Page 25 of His Forgotten Wife
“You didn’t, at that time. I was your boyfriend’s freaky roommate, obsessed with order and silence, remember?”
Dolly shook her head. “I never thought that of you.”
“No, you didn’t.” A warm glow suffused his expression as if he too cherished the memory. “The next night, I started putting insulation around Tony’s room to stop the noise from seeping out. And you dressed me down. Saying I wasn’t just rude but insensitive. It was refreshing. You treated me like you did everyone else. Instead of making passive-aggressive comments, you told me why what I was doing could be perceived as wrong.”
Dolly laughed at his phrasing while her stupid heart did that flip-flop thingy again. “The next evening, you brought a psych resident to talk to me. You know, Isiah checked on me the entire semester.” For a moment, Dolly blanked out at the memory of Isiah King, the one man who could be loosely called Ares’s friend. A preeminent expert in the field of psychology, Dr. King had spent the last seven months at the South Pole for some secret project. “I still don’t understand how you know about the accident.”
One finger on his brow, Ares pursed his lips, then blew out a breath of air. “Promise you won’t go off on me here? If you do, I’ll have to pretend it’s a lovers’ tiff and then we’ll have to make up for it. I’ve read that couples have a lot of fun—” he raised his brows “—when making up from arguments.”
Dolly didn’t know whether to laugh or run as fast as she could. Or maybe she could jump into the sea and start swimming toward North America. “I won’t. So tell me.”
“Isiah told me you had trauma from your parents’ sudden death, nothing more, which you admitted yourself. You told me about the car accident a few years later. At that time, I was paying him and wanted to make sure he was treating you right.”
“You paid Isiah to talk to me?”
“You needed an objective listener with the right background.”
“Why?”
“Like I said, you needed someone you could trust, Dahlia. At that time, he was the only one I could afford to pay. You already told me you had minimal insurance and—”
“Why did you pay him to help me?” Dolly said, feeling as if she were drowning.
Ares stared at her as if she was stupid. Which he had never done before—to his credit, given the brilliant brainhepossessed. “I wanted you to feel better. Seeing you in pain made me very uncomfortable,” he added in his usual matter-of-fact fashion.
The memory seared through Dolly.
She had forgotten that, after a few weeks, Ares began coming to her own dorm room and sitting in the armchair next to her tiny bed, working away at his laptop until the small hours of the dawn while she tried to sleep.
The move to the college, a new environment with strangers, and being all alone all over again, had triggered her nightmares, she knew. Leaving her grandfather behind had been one of the hardest things to do. She’d worried about herself and worried about how he would be looked after in her absence.
With Ares standing like a sentinel in her room, the nightmares hadn’t returned. She had felt safe and cocooned, more than she had ever felt at her aunt and uncle’s place. When she had offered feeble protest on the second night, Ares had claimed that he never slept anyway and that her dorm room was more peaceful than the lab or his own apartment.
She and Ares had been inseparable after, even though they had been pursuing completely different majors. And when Ares’s app had taken off in his senior year, selling for millions,and he’d asked her to come work for him, she had ditched her business degree and never looked back.
Even more than the generous salary and stock options, which she couldn’t deny, the idea of working at a start-up tech business with one of the most innovative, brilliant minds she had ever seen had made her follow him.
A soft gasp escaped her lips as Dolly stared at him now. All these years later, it was almost as if her mind had smudged that memory. Worse, it had also skewed her point of view since his rejection, muddying everything that had been good about them.
It wasn’t just his exceptional good looks or his wealth or his brilliant brain that had lured her into falling for him. It was the generous heart that he hid beneath it all. The realization made her feel a little less foolish.
“So why are the nightmares back now?” Ares demanded, with his one-track mind.
Dolly blinked, still lost in the past.
“There must be a reason.” His jaw turned granite hard as he stepped back from her. As if to study her better. “Is it my family and their open animosity that’s triggering them? Or is it that blasted aunt of yours again?”
“No, the nightmares have been on and off for months now. Although, yes, a new, strange location always throws me off.”
“Tell me what you think might have triggered them this time.”
She sighed. “My grandfather’s health has been declining for a couple of years now. You know that. When he broke his hip, I thought I might have lost him. Then you and I…there was news of your accident and coma…it was a lot. It’s one of the reasons I quit too. I was desperate enough to change something, anything.”
“And now?”
She shrugged.
His finger lifted her chin, his gray gaze an ocean she could willingly drown in. “I’m here, Dahlia, and not going anywhere.”
