Page 15 of His Forgotten Wife
Heat streaked her cheeks as she tried to cover her confusion. “I don’t know,” she finally said.
“If I want to take your biggest worry in life off your shoulders so that you can give me your time and focus, is thatbuyingyou?” Disgruntlement etched his features.
“That was over the line,” she said, biting down on her lip. “This whole thing has thrown me.”
“Of course it has. Especially since, clearly, you have built this whole new life without me in it.”
While she had hoped to find some sense of equanimity about his place in her life, all she had established in the long seven weeks they’d been apart was that she was even more attached to him than she’d realized. She had been lost and confused, even grieving. It had felt as if she had lost a friend and a partner, without ever having enjoyed the actual benefits of either.
But there was no way she could share that with him. He would either laugh at her or banish her again.
He steepled his fingers over his abdomen, his words strained. “Now that I’ve made the offer, I’ll see that it’s done.”
Her chest rose with her ballooning breath. “That’s called railroading. And it’s not necessary. As soon as his doctors clear him for moving, he’ll shift into a long-term care facility. I was able to get enough funds into place.”
“That home in upstate New York?”
God, but the man didn’t forget a single detail. “Yes.”
“You said the place was prohibitively expensive.”
She sighed. “I have savings. You have always paid me well and I liquidated some of my stock options.” And before he could probe further, she said, “I’ll stay and help you with whatever. I want it noted, though, that I’m agreeing to the fake engagement and everything it entails under extreme resistance.”
“Noted,” Ares said without missing a beat.
“And I’m going to leave when you figure out a way to beat the meatheads.”
Ares was angry enough that he could feel its burn up his throat. To say he didn’t like the sensation would be an understatement. He liked the irrationality of her decision even less.
He’d thought seeing Dahlia here, in this environment where he had once been the most vulnerable, would return his self-assurance.
There was a sense of his world tilting right at her presence. Of not being alone, of not being an outsider among familiar faces, a sentiment that had dogged him all his life.
But the fact that she was still insisting on leaving her position,on leaving him, made that feeling transient.
He felt like he was struggling for air. A sensation he remembered very vividly from when he had been twelve and Sergio and Stefano had pushed his face into the massive water sump at their farmhouse. Even the passing reminder that he couldn’t begin to navigate the world around him without her grated on him.
A pulse of awareness pinged through him as he let his gaze travel over her.
Her tight braid pulled her angular features into focus. A high forehead, the sharp tip-tilted angle of her nose and thethin but wide mouth with lips the color of cherries…nothing about her features was conventional. And yet, mixed together on the canvas of her face, like some artist’s individual strokes coming together to paint a vivid scene, she radiated stunning intelligence and subtle beauty.
It was a face one could become obsessed with. The birthmark on the slope of her upper lip, the fragile cradle of her clavicle, the arch of her neck…his fingers tingled with the urgent need to trace every inch of her.
He wanted to dig his fingertips into her flesh, smudge that composure she wore like an armored vest until it crumpled under his fingers. Until she told him why she was so desperate to leave him.
Like so many other emotions clamoring to be heard, this too was raw and persistent. This stringent awareness and dawning attraction to his assistant.
It was the reason he had waited two hours to approach her, even though her arrival had tugged at him as if he were a magnet seeking north.
This attraction was last thing he needed right now, an extra complication when they were caught in a situation that demanded constant proximity. And it made him wonder if he had felt this awareness and attraction to her before.
Had he tamped it down because it was unprofessional and made him feel this…out of control? Had he ever admitted it to her?
Because he was definitely failing now at keeping the boundaries, especially given he was parading her as his fiancée.
“Right,” he said, refusing to betray this new awareness just yet, “I forgot about your whole dating, romance and babies plan.”
Her shoulders went straight, stretching the soft fabric of her sleeveless top tight across her breasts. The light from thehanging sconce limned her high cheekbones and lips, leaving the rest of her face in alluring shadows. “Mock me all you want. But nothing’s wrong with paying attention to what I want from life.”
