She couldn’t deny that. Polly had her own measure of pride and hadn’t wanted to admit she wasn’t physically up to the same schedule she’d always kept. “If you’ve hired a nanny behind my back, we are going to have some serious words,” she warned him.
“It would almost be worth it to see you engaged enough to actually argue with me, but that is not something I would do.”
“You want me angry with you?” she asked. This was the second time he’d alluded to wanting that and she was trying to understand why suddenly he wanted her to revert to how she’d used to be.
Willing to argue every time she didn’t agree with his autocratic view of the world. Angry with him more often than she’d ever wanted to be.
Because she kept expecting him to treat her like he loved her.
She didn’t have those expectations any longer.
“No.” Which did not surprise her. “I want you real with me, and I’m only just now realizing how long it has been since I saw the real Pollyanna. Only in the same way I have realized that there are an honored few that already do.”
“What do you mean?”
“My brother. His new wife. The few you call friend and not acquaintance.”
He’d left off her family, but maybe that was because he realized bringing them up would only point out how differently her parents and siblings treated Polly to how his own mother and sister did. “None of them call me Anna.”
And at its most basic level, that was the dividing line.
“So, all I have to do is call you Pollyanna to get back into the charmed circle?” he asked in that seductive tone he usually reserved for the bedroom.
Heat climbing her cheeks at her body’s instant reaction to it, she said, “I don’t know what circle you’re talking about.”
But she did. He meant the people she trusted, including those few she’d learned she could rely on since moving to Greece.
Her husband, she had learned not to trust.
“Yes, you do.”
“Yes, I do,” she admitted.
“I call you Anna.”
“Yes.”
“You do not like it.”
“It is not my name.”
“It is a nickname.”
“That your mother finds more acceptable than my real name. Yes, I know.”
“You have never asked me to call you Pollyanna instead.”
She shook her head. Was he rewriting history now? “That is not true.”
He stared at her, his mouth open to refute her words, but then he must have remembered. Because he went oddly pale. “You told me Anna was not your name and you would prefer if I would not use it.”
“But your mother had made it clear how very lowbrow she found my real name.”
“So, I called you Anna around her.”
“Not just around her.”
He winced in acknowledgment. “I slipped once too often and realized I needed to use it all the time, for consistency.”
The other option of course would have been for him to never use it. For consistency. And because Polly had made it clear that was what she wanted. But then, when had Polly’s wants, or even needs, ever trumped his mother’s? Never, that was when.
Their daughter demanded her father’s attention right then, and Polly was grateful for it. She was done with this weird walk down memory lane.
No one could change the path their marriage had taken, because she’d realized way too late that she’d married a man programmed to hurt her.
Because, despite a few claims to the contrary, usually when she’d done something that made him really happy, like giving birth, he did not love her.
No man who loved her would treat her the way that Alexandros had since their marriage and her move to Greece. The very fact he’d insisted on moving into his family home, one they had had to share with the two wicked witches, showed just how little her feelings had mattered to him.
He knew from the beginning that Athena had wanted him to marry an entirely different type of woman. It had taken Polly longer to see the contempt behind the smile.
Even so, Alexandros would be so annoyed if he knew she thought of his mother and sister in those terms.
But Polly’s thoughts were her own and even her had to be in charge husband could not police them.
They put their daughter down for her nap together, and Polly enjoyed the family togetherness so much, moisture burned the back of her eyes.
“Are you all right?” he asked as they left their daughter’s bedroom together.
“I’m fine.” She didn’t consider that two-word answer deception.
She simply said what he expected to hear.
Suddenly she found herself in his arms and being carried past the staircase that would have taken them back downstairs, down the hall and to their bedroom.
“It’s the middle of the day, Alexandros!”
“When has that ever stopped me?”
It was true that some weekends they utilized the time during their daughter’s naps to enjoy marital intimacy, but since he was never home during the day during the week, and not always on the weekends, it was something very new.
“Don’t you have to get back to the office?” she asked in wonder as he laid her down on their bed, his expression harsh with need that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
Or maybe it had been and she just hadn’t let herself notice it.
“The office can wait.” He removed his jacket and tie in rapid succession, his nimble fingers already working the buttons of his shirt open.
She gasped, her shock was so great at that unprecedented statement.
CHAPTER THREE
ALEXANDROS IMPATIENTLY TUGGED his shirt over his head with only the cuffs and a few buttons undone. Shock turned to passion as the body she loved touching so much was revealed to her hungry gaze.
He unhooked his leather belt and didn’t even bother taking it from the loops as he usually did before undoing his slacks to push them down his hips.
“They’re going to get wrinkled like that.”
“Do you care?” he asked lazily.
She shook her head, her gaze glued to his now-naked body.
“I love the way you look at me. In the bedroom.” There was something strange in his expression she couldn’t read though. Like something about what he’d said bothered him.
Polly leaned up on her elbows, confident in this, as she was in no other area of their relationship. In this area, there could be no denying they were entirely simpatico.