Page 8 of His Forgotten Wife
He was aware that she had barely left his side in the last two weeks. Day or night, she was there when he opened his eyes, more alert and awake than the nurse hired to monitor his state of mind, worry wrinkling her brow. His younger sister, Arabella, had also told him that Mama had barely left his side at the private clinic for the seven weeks he’d been under.
Moving closer, he laid an arm around her slender shoulders loosely. Her smile turned brilliant. “The only person who has successfully dragged me to the dance floor once is Dahlia. She possesses an uncanny knack for making me do things I don’t want to or I’m incapable of.”
Apparently, he couldn’t do small talk but he could share unnecessary stuff that had hidden import. He frowned.
“She sounds like a very capable and compelling woman, your assistant,” Mama said, facing him.
His cheeks flushing, Ares met her gaze straight on. Having holes in his memory wasn’t just inconvenient. It made trusting himself harder. “She’s been with me in that position for close to seven years. She’s been my friend and my…partner for all intents and purposes. It doesn’t matter what you call her because no word can encapsulate all she is to me.”
He stilled, his own words a revelation to him. They seemed to come from some place deep inside him that bypassed logic and facts, a place he hadn’t even known existed within him.
It was the same place that radiated a deep panic when Dahlia had mentioned romance and love and babies.
Had that been because he didn’t want to lose her or because he wanted to be able to give those things to her, because he wanted to be the only man in her life? Coupled with the alarming physical awareness that had flooded him at the sight of her, he wondered if he had gone down this route before?
Was that why he had come up with the engagement plan—because it killed two birds with one stone?
“You and this woman…” his mother began.
“Dahlia. Her name is Dahlia,” he repeated, feeling a flare of annoyance. “We briefly talked about her at the clinic, remember? About how she’s my fiancée?”
“And yet she hasn’t visited you once in all these weeks.”
“She didn’t know about the accident for nearly a week,” he said, repeating what his CEO Christina had told him. “After that, she was caught in her own familial obligations. Then, later, there was no point.”
“No point in being by the side of the man she’s engaged to while he’s in a coma?”
Ares gritted his jaw, since he faced the same question over and over inside his head.
It had been more than simply discombobulating to find himself in a hospital bed, wired to beeping machines, and to have strangers tell him that he had sustained a head injury and had been in a coma for seven weeks.
It had been devastating to find Dahlia absent from the whole scene, anchoring him.
Forget being by his side on the chance that he woke from the coma any moment, she hadn’t visited him once. Not once in seven weeks while he lay there.
He had felt…betrayed at learning that little fact from the staff, after clarifying her name multiple times. His own feelingsand the intensity of them surprised him too. It wasn’t as if her being by his side would have made him better faster or sooner. Or that he wanted her pining away for him.
What was truly shocking, though, was that she’d simply resigned from GenTech and wiped him from her life. It made zero sense when she had a grandfather who depended on her income for his medical needs. A man whom she had adored for as long as Ares had known her.
Like him, Dahlia wasn’t sentimental. So why quit a cushy job? Why not coast for a while—Christina was one of her biggest fans after all and knew what a crotchety boss he was—without his demanding ass around? Why not take the break she claimed she needed while cashing in an easy paycheck?
God knew she had earned the right to take it easy ten times over.
Instead, she had sounded as if it had been imperative that she quit. Almost as if she needed to break away fromhim.
He had pondered the why of it endlessly, giving himself a pounding headache more than once in the last two weeks.
“That doesn’t sound like a woman who cares about you at all,” his mother declared.
Ares didn’t miss the thread of hostility in her voice. “Her grandfather had to have an emergency hip surgery.” Even that very genuine reason didn’t calm the furor in his gut. “She’s a very devoted granddaughter. But she will be here any day now.”
“I’m curious to meet the woman who’s such an integral part of your life, Ares. All these years…it almost seems like she has replaced your family.”
Ares nodded.
While he might not like how Mama phrased it—as if it were Dahlia’s fault that he was estranged from them, the rest of it was the truth. Dahlia was integral to his life running smoothly and damned if he would lose her at this stage. He had no patience orenergy to train a new assistant to cater to his moods and habits, to understand the way his mind worked, to keep pace with his working patterns.
Only a day ago, he had started catching up on work. The alternative was to go mad sitting around, in pain. Especially, since he had to keep on top of whatever new, nefarious scheme Sergio and Stefano were cooking up. The evil two had been far too affectionate and accommodating for him to believe it at all.
