Page 4 of His Forgotten Wife

Two weeks later

Ares Demetrius watched the weeklong celebration of his grandparents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary kick off around him with that same sense of isolation he’d always felt amidst his family.

Although, that particular evening, he made sure to not show it on his face.

Apparently, his traumatic head injury, the subsequent gaps in his memory, and escaping the clutches of death with his body beaten into a pulp meant that he had achieved a mild personality transplant.

He could…tolerate the genuine gaiety around him, and was more than curious about how his grandparents had sustained such a close partnership for sixty years.

But he wasn’t overflowing with love for his two older half brothers. He still didn’t trust the two of them as far as he could throw them. Not when they were dragging him through a court case for a cut of his tech fortune.

All based on the spurious claim that the check their grandfather had given Ares as a gift for his nineteenth birthday—that he had used to buy a server farm—was an investment from the family fortune.

Given his grandfather had been the one who turned their small export company into a multinational conglomerate, and had been the only source of kindness Ares had known as a child from a man—their father had thought his two older sons’ constant meanness was simply boys running “wild”—it felt like even more of a violation to use that check to cause a family rift.

The shameless, conniving bastards…just thinking of the lawsuit made his head pound with renewed rage.

And this was after he had poured tens of millions into the dying family export business over five years to resuscitate it. All without his grandfather’s knowledge—the old man would have been ashamed to learn that his two older grandsons had run the business into the ground.

Apparently, his brothers’ greed and misdeeds had no end. Even though his investments had paid off and they—and their grasping wives—were now reaping the rewards after a decade-long slump in profits.

As if it hadn’t been enough to have tormented him through his childhood and adolescence.

His mother, his grandparents, and his eighteen-year-old sister, Arabella, had begged him to return home for years. Ares’s chest twisted at the sight of the latter laughing it up on the dance floor. Examining his life decisions was apparently an ongoing symptom of his current malaise.

Once he’d admitted that he had missed them, his entire life seemed to cave in, as if it had been erected on false assumptions.

That he had allowed Stefano and Sergio’s bullying as children to drive him away from the rest of the family, that he had let them taint his relationship with the ones he did love…

was illogical. Especially for a man who thrived on understanding himself well to better operate in the world.

Then there was the other fact that he’d had to face in the last couple of weeks as he’d returned home to the family villa in Corfu to continue his recovery.

As a kid who didn’t connect to anything mainstream, he had been terrified of his older half brothers.

They had been bigger, popular, almost larger-than-life.

Now, being back in the family home after nearly a decade and once again in a vulnerable state, it was like living his worst nightmare all over again.

From the perspective of an adult, though, he was beginning to wonder why his father hadn’t done more to protect him from his older sons.

But he didn’t want to be a stranger to all of his own family. Not anymore. He was a twenty-eight-year-old man who had accepted that he was different and always would be, and he couldn’t let it affect how he related to his family and how they saw him.

Not that he had the faintest idea how to go about achieving the close relationship with his family that he craved.

Unless it included writing out a list of Papa’s mistakes and missteps.

Unless it meant ensuring that Stefano and Sergio ended up in prison for embezzling funds from the family company to support their vices.

Unless it meant ripping into his mother and demanding to know why she had been so oblivious to what her stepsons had been doing to her own son.

But he couldn’t.

Apparently, he was a weak man when it came to family.

The scandal that would descend on them if he sent his half brothers to jail would be unimaginable. He couldn’t hurt his grandparents that way.

Was that why he had gone down the convoluted route of telling his parents that he was engaged to Dahlia minutes before the accident?

Because he wanted his brothers to know that someone else had a bigger say in his own fortune?

Because the threat of an upcoming legal union between him and the person he trusted the most would deter them from wanting more of his hard-earned wealth?

It was a clever solution and he wasn’t surprised that he had thought of it.

Except Dahlia hadn’t even mentioned it on the phone call.

Worse, she had made it sound like she wanted nothing to do with him going forward. If his mother hadn’t asked him, within minutes of joining him at the clinic, where his wayward fiancée was, he wouldn’t have even remembered the plan they had concocted together.

So, not only had she picked her grandfather over him, she had also actively omitted a big truth.

Then there was the fact that he had felt every nerve-ending that wasn’t battered down by pain come alive at the mere sight of her.

It had been an upsurge of sensation, too much feeling, for his confused brain to process.

He wanted to reach through the screen and grab her by her shoulders and pull her to him, to smell her and touch her and feel her breath against his, to relearn how familiar he was with her… The urge had been a reminder that he was painfully alive, bringing with it a deep, visceral response.

An attraction he vaguely remembered feeling before, a shocking primal hunger that had thrown him into a panic and a rage…had that been for Dahlia too? And why did the memory of it make him flinch inwardly?

Christos , not knowing what lurked in the shadows of his mind was both painful and infuriating. Especially with the person he wanted to instinctively trust above all else.

“Won’t you dance, Ares?” His mother’s voice interrupted his loopy brooding.

Ares fought the nearly overwhelming instinct to step back from the emotion glimmering in her eyes.

He identified it to be a combination of guilt and grief and love.

And he felt that nauseous resistance to it rise up inside him, filling his veins with something like panic.

Especially because of love…which he didn’t understand.

Even being able to identify the emotions in his mother’s eyes was the effect of nearly nine years with his assistant, Dahlia, rubbing off on him. Not that he was equipped yet to process the first two or return the third. At least in ways that would please his mother.

“No,” he said, smoothing out the self-directed ire from his voice.

He was aware that she had barely left his side in the last two weeks.

Day or night, she was there when he opened his eyes, more alert and awake than the nurse hired to monitor his state of mind, worry wrinkling her brow.

His younger sister, Arabella, had also told him that Mama had barely left his side at the private clinic for the seven weeks he’d been under.

Moving closer, he laid an arm around her slender shoulders loosely. Her smile turned brilliant. “The only person who has successfully dragged me to the dance floor once is Dahlia. She possesses an uncanny knack for making me do things I don’t want to or I’m incapable of.”

Apparently, he couldn’t do small talk but he could share unnecessary stuff that had hidden import. He frowned.

“She sounds like a very capable and compelling woman, your assistant,” Mama said, facing him.

His cheeks flushing, Ares met her gaze straight on.

Having holes in his memory wasn’t just inconvenient.

It made trusting himself harder. “She’s been with me in that position for close to seven years.

She’s been my friend and my…partner for all intents and purposes.

It doesn’t matter what you call her because no word can encapsulate all she is to me. ”

He stilled, his own words a revelation to him. They seemed to come from some place deep inside him that bypassed logic and facts, a place he hadn’t even known existed within him.

It was the same place that radiated a deep panic when Dahlia had mentioned romance and love and babies.

Had that been because he didn’t want to lose her or because he wanted to be able to give those things to her, because he wanted to be the only man in her life? Coupled with the alarming physical awareness that had flooded him at the sight of her, he wondered if he had gone down this route before?

Was that why he had come up with the engagement plan—because it killed two birds with one stone?

“You and this woman…” his mother began.

“Dahlia. Her name is Dahlia,” he repeated, feeling a flare of annoyance. “We briefly talked about her at the clinic, remember? About how she’s my fiancée?”

“And yet she hasn’t visited you once in all these weeks.”

“She didn’t know about the accident for nearly a week,” he said, repeating what his CEO Christina had told him. “After that, she was caught in her own familial obligations. Then, later, there was no point.”

“No point in being by the side of the man she’s engaged to while he’s in a coma?”

Ares gritted his jaw, since he faced the same question over and over inside his head.

It had been more than simply discombobulating to find himself in a hospital bed, wired to beeping machines, and to have strangers tell him that he had sustained a head injury and had been in a coma for seven weeks.

It had been devastating to find Dahlia absent from the whole scene, anchoring him.