Page 14 of His Forgotten Wife
He sat back. Watching her, drilling holes into her with that gaze.
Lacing her fingers on the table, she sifted through the various options. “When you called me, you’d just woken up after seven weeks in a coma. All I kept thinking was that you’re okay. My brain wasn’t all there. I was riding the wave of relief and happiness.”
Which was mostly true.
He didn’t look satisfied but at least moved on. “So, the plan was to use the engagement and the idea of an imminent wedding to encourage my brothers to drop the lawsuit?”
“Yes,” Dolly said, past a throat full of thorns. “You thought letting them see that your assets could be mine any day would be a warning. The direct threat would be that you wouldn’t let them touch a penny of yours, ever again. That you would never again come to their rescue like you did four years ago.”
“You know that I helped the family company out?”
“That you invested twenty million Euros into the export company and paid off the money they embezzled from it, yes.” She sighed. “You trusted me.”
“I still do.”
“But?” she said, her breath hanging on a sword.
He shook his head, shutting her out. “We will follow that plan and make a big show of the engagement, then. Which will give them a chance to plan out some activities for me.” A hint of vulnerability flashed in his eyes. “I want to repair my relationship with my parents and Arabella.”
“I get that,” she said. “But you’re starting it with a big lie to them.”
He pressed the pad of a thumb to her knuckle. “It’s not that much of a stretch, is it?”
Her heart gave a kick against her rib cage, her entire being sinking into that patch of skin he touched. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve been the only woman in my life for a long while, Dahlia. You know me inside out. And with these damned headaches…” He pressed his fingers into his temples, his mouth bracketed by strain. “Right now, you’re the only one I can trust.”
“Surely not everyone in your family is like those two?”
“No, but it doesn’t mean Sergio and Stefano won’t use them to manipulate me. I have to stop them from dragging this lawsuit out, in a way that doesn’t hurt the rest of the family. Mama and Papa are, I believe, already at loggerheads,” he added. “The scandal of us going at each other will break my grandparents’ hearts. It’s the reason I stopped it from becoming public.”
“They’re suing you, Ares. For a huge chunk of your fortune that they have no right to. At some point, you have to tell the rest of them.”
“No. It would only hurt them. Especially Mama and maybe even my father.”
The need to question his continued loyalty toward a man who had done nothing to protect him grated on her. Dolly bit back a sigh.
Lies within lies…She was beginning to feel like she had walked into some kind of play, blindfolded, with no memory of how she got there.
Wasn’t it better to simply tell him the truth? To get the whole mess out in the open if he was going to be here indefinitely? But if she did, she would have to also reveal what had happenedafter, what had made him look so disgusted with her. Why he’d been so angry with her.
She had no idea where he had hidden the marriage contract they had both signed. If the engagement itself was enough to thwart the meathead brothers as Ares was hoping, could she simply hide her head in the sand about their agreement until they could dissolve the marriage after ten months?
Maybe by then, Ares would not only recover but be relieved that she wasn’t his contract wife anymore.
Still, the last thing she needed was to enter a fake engagement with the man she was secretly married to, a man she had too many confusing feelings about.
“Dahlia…” he said, that thumb pad stroking toward her wrist. “What are you not telling me?”
Her pulse spiked as she looked up to meet his eyes. “You’re asking too much of me, Ares.” It was what she should have said months ago when he’d asked her for “a small favor.”
Pulling his hand away, he sat back in his chair, his gaze drilling into hers. “What if I offer to pay for your grandfather to move into that assisted living community that you were checking out last year? For the rest of his life?”
Dolly stared at him, her chest squeezing tight with guilt this time. That was exactly what she’d done with the money he’d given her for signing the marriage contract.
Then there was the shock that he had remembered that her grandfather had been having more and more mobility issues and that, right before Ares’s accident, she’d been scouting old age homes. Just when she thought she might be more objective about their relationship… “Are you trying to prove that you can buy me?” The question sounded pretentious and self-righteous to her own ears, because she’d already sold herself to him, even if not for his wealth.
“Buy you?” he snarled, jaw tight.
