Page 8 of His Forgotten Wife

A soft breeze from the ocean ruffled his collar, giving her a glimpse of the smooth, taut edge of his pectoral muscles.

Swallowing, she looked away, pressing her shaking fingers to her suddenly thumping heart.

“No wonder they…loathe me. They think I didn’t care enough to show up here when you were unwell.

But now that you are recovering, I come running back to you. ”

“You didn’t care to be here. That is the truth.”

Cheeks heating, Dolly stared at him. “You’re angry about that?” she asked, surprise coloring her words. “It didn’t make sense for me to fly all the way here, Ares. Not when you—”

He raised a hand, cutting off her apology. “Why didn’t you tell me that we agreed to a fake engagement? My mother, of all people, had to remind me what I blurted to her on the phone, moments before the accident.”

Shivers coursed through her even though it was only balmy. Dolly rubbed her fingers over her neck. “I…”

“You agreed, right?”

The doubts in his eyes made her feel awful. “Yes, of course.”

He sat back. Watching her, drilling holes into her with that gaze.

Lacing her fingers on the table, she sifted through the various options. “When you called me, you’d just woken up after seven weeks in a coma. All I kept thinking was that you’re okay. My brain wasn’t all there. I was riding the wave of relief and happiness.”

Which was mostly true.

He didn’t look satisfied but at least moved on. “So, the plan was to use the engagement and the idea of an imminent wedding to encourage my brothers to drop the lawsuit?”

“Yes,” Dolly said, past a throat full of thorns.

“You thought letting them see that your assets could be mine any day would be a warning. The direct threat would be that you wouldn’t let them touch a penny of yours, ever again.

That you would never again come to their rescue like you did four years ago. ”

“You know that I helped the family company out?”

“That you invested twenty million Euros into the export company and paid off the money they embezzled from it, yes.” She sighed. “You trusted me.”

“I still do.”

“But?” she said, her breath hanging on a sword.

He shook his head, shutting her out. “We will follow that plan and make a big show of the engagement, then. Which will give them a chance to plan out some activities for me.” A hint of vulnerability flashed in his eyes. “I want to repair my relationship with my parents and Arabella.”

“I get that,” she said. “But you’re starting it with a big lie to them.”

He pressed the pad of a thumb to her knuckle. “It’s not that much of a stretch, is it?”

Her heart gave a kick against her rib cage, her entire being sinking into that patch of skin he touched. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve been the only woman in my life for a long while, Dahlia. You know me inside out. And with these damned headaches…” He pressed his fingers into his temples, his mouth bracketed by strain. “Right now, you’re the only one I can trust.”

“Surely not everyone in your family is like those two?”

“No, but it doesn’t mean Sergio and Stefano won’t use them to manipulate me.

I have to stop them from dragging this lawsuit out, in a way that doesn’t hurt the rest of the family.

Mama and Papa are, I believe, already at loggerheads,” he added.

“The scandal of us going at each other will break my grandparents’ hearts.

It’s the reason I stopped it from becoming public. ”

“They’re suing you, Ares. For a huge chunk of your fortune that they have no right to. At some point, you have to tell the rest of them.”

“No. It would only hurt them. Especially Mama and maybe even my father.”

The need to question his continued loyalty toward a man who had done nothing to protect him grated on her. Dolly bit back a sigh.

Lies within lies… She was beginning to feel like she had walked into some kind of play, blindfolded, with no memory of how she got there.

Wasn’t it better to simply tell him the truth? To get the whole mess out in the open if he was going to be here indefinitely? But if she did, she would have to also reveal what had happened after , what had made him look so disgusted with her. Why he’d been so angry with her.

She had no idea where he had hidden the marriage contract they had both signed. If the engagement itself was enough to thwart the meathead brothers as Ares was hoping, could she simply hide her head in the sand about their agreement until they could dissolve the marriage after ten months?

Maybe by then, Ares would not only recover but be relieved that she wasn’t his contract wife anymore.

Still, the last thing she needed was to enter a fake engagement with the man she was secretly married to, a man she had too many confusing feelings about.

“Dahlia…” he said, that thumb pad stroking toward her wrist. “What are you not telling me?”

Her pulse spiked as she looked up to meet his eyes. “You’re asking too much of me, Ares.” It was what she should have said months ago when he’d asked her for “a small favor.”

Pulling his hand away, he sat back in his chair, his gaze drilling into hers. “What if I offer to pay for your grandfather to move into that assisted living community that you were checking out last year? For the rest of his life?”

Dolly stared at him, her chest squeezing tight with guilt this time. That was exactly what she’d done with the money he’d given her for signing the marriage contract.

Then there was the shock that he had remembered that her grandfather had been having more and more mobility issues and that, right before Ares’s accident, she’d been scouting old age homes.

Just when she thought she might be more objective about their relationship…

“Are you trying to prove that you can buy me?” The question sounded pretentious and self-righteous to her own ears, because she’d already sold herself to him, even if not for his wealth.

“Buy you?” he snarled, jaw tight.

Heat streaked her cheeks as she tried to cover her confusion. “I don’t know,” she finally said.

“If I want to take your biggest worry in life off your shoulders so that you can give me your time and focus, is that buying you?” Disgruntlement etched his features.

“That was over the line,” she said, biting down on her lip. “This whole thing has thrown me.”

“Of course it has. Especially since, clearly, you have built this whole new life without me in it.”

While she had hoped to find some sense of equanimity about his place in her life, all she had established in the long seven weeks they’d been apart was that she was even more attached to him than she’d realized.

She had been lost and confused, even grieving.

It had felt as if she had lost a friend and a partner, without ever having enjoyed the actual benefits of either.

But there was no way she could share that with him. He would either laugh at her or banish her again.

He steepled his fingers over his abdomen, his words strained. “Now that I’ve made the offer, I’ll see that it’s done.”

Her chest rose with her ballooning breath. “That’s called railroading. And it’s not necessary. As soon as his doctors clear him for moving, he’ll shift into a long-term care facility. I was able to get enough funds into place.”

“That home in upstate New York?”

God, but the man didn’t forget a single detail. “Yes.”

“You said the place was prohibitively expensive.”

She sighed. “I have savings. You have always paid me well and I liquidated some of my stock options.” And before he could probe further, she said, “I’ll stay and help you with whatever.

I want it noted, though, that I’m agreeing to the fake engagement and everything it entails under extreme resistance. ”

“Noted,” Ares said without missing a beat.

“And I’m going to leave when you figure out a way to beat the meatheads.”

Ares was angry enough that he could feel its burn up his throat. To say he didn’t like the sensation would be an understatement. He liked the irrationality of her decision even less.

He’d thought seeing Dahlia here, in this environment where he had once been the most vulnerable, would return his self-assurance.

There was a sense of his world tilting right at her presence. Of not being alone, of not being an outsider among familiar faces, a sentiment that had dogged him all his life.

But the fact that she was still insisting on leaving her position, on leaving him , made that feeling transient.

He felt like he was struggling for air. A sensation he remembered very vividly from when he had been twelve and Sergio and Stefano had pushed his face into the massive water sump at their farmhouse.

Even the passing reminder that he couldn’t begin to navigate the world around him without her grated on him.

A pulse of awareness pinged through him as he let his gaze travel over her.

Her tight braid pulled her angular features into focus.

A high forehead, the sharp tip-tilted angle of her nose and the thin but wide mouth with lips the color of cherries…

nothing about her features was conventional.

And yet, mixed together on the canvas of her face, like some artist’s individual strokes coming together to paint a vivid scene, she radiated stunning intelligence and subtle beauty.

It was a face one could become obsessed with. The birthmark on the slope of her upper lip, the fragile cradle of her clavicle, the arch of her neck…his fingers tingled with the urgent need to trace every inch of her.

He wanted to dig his fingertips into her flesh, smudge that composure she wore like an armored vest until it crumpled under his fingers. Until she told him why she was so desperate to leave him.

Like so many other emotions clamoring to be heard, this too was raw and persistent. This stringent awareness and dawning attraction to his assistant.

It was the reason he had waited two hours to approach her, even though her arrival had tugged at him as if he were a magnet seeking north.