Page 4 of His Forgotten Wife
“Again, have you always been this mouthy with me?” He raised a thick brow, lips twitching. The glint of humor in his eyes took the edge out of his question. “If you have, why do I think you’re irreplaceable to me?”
“No one is that for you, Ares. You have always made that clear.”
“So we argued about your importance in my life?”
God, the man had a brain like a steel trap. Dolly fidgeted in her seat, holding back the wriggling truth with great effort. “Not really.”
Because they hadn’t argued. He had simply told her what she was to him and what she wasn’t and how foolish she was to harbor feelings for him. And how damnably inconvenient and awkward she’d made everything by actually confessing to them. And oh, couldn’t she have just swallowed it all or kept them to herself at least?
But despite her confusion and fear at how tangled things had become between them,andannoyance at his current high-handedness that she attend to him, she understood that he must be feeling all those emotions a million times more strongly.
“To tell you the truth, I do not feel like myself,” he said, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. “I do not like that feeling when the entire world is already so strange and alien to me. The last thing I need in this condition is to be surrounded by my…family. But… I can’t leave until I solve this litigation suit, once and for all. Wasn’t that the reason I traveled to Greece?”
Dolly nodded, even as her pulse spiked like unearthed wire looking to ground. She’d never felt more devious than at the moment, willfully keeping a big secret from him.Was it willful if it protected them both though?she wondered, her head beginning to pound now.
“While I understand your dilemma,” she said softly, “there’s nothing to be done, Ares. Sometimes, life has us by the short and curlies, and we simply have to give in. Trying to wrest control during that time is…counterintuitive, to use your own words.”
A smile split his thin lips, changing the very landscape of his rugged features. It even touched his eyes, melting the gray frost. He looked boyishly handsome, so achingly beautiful that the knot in her chest tightened, as if he were holding the threads for it and tugging at them willy-nilly.
Seven weeks of his absence apparently hadn’t thickened her armor enough. But caring about him shouldn’t necessarily mean that she loved him. The last few months had made her see how terribly tangled her own feelings were.
“Ahh…what a poetic way to put it, Dahlia. Is that why I kept you around, for your no-nonsense approach to life?”
She shrugged, wet heat prickling behind her eyes. “I kept up with your maniacal moods and impossible demands better than anyone else. Maybe that’s why.”
“So make this period ahead easier for me. Help me catch up to everything. Come back to your job, Dahlia.” When she hesitated, he bit out, “Whatever you’re making, I’ll double it. I’ll triple what you were making with me before.”
“I’m not working currently,” she blurted out before she could catch the ramifications of admitting that to him. “I told you, I needed a break,” she added, hoping he wouldn’t read much into it.
“But you take care of your aging grandfather and pay the mortgage on your aunt and uncle’s house and pretty much support all of them, don’t you? Plus you have those humongous student loans for Columbia that you wouldn’t let me clear.”
Dolly blinked.
How could he remember that small, insignificant fact but not the earth-shattering contract they had both signed? Had her fervent admission that night been so traumatic that his mind had blocked out the entire week leading up to his accident completely?
“Dahlia?” he prompted, tone impatient.
She cleared her throat. “You paid me well enough that I had some savings. The day after your accident, my grandfather fell and had to have hip surgery. Seemed like a good time to take a break.”
“Sure you don’t need any financial help?”
She shook her head, shying her gaze away from him.
For all his temperamental moods and ruthless demands on her time and energy, he had always been more than fair to her monetarily.
Then there was the giant payout he had given her for signing the marriage contract, along with stock options in GenTech. She’d used up three-quarters of it to pay toward a long-term care home for her grandfather’s foreseeable future. As for the remaining amount, she’d simply written out a check in her aunt’s name, which she hoped would cover the meals and clothes and shelter that she and her uncle had given her after her parents had died—as she had been reminded of constantly after they had taken her in.
It was the only way her self-respect would allow her to take such a huge amount from Ares.
But she wouldn’t mistake his caring for her as attachment or more, ever again.
“How long before you can transfer his care to a live-in nurse?”
“A month, maybe. I don’t like the idea of leaving his care to some stranger,” she said, giving in to the inevitable, but adding a big chunk of buffer for herself.
At some point, she’d have to tell him the truth about what had happened between them. She owed him the truth, even if it meant the end of things between them forever.
The very thought made her stomach cave in.
