Page 57 of Husband for the Holidays

“One of my colleagues has taken over my position. Since I was familiar with your situation, I’m to assist you until you no longer need assistance. Also, because your accounts have been frozen until the audits can be conducted,KýrieGalanis will cover your legal fees and any other expenses while you wait for access to your funds to be granted.”

Of course, he would. She stifled a sigh of despair, angry with him for looking after them so well, but from a distance. Was he afraid toaccepther love? Was that it? Had she smothered him? Or not given enough?

After so many years of fantasy, then having marriage to him within her grasp, she struggled to let go of the dream. She lay awake at night wishing she’d done this or that differently, but the reality was he didn’t want to marry her. She had to accept that.

She only wished it didn’t hurtso much.

“Did your tea go cold while you were speaking to your friend?” Nemo asked her mother. Lilja was making a face over the cup she’d just picked up. “Let me ask the kitchen to make you a fresh one.”

“Thank you, Nemo.” She handed over cup and saucer. “I have no idea how we would manage if you weren’t here with us. I think poor Konstantin has lost himself an assistant.”

Eloise choked on a small astonished laugh, her first shred of humor in a week. How had she and Ilias never realized their mother needed a male assistant?

Thankfully, Eloise was kept busy meeting with all the lawyers and accountants, hiring a cotrustee who would teach her the ropes of managing so much money, and realizing that she actually had a crap ton of allowance owed to her that needed investing. It was daunting, but she was glad to be distracted.

She was so distracted, in fact, that she didn’t realize her period was late until she was two weeks overdue.

A visit to the doctor confirmed her pregnancy. She sat in the exam room for a good thirty minutes afterward, crying happy-sad tears. Her first instinct was to go directly to Konstantin and tell him, but she knew what would happen. He would feel obligated to marry her and she didn’t want to put him in that position. She didn’t want him to propose to her again for any reason except that he had fallen in love with her.

Ugh. She was still doing it: hoping.

She would have to tell him about the baby at some point, though. The prevailing advice was to wait twelve weeks before sharing this news. She didn’t want him to get attached to this pregnancy, then suffer the loss if something happened—which was a very convenient rationalization for being a coward, she knew. But she didn’t know if she could face him yet without falling apart. She missed him to the point that she ached from the moment she woke to the moment she slipped into unconsciousness. Then she cried in her sleep, missing him in her dreams.

She would never resist seeing him if she stayed in Athens. She’d only lasted this long because she remembered he’d had business in Singapore in January. Once he returned, the temptation to go to him would be overpowering.

“Mom, what do you think of a change in scenery?” she asked when she returned from the doctor. “I was thinking of applying to that music therapy program again.”

“In New York? Well, yes, I’ve always wanted to spend more than a week or two there. What about Nemo? Can he accompany us?”

Nemo was delighted by the opportunity to spend an indefinite time in the Big Apple. His boyfriend was equally excited and planned to follow as soon as he worked out some wrinkles in his own professional life.

Within a week, they were in a leased Gramercy apartment with four bedrooms, a private terrace, daily housekeeping and an attached studio apartment for Nemo.

Eloise was accepted into the program, thanks to her previous audition, but more because money talked and she now had an abundance of it. Along with starting school, she quietly took her prenatal vitamins and found a midwife, still keeping her pregnancy to herself. She was dying to tell her mother, but she wanted to tell Konstantin first.

The longer she left it, the more daunting that prospect became. She wanted a full plan in place when she told him, one that allowed her to raise the baby alone, but still provided him as much access as he wanted. It would be pure torture to see him on what she suspected would be a daily basis, but somehow they would have to make it work.

The churn of anticipation and dread drove her to the piano every day where she poured out her turmoil of joy and longing, her anguish and all the love that refused to be doused.

In fact, her feelings for him grew a little more each day, just like their baby.

Konstantin tried to retreat into the skin of numbness he’d worn most of his life, but it was shredded beyond repair. His feelings for Eloise were too sharp. Too jagged and hot and extreme.

God, he missed her. How had she become such an integral part of his life in such a short time? It wasn’t just the sex. That had been mind-altering, setting a bar that he doubted would ever be reached with anyone else, but he wasn’t plagued by unmet carnal need. He was instead struck repeatedly by the emptiness of his days. Absence and meaninglessness hit him like an echo in a cavern, leaving him feeling as though he was lost in the dark, bouncing into rough granite walls.

He woke to a cold empty bed. He ate his meals alone, finding no enjoyment in whatever went into his mouth. The silence was worst of all. The cruel lack of music, the absence of laughter. He even missed her innocuous questions about whether he wanted chicken for lunch.

His meetings in Asia should have been a welcome distraction, but he resented them. He hated every minute of being so far from her, but on his return to Athens, he learned she’d gone to New York. That somehow tore a fresh hole in the fabric of his existence.

Hehatedthis feeling. It was the one he’d been trying to avoid, this sense of something having been taken from him. Of having a great hole within him that couldn’t be filled.

Work had always been a useful panacea, but it did little for him these day except provide him with a small satisfaction that he was creating an additional layer of security for Eloise and her mother. When he advised his lawyers the wedding was off, he told them to continue updating his will to make Eloise his beneficiary.

He left her number in his phone as his emergency contact because, if he wound up on death’s doorstep, he wanted her face to be the last thing he saw. Her voice to be the last thing he heard.

Would she even turn up?

I’ve always known my love was unrequited. I won’t keep fooling myself that you’ll come around.

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