Page 6 of His Forgotten Wife
She couldn’t be so foolish again, she reminded herself now. Definitely not with this man who could shred her into pieces with two pithy sentences.
He hadn’t just rejected her tender admission of attraction, but called their entire relationship into question.
“Nothing’s wrong with it if that’s you want, Dahlia,” he said, responding to her tone. “Maybe things have changed for you. Or maybe I didn’t know you that well to begin with.”
She nodded, hating herself for putting him on the wrong foot. Especially when he wasn’t completely himself.
“A month it is, then,” he said, a steeliness in his tone. “For me to change your mind and make you stay with me. Shouldn’t be that hard.”
Despite conflicting emotions pulling her this way and that, Dolly laughed. At his sheer arrogance, at his innate confidence, at how the truth of it shone in his eyes.
For a long time, she had prided herself on the fact that Ares needed her, that only she could keep his life running smoothly.
Only to realize that he saw her as no more than a parameter, a constant at that, in the vast, complex equation that was his mind.
“I’ll see you soon, Ares.”
A sudden rise in the noise level in his room told her his family had arrived. “Not soon enough for me,” he groaned, sending goose bumps over Dolly’s skin.
She ended the call before he could see how desperately she wanted to soothe him, to be by him. To hold him even, not that she ever had before.
And now she had a month to come clean…
Her belly twisted up in knots as she wondered how she would bring up the small, sticky subject of their having been married in secret. How she would admit that he’d asked her to marry him—to sign a watertight contract to be exact, for a one-year marriagewith a huge payout on signing—on one normal Tuesday evening as if it were just a complicated business assignment. And how she had said yes without hesitation and signed the contract.
Because it meant everything to her that he would trust her beyond anyone else, because it meant that, maybe, just maybe, he liked her a little, even. As more than a friend, as more than an efficient assistant.
In her stupid pathetic heart, it had even looked like they were finally taking a step forward in their relationship.
Not that she’d expected Ares to change overnight and fall in love with her just because she was his wife…
There was also the fact that, having stood by him all these years, the lawsuit and the claim on his fortune made her just as furious as it did him. A wife had been the perfect way to protect his assets from his vulturelike half brothers, who had twisted their grandfather’s long-ago birthday gift to Ares into a family investment that they also had a claim to.
She was a wife he could sign off his assets to at a moment’s notice. As his spouse, her own private assets would be untouchable by his family in the state of New York. But that was the last resort, the final trick up his sleeve, only to be usedifhe couldn’t settle the lawsuit outside of court.
The last thing he wanted was for a scandal to touch the Demetrius family.
A week after they had signed the marriage contract, they’d found themselves stuck in a cabin upstate with a snowstorm raging outside. She’d drunk cognac—which had loosened her tongue and her heart, cheap drunk that she was.
And when he had pulled her to her feet and she stumbled into his chest, she blurted out her attraction to him. Her feelings for him that she had tried so hard to nip in the bud but failed.
His rejection had been swift and brutal, leaving her with no doubt of his disgust.
Burying her face in her hands, Dolly let out a half groan, half cry.
It was clear to her that Ares remembered nothing of their arrangement, nor the lurid details of her admission and his swift rejection.
Her time with Ares Demetrius was limited before either the gap in his memories would fill in or she’d tell him the truth. And that difficult fact made her chest heavy and her throat tight.
CHAPTER TWO
Two weeks later
Ares Demetrius watchedthe weeklong celebration of his grandparents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary kick off around him with that same sense of isolation he’d always felt amidst his family.
Although, that particular evening, he made sure to not show it on his face.
Apparently, his traumatic head injury, the subsequent gaps in his memory, and escaping the clutches of death with his body beaten into a pulp meant that he had achieved a mild personality transplant.
