In receipt of those indictments, he was shocked stupid and silent for several long moments.
“If I’m so awful, why have you stayed married to me?” he asked finally, a wholly unexpected fear that one day maybe she wouldn’t taking root inside him.
He’d realized long ago that the material benefits of being married to a billionaire were not the perks he thought they would be for her. So, what kept her married to a man she considered a total failure as a husband?
“You’re just now asking yourself that?” She sighed. “We made promises before God, and I won’t just ignore those promises in favor of an easy out. We also have a child together. From the moment of conception, I stopped making decisions based solely on my own happiness.”
He had no doubt she spoke the truth on both counts, but those reasons for his wife staying married to him were not exactly good for his ego.
“So you’ll stay married to me no matter what?” That didn’t jibe with the woman he knew his wife to be under the placid facade.
“No, not no matter what.”
“What would make those vows invalid?” he was driven to ask, a nameless dread telling him that he was on the thinnest ice when he hadn’t even realized he’d stepped out onto the frozen lake.
“Abuse. Infidelity.”
“And that is all I have going for me? I don’t abuse you and I’m not unfaithful.”
“Pretty much, yeah.” She sighed. “And you’re good in bed,” she added as if forced to do so. “You are not a selfish lover.”
Just selfish in every other way.
He had no words to respond to that statement.
CHAPTER TWO
THEY HAD ARRIVED at the helipad, and for the first time ever, Alexandros was relieved to have a confrontation interrupted because he literally did not know where to go from here.
He watched his wife scoot to get out of the car and really noticed for the first time just how tired she was. Why hadn’t he noticed before? Those bruises under her eyes had been there before they left the house. The way she moved more slowly than normal—that had been there too.
He cursed and then reached in to lift her out into his arms and carried her to the helicopter. She didn’t fight him. In fact, she gave him the biggest shock in an evening of shocks when she relaxed into him and simply let him take her weight.
Was it a sign that on some primal level she still trusted him? Or was she simply that exhausted?
When they got into the helicopter, he shrugged out of his dinner jacket and then pulled her into his arms, putting it around her like a blanket. Again, she didn’t fight him, but relaxed into him, falling asleep almost immediately.
Okay. That exhausted.
She did not wake on the flight home, nor when he lifted her from the helicopter and carried her inside.
When he reached their bedroom, Alexandros undressed his wife for the first time since meeting her without plans to have sex. Not that the sight of her body didn’t turn him on. It always turned him on, but he wasn’t such a monster he couldn’t see how much she needed her rest.
No matter what she chose to believe, he did care about her well-being. Of course he did. She was his wife. And though he rarely said the words, he loved her.
He carefully removed the pins from her hair and fetched makeup wipes from their en suite in order to do what he’d never done before. He gently removed all traces of the makeup he knew she did not like to wear.
So, why did she wear it?
Because he’d made it clear he expected her to look the part of the wife of Alexandros Kristalakis, one of the most powerful men in Greece, if not the world.
He’d thought he was helping her fit into a world she had no experience of, but he couldn’t help wondering how much help his advice couched as demands had really been.
Alexandros might be singularly obtuse to her feelings like she accused him, but he’d noticed that while she did the charity work he insisted was part of being his wife, she chose to support charities that his mother did not. His wife had put the power of his purse behind children’s charities and those that served the marginalized, charities that did not have the cachet of those his mother supported.
In five years, his wife had built her own circle of friends and interests, and while those circles might overlap his and that of his influential family, they were not encompassed by them. Were in fact, he realized, as far removed from them as she could get without removing herself completely from his sphere of influence.
He finished preparing his wife for bed and then slid her lovely, pregnant body under the sheet and summer-weight duvet. She didn’t shift until he joined her in the bed, forgoing the call to China he’d meant to make. He put his arm over her and tugged her close, the feeling that he was on the verge of having her ripped right from his arms too strong to ignore.
“Andros,” she whispered against his chest in her sleep.
He went rigid at the name he hadn’t heard in years, not even during lovemaking. Then without even considering it, he was turning and facing her, gently shaking her shoulder. “Why don’t you call me Andros anymore?”
“Andros was the man I fell in love with,” she said in a voice that sounded more asleep than awake.
“And who is Alexandros?”
“The man I married.” She made a snuffling sound and turned in her sleep. Away from him.
Alexandros wrapped his body around his wife, his entire perception of his life going through a painful metamorphosis.
Polly woke warm and relaxed, feeling better than she had all week despite the way the night before had ended.
She had no memory of undressing or taking off her makeup the night before, but she slept naked, the way her husband liked her, with no day-old mascara clumped on her lashes when she blinked her eyes open.
Polly was alone in the bed. Nothing new about that, but the single yellow rose on her husband’s pillow was.
She picked it up and automatically brought it to her nose to sniff as she read the note he’d left with the flower on her pillow.
Good morning, agape mou.
Nothing life altering in those four words, except it was the first time in their relationship that Alexandros had written a personal note to her. He didn’t do cards for holidays or anniversaries, or even her birthday. He did big, extravagant gifts that touched her less than a simple card would have done. Money was easy for Alexandros.
Sentiment would have been harder.
He did texts and sometimes phone calls, but since she stopped replying immediately or picking up the phone every time his number showed, those instances had become less common.