from his bed only two years, but that had been one year, eleven months and twenty-nine days too long.
He didn’t like feeling weak, and needing her sexually had done that to him.
Eventually, he’d realized that the problem wasn’t how much he’d enjoyed bedding his ex-wife, it was that he’d allowed the balance of power to shift in their relationship in a way he never would have done in any other business deal.
This new deal was much more weighted in his favor. And that was just the way he intended to keep it. No matter what revelations she made about the past.
It had taken him only six months to realize he wanted his wife back, but another eighteen to bring everything into place so that it could happen—on his terms.
She would make an ideal mother. He’d thought so from the beginning. So had his grandfather.
Ariston might give the appearance of an American businessman and speak English without an accent, but at heart Ariston Spiridakou was a Greek man.
Despite his own parents doing their best to destroy it, he still had a strong sense of family and heritage. He wanted offspring, children that would never be neglected as he had been.
He’d expected Chloe to provide the other half of that equation. And with her purely Greek lineage, even though she’d been raised entirely in the United States, she’d found favor with his grandfather as well.
Once she’d met him, she’d charmed Pappous as well, cementing her role in their family, though Ariston hadn’t realized how permanent that was until he’d filed for divorce.
Pappous had been apoplectic.
Unused to upsetting the one person in the world Ariston did not want to disappoint, he’d been more than a little dismayed by his grandfather’s reaction to losing Chloe from their small family.
Even after Ariston told the old man she’d been on birth control, he’d ranted at Ariston, being the one to first suggest maybe she’d been too young to face motherhood yet.
An old-fashioned man, Takis Spiridakou had still been furious when he learned Chloe hadn’t been allowed to finish her university degree. Ariston doubted she had any idea what an ally she had in the strong-minded old Greek.
One thing both Ariston and Takis agreed on—Chloe was nothing like Ariston’s own mother.
He hadn’t been surprised at all that Chloe categorically refused to give him a child and walk away. She was not the type of woman to abandon her baby to be raised by others. Not that that had ever been Ariston’s intention.
She’d shown herself to be tenderhearted and generous; he imagined that under the right circumstances, she would be willing to surrogate a child for someone else. But these weren’t them.
And between the two of them, he was fairly certain, never could be. He didn’t mind. He didn’t want a mother for his children that saw them as a bargaining chip to ensure a certain lifestyle as he’d been for the woman who gave him birth.
But no matter how Chloe attempted to paint the past in a new light, one in which she was not obliged to fulfill the unwritten expectations of their contract, she’d hidden the fact she was on birth control from him.
He would have understood a desire to wait a year, or two. He would have changed the original terms of the contract to five years, in that case.
He wouldn’t have liked it, but Ariston was a reasonable man. He would have done it.
But she hadn’t given him the chance.
She’d simply deceived him.
For three years. Well, almost three years. He’d been no more aware she’d gone off the pill than that she’d been on it in the first place.
Ariston didn’t like feeling ignorant any more than he did feeling weak. Even less so, if that were possible. Weakness he could control with his formidable will, but ignorance born of another’s deception?
That was something he couldn’t control and a complete anathema to him. And something he would make damn sure did not happen this time around with Chloe.
Regardless of recent revelations, he wasn’t going to make the mistake of blindly trusting her innocence again.
Chloe was busy supervising movers and quietly plotting the most effective way to murder her ex-husband for his impatience when her phone rang for the umpteenth time in an hour. She sent it to voice mail without even looking at who the caller was.
Avoiding the curious looks of the movers, Chloe sighed and rubbed her forehead.
The man simply wasn’t content to let her get on with putting things in order—he kept calling