Page 1 of His Forgotten Wife
CHAPTER ONE
Ares Demetrius calling…
Ares Demetrius calling…
Ares Demetrius calling…
The incessant ringand the name on the video call flashing on her tablet made Dolly Singh drop the hot cup of coffee in the tiny kitchen of her uncle’s home.
Even the shatter of the cup as it hit the floor and the brown liquid pooling into cracks on the already worn-out tiles couldn’t unfreeze her from her shock.
Ares Demetrius—the Greek tech entrepreneur who had sold his first app at twenty for a hundred million out of Columbia University, her boss of six years and university mate for three before that—was calling.
Ares calling her at four in the morning wasn’t usually extraordinary because her boss was a genius who worked hundred-hour weeks and insisted she be at his beck and call the entire time.
But he’d been in a car accident seven weeks ago while returning to his family’s estate in Corfu for the first time in nine years. He slipped into a coma after his traumatic head injury, upending her entire world in one horrible moment.
And the events of the weekend before his fateful trip had already left Dolly feeling as if their entire relationship had burned down.
Six years of working nonstop beside him, without a life of her own, standing by his side as he revolutionized the tech world, meant her life had suddenly been empty while he lay in a coma.
Seven weeks of not seeing his hard, handsome face, of not hearing his deep timbre, of not meeting that gray gaze that she knew better than anyone else’s in the world…it was as if she had been induced into a coma too. But her grandfather falling and injuring his hip within hours after Ares’s own accident had made it impossible for her to travel.
“Dolly,beta,” her grandpa’s sleep-muffled voice came from the bedroom. “Your phone is screaming.”
“Yes, Grandpa. Getting it now,” she shouted back, reaching for the tablet. Her uncle and aunt were on a summer trip financed by Dolly, happy to get them out of the way while her grandfather recovered from hip surgery. The last thing she’d needed was her aunt needling at how morose and depressed Dolly had been for weeks now.
Her hands trembled as she set up the tablet against a pickle jar on the tiny island, her heart speeding up in her chest so fast that she had to rub the area with her fingers.
Outside the jammed-up sliding doors of the living room, she could see dawn paint the sky in splashy pinks and oranges. Soon, the tiny community her aunt and uncle lived in in Brooklyn would come to life in Technicolor: noise bleating from the bridge overhead; smells from the bakery and left-out garbage cans mingling; the tall maple trees painting the streets in deep golds and blazing reds announcing early fall.
It was exactly how she felt at the prospect of Ares coming out of the coma—as if she too were emerging from a deep, restless slumber.
Her finger slipped twice on the screen before she swiped to accept the call.
“Christos, Dahlia! How long do you need to pick up a damned call?”
Her heart climbing into her throat, it took Dolly several long minutes to register that he was expecting a response.
How could she when all her other senses shut down so she could focus on the vision before her? When relief that he was better flooded her system in waves?
His rugged face filled the screen and Dolly traced each feature with her hungry eyes as if she were seeing him for the first time, charting every angle and plane.
His high forehead, the long, patrician nose, the thin slash of his lips that denoted his impatience, the divot in his chin that made a god out of him, the square jaw…all as familiar to her as her own strong-angled face and yet now, so achingly different…even new.
Then there were his eyes—a frosty gray that she’d seen warm only once in nine years of their acquaintance.
In spite of her practical, no-nonsense nature, Dolly knew she could drown in those eyes. And had done on that night before the accident, at a very high cost to both of them. Guilt choked any words her brain managed to even make.
“Dahlia? Is it me that has been in a coma or you?”
His gruff question made her snap out of the bubble of longing. “I… You…” A long sigh tumbled through her lips. “I didn’t know you came out of the coma,” she finally said, sounding utterly stupid.
“How would you, given you cut off all communications with me and the company?”
The uncharacteristically personal tone of that complaint took the wind out of her sails. Until she reminded herself thatAres thrived on routine and efficiency and familiarity and she represented all those things to him.
To wake up in an unfamiliar hospital would have notched up his confusion and his need for control. He wasn’t a man who did well with the unexpected and being in a car crash and the subsequent coma had to be devastating.
