lid tight on her personal dreams and expectations when she realized that no matter how much she fought him, she was trapped in a marriage that wasn’t anything like she’d thought it would be. That whatever else her husband felt for her, it wasn’t love and that no matter what, their unborn child deserved a stable and content homelife.
“I…” He let his voice trail off, without a ready response.
If she could believe it. And she found that very difficult. He was never without a ready response.
“So, you don’t like the charity work?” he asked finally.
“It’s not that black-and-white.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Do you like spending time with me and Helena?”
“You know I do.”
“So, sell off your company and spend all your time with us.”
He stared at her in nothing less than abject horror. “You don’t mean that.”
“It’s not that black-and-white, is it?”
He sighed. “I suppose not.” For Alexandros?
That was quite the climbdown.
“When we talked about having children before we got married, do you remember what we said?” She looked into the espresso gaze that had so caught her that first time their eyes met and willed him to think back.
“That we both wanted you to be able to stay home with our children.”
“And you promised me that I could. You said you understood that I wanted to be the mom who was home after school, that our house would be the one that our children and their friends hung out in. Even if it was a mansion.” He’d used those exact words.
“You are an at-home mother.” Confusion made his body tense against hers.
He had never liked not understanding. Anything.
“Am I?” Only she didn’t feel like one when the charity work and social events he insisted she had to host and attend were as demanding as any full-time job. “Today I got to play as much as I wanted to with Helena. I got to help her make cookies for the first time without planning the event two weeks in advance on my calendar.”
There had been a time that Polly spent time baking every day, just to relax. She’d clung to that in the first year of their marriage, but obligations on her time and her mother-in-law’s attitude toward such pursuits eventually saw the end to her indulging in her passion for creating.
“In fact, it was one of the few times I’ve been in the kitchen with our daughter because there are so many things I want to do with her and there simply isn’t enough time to do them. She spends a lot of her time with me, in here, while I work with Beryl, my attention divided.”
“You do make it sound like a full-time job, but you must understand. This is how I was raised. I grew up with a mother who kept such social obligations as a matter of course.” And a grandmother before that.
She knew it was ingrained in him to see life a certain way by his family, by his history, by his culture and by his own personal experience. That didn’t make it any easier for Polly to live the life he expected of her.
“Your mother never held any other job, and she relies a lot more heavily on her personal staff than I ever had,” Polly pointed out.
“Because you believe that if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing right.”
“And personally.” Polly wasn’t putting her name to something she wasn’t actually personally involved in, but recently she’d begun to realize that maybe her own stubbornness had pushed her to a higher level of involvement than necessary.
That wasn’t an easy thing to acknowledge or admit. Because it meant that not only was some of her discontent with her life at her own instigation, but her own pride and intransigence had led her to taking time away from Helena that she hadn’t needed to.
“I know that a lot of moms don’t have the time they want with their children,” she acknowledged to him, for now not addressing her inner revelations. Not ready to share the burden of blame when so much rested on his attitudes and expectations. Still, she added, “I try very hard to remember that my life is easy in comparison to other women’s.”
“Because you are rich.”
“Because my husband is a billionaire.”
“What is mine is yours.” He said it like he believed it.
But again she thought it was a matter of him believing something in the abstract, but his actions showing a deeper conviction toward something else.
“Not according to the prenup. And honestly? If that were true, you would not have bought this house without my input.” Could he finally understand that had been taking his tendency toward control one giant step too far?
“That was a mistake.”
Again, shock rendered her nearly mute, but she managed to force out, “Was it?”
“You are my wife.” He cupped her cheek, his hand warm against her skin. “I should never have made the decision to move us out of Athens without your agreement.”
Polly was kind of stunned he was admitting it finally. “I didn’t want to live with your mother and sister any longer.” Even though, at first, she’d been okay with it.
He’d explained how the villa had been their family home for generations. How his mother had begged them to make their home there rather than him moving out. In the light of Athena
’s recent losses, Polly’s heart had been moved to agree.
And she’d moved into the villa, believing she could help heal the family’s grief only to learn that nothing she said or did was going to endear her to Athena or Stacia.
“But when you bought Villa Liakada, I’d made friends in Athens, built a life for myself. You took it all away.”
“And thought I was doing you a favor in the process,” he said with a self-deprecating twist to his handsome lips.
“Yes.”
“I hurt you.”
Many times. “Yes.”
He winced, his own expression revealing a vulnerability she wasn’t sure she could believe. “I have always wanted you to be happy in our marriage.”
“I’ve found contentment.”
He leaned down, pressing his forehead to hers. “Damned by faint praise.”
“It could be worse,” she admitted, whispering because she felt like there was a fragile bubble of intimacy around them she did not want to break.
“I could be a philandering abuser,” he said with pure self-derision she had never seen him point at himself. “Believe it, or not, but I need to be something better in your life than that.”
Suddenly that bubble was suffocating, and she couldn’t stand being in his arms, held like something precious when so many times she had not mattered to him at all.
She pushed against him, but he resisted.
“Let me go, please.” She needed to breathe.
He released her, his expression one she did not want to try to interpret right then.
She stood and moved to where her book sat on the table by the chair she’d been in earlier. Needing something to do, she slotted it back into the bookshelf. “I think we married too quickly, without really realizing what the other person wanted.”
She didn’t claim they were both too young, because Polly had been twenty-seven and Alexandros had been thirty-two.
They’d met when he was in the States. She’d done the desserts for a meeting he attended, and somehow the middle-class pastry chef had bumped into the billionaire.