when I didn’t, to my own detriment.”
“I can’t imagine it.”
“Neither could I, but it did happen.”
“When?”
“You need to ask?”
She blinked. “Yes.” Did he think she was a mind reader?
“The birth control.”
“But you did know about it.”
“Not until shortly before we left New York for our final trip together to Athens.”
“By then, I’d stopped taking it,” she shared with gallows irony she wasn’t sure he’d get.
“What?” For the first time in their acquaintance, her ex-husband, the mighty Ariston Spiridakou looked 100 percent gobsmacked. “But then you could have been …”
“Pregnant when I left you? Yes, for a month I was very much afraid I was.”
A month during which she’d been terrified she’d allowed herself to become pregnant only to discover that the man she loved and had called husband felt nothing for her. She could have waited to make sure, but she’d known if she didn’t leave while he was out of country, the chances of her doing so at all dropped dramatically.
When she’d discovered she wasn’t pregnant, she’d been in equal parts relieved and devastated.
No excuse to go back to him, no stay in her bid for building a new life without him. It was about that time she’d stopped eating and a couple of months later that Rhea had staged her intervention, encouraging Chloe to return to the West Coast, where she’d gone to art school and fallen in love with a different type of life.
“But you were not?” His face leached of color and the hands on either side of her hips fisted in tension.
“Do you really need to ask?”
“You could have …”
“No, I could not. You really can be an idiot, Ariston.” With that she shoved him out of the way and jumped from the bed, uncaring of her nudity, as done with their conversation as she had ever been.
The great big stupid idiot.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ARISTON watched his ex-wife storm into the en suite with a sense of utter shock coursing through him.
She’d stopped taking the pill about the same time he’d discovered she’d been using it. What terrible timing.
She had intended to fulfill her part of their marriage contract—she’d just clearly had her own timeframe for doing so. As he was famous for telling his CEOs, a bit of communication would have helped.
And she was angry with him?
He shook his head, not for the first time, at the vagaries of the female psyche and his ex-wife’s in particular.
She could have been pregnant when she left. That infuriated him, but it also confused him. Why leave before she knew whether or not she was? Why stop taking birth control, thereby showing intention to make their marriage long-term only to end up leaving after all?
For the first time in his life, Ariston had absolutely no clue to the puzzle before him and he found that more than a bit frustrating.
Had she felt too young for motherhood? While she hadn’t said as much, Chloe had revealed a level of bitterness at her circumstances he would never have guessed at. Feelings she’d apparently needed to work through before being willing to have his baby.
One thing was certain, her coming off the pill—even in the eleventh hour of their marriage—blew his initial assessment of what she’d wanted out of their marriage all to hell.
Though he was a man who hated to be wrong, he found he didn’t mind in this instance.
And regardless of the past, soon she would be exactly where he wanted her, back in his bed on a permanent basis.
Unlike what Chloe had implied with her question about his lovers during their two years apart, he’d hardly had legions of sexual partners since she’d left Greece. The few he’d taken to bed since the divorce had only proven one thing to him. Once a supremely congenial lover was found, no one else measured up.
While he did not believe in romantic drivel like all-consuming love, he did believe in sexual compatibility. And he and Chloe had that in spades.
Against all of Ariston’s expectations, when he’d married the artsy, somewhat introverted and extremely innocent daughter of his business associate, Chloe had turned out to be the most amazing lover he’d ever had.
She didn’t play sexual power games, but gave him everything in her responses, holding nothing back. Her honest, awakening passions had become addictive in a way Ariston had neither expected nor been happy about once he learned of her subterfuge about the birth control.
But he had no intention of ever admitting it to anyone, and Chloe least of all—she’d been gone