by Lucy Monroe
“What has left you so disappointed?” He asked as if the answer really mattered to him, when she knew it couldn’t.
“You wouldn’t understand.” He really, really wouldn’t. And with that, she realized it was time for her to escape. She pushed at his hip and chest. “I need a shower.”
“You have time.”
“Weren’t you on your way out the door?”
“Perhaps I will put off my first meeting of the day.”
“No.” She practically yelled her denial. “My plane—”
“Leaves in a few hours, I know. And you’ll want to give your sister the news.” His eyes traveled over Chloe’s curves under the thin sheet, saying without words what he’d rather she spend her time doing.
“You know too much,” she grumbled.
“There was a time when I didn’t, to my own detriment.”
“I can’t imagine it.”
“Neither could I, but it did happen.”
“When?”
“You need to ask?”
She blinked. “Yes.” Did he think she was a mind reader?
“The birth control.”
“But you did know about it.”
“Not until shortly before we left New York for our final trip together to Athens.”
“By then, I’d stopped taking it,” she shared with gallows irony she wasn’t sure he’d get.
“What?” For the first time in their acquaintance, her ex-husband, the mighty Ariston Spiridakou looked 100 percent gobsmacked. “But then you could have been …”
“Pregnant when I left you? Yes, for a month I was very much afraid I was.”
A month during which she’d been terrified she’d allowed herself to become pregnant only to discover that the man she loved and had called husband felt nothing for her. She could have waited to make sure, but she’d known if she didn’t leave while he was out of country, the chances of her doing so at all dropped dramatically.
When she’d discovered she wasn’t pregnant, she’d been in equal parts relieved and devastated.
No excuse to go back to him, no stay in her bid for building a new life without him. It was about that time she’d stopped eating and a couple of months later that Rhea had staged her intervention, encouraging Chloe to return to the West Coast, where she’d gone to art school and fallen in love with a different type of life.
“But you were not?” His face leached of color and the hands on either side of her hips fisted in tension.
“Do you really need to ask?”
“You could have …”
“No, I could not. You really can be an idiot, Ariston.” With that she shoved him out of the way and jumped from the bed, uncaring of her nudity, as done with their conversation as she had ever been.
The great big stupid idiot.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ARISTON watched his ex-wife storm into the en suite with a sense of utter shock coursing through him.
She’d stopped taking the pill about the same time he’d discovered she’d been using it. What terrible timing.
She had intended to fulfill her part of their marriage contract—she’d just clearly had her own timeframe for doing so. As he was famous for telling his CEOs, a bit of communication would have helped.
And she was angry with him?
He shook his head, not for the first time, at the vagaries of the female psyche and his ex-wife’s in particular.
She could have been pregnant when she left. That infuriated him, but it also confused him. Why leave before she knew whether or not she was? Why stop taking birth control, thereby showing intention to make their marriage long-term only to end up leaving after all?
For the first time in his life, Ariston had absolutely no clue to the puzzle before him and he found that more than a bit frustrating.
Had she felt too young for motherhood? While she hadn’t said as much, Chloe had revealed a level of bitterness at her circumstances he would never have guessed at. Feelings she’d apparently needed to work through before being willing to have his baby.
One thing was certain, her coming off the pill—even in the eleventh hour of their marriage—blew his initial assessment of what she’d wanted out of their marriage all to hell.
Though he was a man who hated to be wrong, he found he didn’t mind in this instance.
And regardless of the past, soon she would be exactly where he wanted her, back in his bed on a permanent basis.
Unlike what Chloe had implied with her question about his lovers during their two years apart, he’d hardly had legions of sexual partners since she’d left Greece. The few he’d taken to bed since the divorce had only proven one thing to him. Once a supremely congenial lover was found, no one else measured up.
While he did not believe in romantic drivel like all-consuming love, he did believe in sexual compatibility. And he and Chloe had that in spades.
Against all of Ariston’s expectations, when he’d married the artsy, somewhat introverted and extremely innocent daughter of his business associate, Chloe had turned out to be the most amazing lover he’d ever had.
She didn’t play sexual power games, but gave him everything in her responses, holding nothing back. Her honest, awakening passions had become addictive in a way Ariston had neither expected nor been happy about once he learned of her subterfuge about the birth control.
But he had no intention of ever admitting it to anyone, and Chloe least of all—she’d been gone from his bed only two years, but that had been one year, eleven months and twenty-nine days too long.
He didn’t like feeling weak, and needing her sexually had done that to him.
Eventually, he’d realized that the problem wasn’t how much he’d enjoyed bedding his ex-wife, it was that he’d allowed the balance of power to shift in their relationship in a way he never would have done in any other business deal.
This new deal was much more weighted in his favor. And that was just the way he intended to keep it. No matter what revelations she made about the past.
It had taken him only six months to realize he wanted his wife back, but another eighteen to bring everything into place so that it could happen—on his terms.
She would make an ideal mother. He’d thought so from the beginning. So had his grandfather.
Ariston might give the appearance of an American businessman and speak English without an accent, but at heart Ariston Spiridakou was a Greek man.
Despite his own parents doing their best to destroy it, he still had a strong sense of family and heritage. He wanted offspring, children that would never be neglected as he had been.
He’d expected Chloe to provide the other half of that equation. And with her purely Greek lineage, even though she’d been raised entirely in the United States, she’d found favor with his grandfather as well.
Once she’d met him, she’d charmed Pappous as well, cementing her role in their family, though Ariston hadn’t realized how permanent that was until he’d filed for divorce.
Pappous had been apoplectic.
Unused to upsetting the one person in the world Ariston did not want to disappoint, he’d been more than a little dismayed by his grandfather’s reaction to losing Chloe from their small family.
Even after Ariston told the old man she’d been on birth control, he’d ranted at Ariston, being the one to first suggest maybe she’d been too young to face motherhood yet.
An old-fashioned man, Takis Spiridakou had still been furious when he learned Chloe hadn’t been allowed to finish her university degree. Ariston doubted she had any idea what an ally she had in the strong-minded old Greek.
One thing both Ariston and Takis agreed on—Chloe was nothing like Ariston’s own mother.
He hadn’t been surprised at all that Chloe categorically refused to give him a child and walk away. She was not the type of woman to abandon her baby to be raised by others. Not that that had ever been Ariston’s intention.
She’d shown herself to be tenderhearted and generous
; he imagined that under the right circumstances, she would be willing to surrogate a child for someone else. But these weren’t them.
And between the two of them, he was fairly certain, never could be. He didn’t mind. He didn’t want a mother for his children that saw them as a bargaining chip to ensure a certain lifestyle as he’d been for the woman who gave him birth.
But no matter how Chloe attempted to paint the past in a new light, one in which she was not obliged to fulfill the unwritten expectations of their contract, she’d hidden the fact she was on birth control from him.
He would have understood a desire to wait a year, or two. He would have changed the original terms of the contract to five years, in that case.
He wouldn’t have liked it, but Ariston was a reasonable man. He would have done it.
But she hadn’t given him the chance.
She’d simply deceived him.
For three years. Well, almost three years. He’d been no more aware she’d gone off the pill than that she’d been on it in the first place.
Ariston didn’t like feeling ignorant any more than he did feeling weak. Even less so, if that were possible. Weakness he could control with his formidable will, but ignorance born of another’s deception?
That was something he couldn’t control and a complete anathema to him. And something he would make damn sure did not happen this time around with Chloe.
Regardless of recent revelations, he wasn’t going to make the mistake of blindly trusting her innocence again.
Chloe was busy supervising movers and quietly plotting the most effective way to murder her ex-husband for his impatience when her phone rang for the umpteenth time in an hour. She sent it to voice mail without even looking at who the caller was.
Avoiding the curious looks of the movers, Chloe sighed and rubbed her forehead.
The man simply wasn’t content to let her get on with putting things in order—he kept calling her.
First to tell her about the terms of the takeover. As if she cared. Bottom line? People kept their jobs and Rhea and Samuel’s marriage had a chance of surviving.
Samuel had called to thank her and Chloe had gotten off the phone and cried at how happy and hopeful her sister’s husband had sounded. Rhea had expressed her gratitude with heartfelt effusiveness when Chloe had dropped off Ariston’s deal proposal with her.
Her sister was happy and that made Chloe happy.
But Ariston had wanted to tell her all the nitty-gritty details of a merger that Chloe had zero real interest in.
As if her sister hadn’t kept Chloe on the phone for three hours the night before doing the same thing. Rhea had been ecstatic about some of the terms, but a little hurt about the marriage counseling requirement.
Samuel, on the other hand, had made it clear that was his favorite element to the proposal.
Chloe just wanted to forget about Dioletis Industries for the next few days while she got her own chaotic life in order.
She had had plenty to think about already. Plenty to keep her tossing and turning and sleepless for most of the night.
She’d still been zombielike and on her second cup of coffee when the movers arrived this morning.
Organizing her move was hard enough in her exhausted condition without Ariston’s constant phone calls.
Less than an hour after the one about the contract, he’d called to tell her about the apartment she’d be living in, after texting her enough pictures to fill up her text in-box storage.
The apartment was beautiful and bigger than what she was living in now, but really? She’d see it when she got there. Right?
And right now, she couldn’t care less about its original moldings and hardwood floors throughout. The urge to run away that she’d had in his office was back in full force.
No matter how much she wanted to be with Ariston, Chloe wasn’t so naive that she didn’t realize the risk to her heart was huge.
The call asking her which designer she currently favored had technically come from Jean, who wanted to set up appointments at several of New York’s boutiques.
But the source of the call had been Ariston.
Chloe was feeling pressed enough trying to button down her life in two weeks—she didn’t need the extra pressure of scheduling her new life in New York already on top of it.
He’d called at lunch time to make sure she was taking a break to eat. Seriously?
Ariston was the least likely candidate for that kind of solicitude she could imagine.
When she’d said something to that effect, he’d taken her crankiness as a sign she hadn’t eaten. He’d been right.
Arrogant, pushy tycoon.
The phone rang again and she went to press the forward-to-voicemail key, only to realize that it wasn’t her phone ringing. It was one of the movers’. That was it. She was definitely changing her ringtone to something more personal. Just as soon as she could get someone else to do it for her.
Technology wasn’t exactly her friend.
The mover who had answered his phone had a strange expression on his face and he was walking toward her.
“It’s … uh … Mr. Spiridakou. He … uh … wanted to talk to you.” The mover put the phone out toward her.
She groaned and rolled her eyes, not caring who saw her reaction, but she took the phone. “Yes, Ariston?”
“I believe your phone is broken. I’ve instructed Jean to get you a new one immediately.”
“It’s not broken. I forwarded your call to voice mail.”
“My last three calls?”
“Are you sure there were three?” She thought about it and conceded maybe he was right. She sighed. “Yes, three of them.”
“But why?”
“Ariston, you can’t call me every ten minutes while I’m trying to oversee the packing up of my apartment.” She couldn’t help the exasperation-borderline-irritation in her tone.
“Surely they are done by now. Your current accommodations are not precisely capacious.”
She couldn’t deny the one-bedroom apartment above her gallery was small, but it was hers. And she wasn’t exactly relishing leaving it. Even to be with Ariston.
“I’m sorting as we go.” And if she was taking her time doing so, that was her business.
“You can sort when you arrive in New York.”
“I doubt it.” As if he was going to give her the time. “I remember how hectic my life was with you before.”
“You will not have the responsibilities you once did. You will not be my wife.”
“I know that, but you’ve already had Jean calling me to set up shopping appointments, for goodness’ sake.”
“You’ll need new clothes.”
“Right, because my old clothes from the city are so worn.” They might not be this year’s collections, but she favored the designers she did because of their classic lines and minimal use of ephemeral trends.
“They are out-of-date, surely. It’s been two years.”
“Ariston, I’m not particularly fussed if they are a couple of seasons out-of-date.”
“Besides, you have lost weight. You will need a smaller size. For now, anyway.”
Well, that explained his call about lunch. He thought she was too thin. He wasn’t alone. Her doctor had been hounding her to put on a minimum of ten pounds, but Chloe hadn’t taken the need to do so seriously.
She wasn’t dangerously underweight. Just maybe headed in that direction. “I’m fine. My clothes are fine.”
“Why wouldn’t you want new clothes?” he asked, sounding bewildered.
“It’s not that.”
“Then?”
“Fine … I’ll buy new clothes. Just let me get back to packing.”
“You mean sorting.”
“Yes.”
His snort said what he thought of her insistence on doing it now. “I called because I wanted to know if you would prefer a different apartment. You didn’t seem all that excited about the one I sent you pictures of.”
“It’s beautiful. Why would you say that? I told you I liked it. A lot.”
“But you do not love it.”
“It’s just an apartment, Ariston.”
“It is where you will be living, for the foreseeable future.”
“I am aware.”
“So?”
“I’m sure it will be just fine.”
“I do not strive for fine.”
No, he didn’t. She’d always known he was an over-achiever. She’d never believed he had even the narrowest of streaks of insecurity, though. “It’s more than fine. It’s wonderful. Really.”
“If you’re sure.”
“Yes, now I’ve got to go.” She tried to keep her tone patient. “I’m sure you have more important things to attend to.”
“I was in a meeting,” he admitted in a strange tone.
She didn’t know how to respond to that. She couldn’t picture the man she’d been married to ducking out of a meeting to call and make sure she was happy with the apartment he’d chosen for his … well, not mistress, but she wouldn’t call herself his lover either.
Not when he would not, or simply could not, love her.
“If you are sure the apartment is to your liking.”
“It is, very much,” she added, not wanting a repeat of this phone call.
“I will talk to you later.”
“Sure. Talk to you tomorrow,” she hinted.
The call ended from his end and she figured he’d gone back to his meeting.
When her phone buzzed in her pocket an hour later, she knew better than to forward it to voice mail.
She grabbed it and pressed the connect button with more force than necessary. “Look, if you’re still worried about the apartment, don’t be. I said it was fine,” she said, thoroughly frustrated. “I had no idea you could be so insecure.”
“Hello, Chloe.”
It was a male voice, but it wasn’t Ariston’s.
A sick feeling settled in the pit of her stomach. “Father.”
“I called to thank you for saving the company. It means a great deal to me.”
“I didn’t do it for you.”
Silence met that pronouncement.
“I did it for Rhea and the hundreds of employees your mismanagement would have put out of work.”