Page 14 of His Forgotten Wife

“No, you didn’t.” A warm glow suffused his expression as if he too cherished the memory.

“The next night, I started putting insulation around Tony’s room to stop the noise from seeping out.

And you dressed me down. Saying I wasn’t just rude but insensitive.

It was refreshing. You treated me like you did everyone else.

Instead of making passive-aggressive comments, you told me why what I was doing could be perceived as wrong. ”

Dolly laughed at his phrasing while her stupid heart did that flip-flop thingy again.

“The next evening, you brought a psych resident to talk to me. You know, Isiah checked on me the entire semester.” For a moment, Dolly blanked out at the memory of Isiah King, the one man who could be loosely called Ares’s friend.

A preeminent expert in the field of psychology, Dr. King had spent the last seven months at the South Pole for some secret project.

“I still don’t understand how you know about the accident. ”

One finger on his brow, Ares pursed his lips, then blew out a breath of air.

“Promise you won’t go off on me here? If you do, I’ll have to pretend it’s a lovers’ tiff and then we’ll have to make up for it.

I’ve read that couples have a lot of fun—” he raised his brows “—when making up from arguments.”

Dolly didn’t know whether to laugh or run as fast as she could. Or maybe she could jump into the sea and start swimming toward North America. “I won’t. So tell me.”

“Isiah told me you had trauma from your parents’ sudden death, nothing more, which you admitted yourself. You told me about the car accident a few years later. At that time, I was paying him and wanted to make sure he was treating you right.”

“You paid Isiah to talk to me?”

“You needed an objective listener with the right background.”

“Why?”

“Like I said, you needed someone you could trust, Dahlia. At that time, he was the only one I could afford to pay. You already told me you had minimal insurance and—”

“Why did you pay him to help me?” Dolly said, feeling as if she were drowning.

Ares stared at her as if she was stupid. Which he had never done before—to his credit, given the brilliant brain he possessed. “I wanted you to feel better. Seeing you in pain made me very uncomfortable,” he added in his usual matter-of-fact fashion.

The memory seared through Dolly.

She had forgotten that, after a few weeks, Ares began coming to her own dorm room and sitting in the armchair next to her tiny bed, working away at his laptop until the small hours of the dawn while she tried to sleep.

The move to the college, a new environment with strangers, and being all alone all over again, had triggered her nightmares, she knew. Leaving her grandfather behind had been one of the hardest things to do. She’d worried about herself and worried about how he would be looked after in her absence.

With Ares standing like a sentinel in her room, the nightmares hadn’t returned.

She had felt safe and cocooned, more than she had ever felt at her aunt and uncle’s place.

When she had offered feeble protest on the second night, Ares had claimed that he never slept anyway and that her dorm room was more peaceful than the lab or his own apartment.

She and Ares had been inseparable after, even though they had been pursuing completely different majors. And when Ares’s app had taken off in his senior year, selling for millions, and he’d asked her to come work for him, she had ditched her business degree and never looked back.

Even more than the generous salary and stock options, which she couldn’t deny, the idea of working at a start-up tech business with one of the most innovative, brilliant minds she had ever seen had made her follow him.

A soft gasp escaped her lips as Dolly stared at him now. All these years later, it was almost as if her mind had smudged that memory. Worse, it had also skewed her point of view since his rejection, muddying everything that had been good about them.

It wasn’t just his exceptional good looks or his wealth or his brilliant brain that had lured her into falling for him. It was the generous heart that he hid beneath it all. The realization made her feel a little less foolish.

“So why are the nightmares back now?” Ares demanded, with his one-track mind.

Dolly blinked, still lost in the past.

“There must be a reason.” His jaw turned granite hard as he stepped back from her. As if to study her better. “Is it my family and their open animosity that’s triggering them? Or is it that blasted aunt of yours again?”

“No, the nightmares have been on and off for months now. Although, yes, a new, strange location always throws me off.”

“Tell me what you think might have triggered them this time.”

She sighed. “My grandfather’s health has been declining for a couple of years now.

You know that. When he broke his hip, I thought I might have lost him.

Then you and I…there was news of your accident and coma…

it was a lot. It’s one of the reasons I quit too.

I was desperate enough to change something, anything. ”

“And now?”

She shrugged.

His finger lifted her chin, his gray gaze an ocean she could willingly drown in. “I’m here, Dahlia, and not going anywhere.”

Tears filled her eyes. Shaking her head, Dolly stepped away from him, even as he ate up the distance she wanted to put between them. “I know that,” she said, the words coming in a shout through her thick throat. “I see you and I…”

“It’s okay, agapi .”

It felt as if he were flaying her skin off to see the vulnerability she hid beneath. As if the loneliness and grief she had felt at learning that he was in a coma couldn’t be contained by her body anymore.

And then there was no gap between their bodies, nowhere for her to go. And she wasn’t sure she even wanted to escape.

When his hands landed gently on her shoulders and pulled, Dolly gave in. His arms were like tight vines around her back as he squeezed her close. With her face buried in his chest, her tears turned to sobs, wrecking through her with the force of a storm.

All the loneliness she had known when he was comatose came pouring out of her.

She clung to him, inhaling the scent of him deep into her lungs, burrowing into his hard, lean muscles, letting her heart have its fill of him.

She had no idea how long he held her like that, letting her grief and fear run their course, and she didn’t care.

Most of her life, she’d craved to be touched and held like this, to be loved.

And the longer she’d worked for Ares, the more vividly her dreams began to take his form.

This wasn’t that, she reminded herself, but just for a second, it was everything she had ever wanted.

“And here I thought you were a smart woman, Dahlia,” Ares said in a dry voice, her head tucked under his chin.

As if they had done this a hundred times before.

His fingers kneaded the tight knots at her shoulders.

“You could have told me you weren’t dealing with it well, you know. Asked me to hold you like this.”

“That’s like asking a cactus to grow colorful flowers. And you hate any touchy-feely stuff, Ares. That can’t be news to you.”

“I apologize if you have never been able to depend on me before.” He frowned, and all the small scars and nicks on his face looked deeper. “I’m beginning to see the seeds of why you want to leave me.”

“It’s unfair to make you think you were a bad or uncaring boss, Ares. I just want different things now. Beginning with a full night’s sleep.”

He nodded. “Will you ask for help at least while you are here, Dahlia? I don’t like to see you in pain. Not when I can do something about it.”

“Not all of my troubles can be solved by you,” she said, smiling.

For the first time in days, it felt as if that pressing weight on her chest had been lifted. There was no better proof than his thumping heart in her ears to know he was well. God, she hoped her mind got the memo and let her have one peaceful night.

His hands moved over her back with infinite tenderness before he released her. And the loss of his warmth, of his hardness, of him, was instant.

“I don’t agree. I’ll bloody well solve anything for you. You should know that.”

“Thank you,” she whispered. A sudden burst of awkwardness filled her, and her hands and her body felt extraneous to her feelings.

“Ares?” came Arabella’s tentative voice from the spiral staircase.

Dolly could have kissed her for interrupting at that exact moment, before she blundered her way into another cringey deep confession. Maybe she should pay his sister to interrupt them every fifteen minutes while she was here.

“I’m sorry for disturbing you,” Arabella said, blushing prettily. “Mama sent me. Everyone’s waiting for you.”

Pulling back, Dolly straightened her wrap. “We should go. I can’t monopolize you like this.”

“You can, anytime,” Ares said, grinning.

Dolly blushed. If he kept up this relentless charm, no one could save her from herself. “Aren’t you the one who wants to reconnect with his family?”

“Making me cut a cake like a child and stuffing themselves with processed sugar, and buying me nonsense gifts that have nothing to do with my interests, is the way to do it?”

“Hey, no sugar-shaming,” Dolly said, loosely lacing their arms together. “They want to celebrate you, Ares. And I want to too,” she said, clearing her throat. “Please let us. I’ll even eat your share of the cake and save you from it.”