health’s sake. Not because her overthin figure had turned him off. He wasn’t sure anything could.
For whatever reason, his libido was turned to her signal to near devastating effect.
But she’d never had much spare weight to begin with, having an indifferent attitude toward food that he had wondered about at times during their marriage.
The slightest cold or flu had her off her feet and losing pounds she couldn’t afford off her willowy five-foot-eight-inch figure.
He should inquire as to whether she’d been ill recently. That would account for her more gaunt appearance now.
For the present, he simply said mildly, “Well, that looks good. I hope you ordered me one as well.”
Her green eyes twinkled as she nodded at the waiter, hovering nearby. “Oh, I thought you could do without.”
The waiter arrived with Ariston’s matching appetizer. They took a moment to order their entrées.
“You like to tease the bear.” Ariston gave her a mock frown. “I had forgotten that.”
“Really? I thought you said I was memorable.” Something shifted in her expression, but then she was smiling again, if with less sparkle than he remembered. “But you meant sexually, didn’t you?”
He was too smart to agree with her. He might have played the fool during their marriage, but he wasn’t one. Not really.
“There are many things I remember about you, Chloe.” That, at least, was the truth.
Her green gaze narrowed speculatively. “I imagine I was the first woman to ever leave you. That would have made me memorable, I suppose.”
“That’s the thing about imagination. It’s not real.”
Her shock was palpable. “I didn’t know you’d had any serious relationships. I can’t believe she ditched you either.”
“Why not? You did.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“Because we wanted different things,” he mocked. “Perhaps my memory is faulty, but it was you in those discussions with me and my grandfather via video conference saying you wanted children eventually and that you agreed to the marriage.”
“I’m not the one who filed for divorce.”
“I wouldn’t have been either, if you’d still been there when I got back from Hong Kong.”
Both her expression and the sound that came out of her mouth said she didn’t believe him.
“Shannon was my one and only serious girlfriend,” he said, rather than trying to convince Chloe of something Ariston would rather forget himself.
“When?”
“A long time ago. I was younger than you were when we married.”
Interest burned bright in Chloe’s emerald gaze. “How young?”
“Nineteen.”
“How old was she?” Chloe asked, proving an insight he didn’t expect.
“Twenty-seven.” And Shannon had had an entire universe worth more experience than he had with sex and the male-female thing.
He’d avoided it because of what he’d seen in his parents’ marriages, so he’d been entirely unprepared for a piranha like Shannon to come into his life.
Chloe stopped eating, fiddling with her silverware instead. “How long did it last?”
“Long enough for her to gather enough inside information so her father could steal a multimillion-dollar deal out from under me.” Long enough for him to tell Shannon that he loved her and wanted to be together always.
Even then, he’d been jaded about marriage, so when she’d broached the subject, he’d said they didn’t need legal bindings to know what they were to each other. It had been all romance at the time, only later had he given thanks for that one small foresight.
“I … oh …” Chloe frowned, her eyes troubled. “It wasn’t like that with us.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“No, of course not. I didn’t try to get any deals for my father.”
“You got him a lot of cash.”
“That was your idea … yours and his. I wasn’t even brought in until the deal between you two was negotiated.”
“True.” He frowned, annoyed by the fact that their discussion had already gone off script to what he’d planned. “We got sidetracked rather spectacularly earlier. You never answered my question.”
For several seconds Chloe looked confused, but then her expression cleared, only to turn into a frown. “You mean why I’d asked to meet with you? Are you still pretending not to know?”
“It is no pretense. You have agreed that you’ve changed, implied there is no love lost between you and your father, and yet here you are.”
“Because my sister asked me to fall at your feet in supplication. And because her husband begged me to save my sister.” Chloe shrugged her thin shoulders. “I don’t think I have that power, but I’ll try.”
The image her words evoked made his slacks uncomfortably tight, but he merely said, “For the sake of your family’s fortune.”
Now was not the time to