even surprise her that he’d said it out loud in the middle of the restaurant. He wasn’t speaking loud enough for his voice to carry far, but she didn’t think it would matter to him if he had been.
Ariston didn’t live by normal people’s rules.
“I … that …” He wanted a mistress? A lover? What?
“Without the birth control,” he said with intense conviction. “I want the baby you withheld from me.”
“You knew.” Shock upon shock. She’d been so sure he wasn’t aware.
She couldn’t even begin to deal with his comment about a baby just that second.
“I told you.” He stood and returned to his seat. Still close, but a vast gulf of emotion and understanding between them. “There is very little about my business interests that I do not know.”
“I never felt like a business interest when we were together,” she said helplessly, her mind reeling. “Not until the end and I saw you planned to divorce me just as the contract said you could after three years and still keep the stocks.”
He said nothing, his silence speaking words she didn’t want to hear.
She shook her head, but her thoughts refused to settle as they spun endlessly around one simple fact. “I don’t understand how you could know.”
“I found your pills.”
“In my jewelry armoire?” But he never went through her things.
Only he must have. At least once.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe it shouldn’t … but I feel like it does.” If he had never trusted her and had spied on her, that put their marriage in a different light, even for her, didn’t it?
“I was planning a gift for you.”
“And you needed something in my jewelry armoire?” she asked with a fatalistic sense of doom.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Is that really important?”
“Probably not.” The fact that he had known was the only thing that really mattered.
Because somehow she was beyond certain his discovery of the packet of pills had led to those divorce papers being drawn up. The only question she didn’t have an answer for was, why had he waited to have the papers served?
But then maybe she had her answer already—in their contract, the clause that stipulated he had to wait until they’d been married exactly three years to divorce her, or forfeit the stocks in Dioletis Industries.
Suddenly the whys and wherefores of his discovery and what she thought it had led to faded into the background as the full implication of his words hit.
“You want me to give you a child.” The horrified shock she felt infused every word and she made no effort to hide it.
His brows drew together as if her response puzzled him, but he said, “Yes.”
“I won’t do it.” She shook her head adamantly and then went to take a fortifying sip of the wine she’d ordered with dinner, only to have the glass shake so badly in her trembling fingers she was forced to give it up. “I won’t.”
His blue gaze narrowed, both his expression and tone taking on a calculating cast. “Not even for your sister and all of those employees you supposedly care so much about?”
“You would have me give up my own child in order to save other families?” she hissed across the table at him with a depth of pain she hadn’t realized he was still capable of drawing forth in her.
“You would not want to give up your child?” he asked, as if curious in a merely academic way.
The jerk. The world-class, professional jerk.
“Surely you know me well enough to know that?” She’d accepted he knew her with far less intimacy than she’d sought to know him, but this was ludicrous.
Even the postman knew Chloe well enough to know she’d never give up her child. Well, okay, maybe not. But the principle was true anyway.
“It is not something one can simply make assumptions about.”
“I’m not your mother, Ariston. She and your father are both idiots, if you want my opinion.” It was one she’d never voiced during their marriage, but really?
That generation of Spiridakous were a mess and Ariston had to realize it. He had almost nothing to do with them himself.
That didn’t mean he enjoyed hearing her say it out loud.
He went stern on her. “I did not ask for it.”
“No, you merely judged me by standards of behavior they set. You know me … or at least you did. You have to know that’s not something I could do.” She took a deep breath, but it didn’t help the anxiety building inside her. “I just can’t.”
“I came to realize that I