Page 16 of His Forgotten Wife
“How did the two unofficial dates go?” The pulsing, pounding pain behind his left eye felt worse as the image of Dahlia with different men moved through his head like a bloody slideshow. “Should I expect one of those men to pursue you across the Atlantic and fight me over you? Do they know that you’re engaged to your billionaire tech boss and are playing around with their hearts?”
Swift color rushed into her cheeks, lips parting on a gasp he wanted to catch with his own. “What?” Her voice rose, a half growl, half squeak, drawing attention to them. She laced her fingers on the table. “They weren’t even dates. More like coffee at the bodega and sushi at the hospital cafeteria. Two random guys I met while waiting nights at the hospital. It was more for company than anything else. H-how do you know?”
“Christina told me.”
“She had no right to do that. Are you paying her to spy on me?”
“We were talking and I expressed my concern at your irrational behavior. She told me what you’ve been up to.”
She leaned forward, her anger rolling off her in waves. “Myirrational behavior?”
A subtle scent of jasmine, deepened by her own, teased his nostrils. He was claimed by an intense, overwhelming urge to duck his head and bury his nose in the crook of her neck where the scent would be richer and deeper. Then he would wrap the braid around his fingers and pull her closer.
Instead, Ares sat back in his chair, fisting his hands in his lap under the table. Clearly, something in his head had shaken loose as a result of the accident because lusting over his assistant and his one true friend wassonot him.
Christos, it wasn’t just inappropriate but a damned inconvenience too. Lust and affection and even bonds of friendship were things that had never interested him before. And yet now…everything seemed to play out to the background of Dahlia’s presence.
“You’re determined to quit a well-paying job to find romance and love and all that…flimsy stuff. What is it if not irrational? Clearly, my accident had more effect on you than you will admit.”
“Of course it had an effect, Ares. You were my boss, my friend and my…” Her throat bobbed up and down.
Despite the cool breeze floating up from the sea, dots of sweat decorated her upper lip. Again, that urge to lean down and lick at that plump lip, to grasp it between his own and suck at it, filled him. He wanted to touch her, not just to know how she would feel but to comfort her too.
Lust was still a biological function he understood. But this need to comfort her in such a personal way, this anger at what he continued to see as her abandonment of him…What the hell is happening to me?Had his brain been completely rewired thanks to the damned coma he’d been in?
With her jaw tight, Dahlia looked as shaken as he felt inside. And that, perversely, grounded him. She was the most sensible, balanced person he knew. Somehow, they would get through this and return to that comfortable, convenient plane of pseudo-friendship. They had to.
Without sounding melodramatic, his survival depended on it.
“I was devastated by your accident and your…coma.” Her brown eyes looked impossibly wide in the shadows. “And it made me take a good look at my own life and I realized I don’t like the direction it has taken. I want more than eighty-hour work weeks inside a steel-and-chrome office.” Her mouthtwisted with self-deprecation. “Did you know that I haven’t gone on a vacation since I was thirteen? I worked two jobs during high school and college. I had grand plans for a career in business.”
“And so?”
“So what?” she said with such fire in her eyes and belligerence in her tone that Ares wanted to taste it straight from her lips.
Was this too a forgotten memory or had Dahlia always been so full of fire?
He had to assume the latter because the one unshakable fact he knew in his gut—which showed how much the accident had changed him, because his gut was suddenly his compass—was that he admired and respected her.
“Did you find the mythical man who’s supposed to make these new, feverish dreams of yours come true?” he quipped. “The man who’s supposed to give you romance novel–worthy sex and movie-worthy romance?”
Her eyes shied away from his, her anger with him an almost tangible force catching them in a bubble. Outlined against the dark waters of the sea behind her, her profile was breathtakingly beautiful. “You’re a bastard, Ares Demetrius.”
“Excuse me? I didn’t catch your answer,” he said, eager to rile her up even more. Maybe then her control would break and he would see what she was hiding. What it was that she didn’t want to give him.
“No. I didn’t meet half a good man, much less a fully perfect one.” Her mouth turned down. “A single hint that I cared for my grandfather full-time, or that I was between jobs, or the fact that I don’t like casual sex had them running in the other direction. Apparently, I’m as out of touch with the dating world as you are. There, are you happy?”
“That you have failed miserably at this, yes,” he said without an ounce of guilt.
“Jesus,” she said, rubbing her fingers over her face. “I’ve forgotten how blunt you can be.”
The chipped nail polish on her nails stood out against her skin, a stark reminder of how far she had come to be here and how she didn’t belong here, amidst his contentious family.
The entire world zoomed out and suddenly all Ares could see was how pinched her features looked and how much weight she’d lost. How his rigid, rigorous lifestyle, his accident, his demand that she see to his needs, had affected her.
And now that his focus had turned to herand only her, he knew what he needed to do.
“How about I make you an offer?”
