Kassandra chewed her lips. “Hmm, I didn’t know it was that bad. But, cut the guy some slack. A man who built an empire without a formal education after the age of twelve, starting with a fishing boat at the age of fourteen, must be real busy. As I said, normal rules don’t apply to him. Maybe there are things about him that would make up for what a normal man would provide.”
Kassandra’s efforts to make her look at the bright side spread more darkness inside her. “Not according to his siblings, there aren’t.” Before Kassandra could bounce back with another sales pitch on Aristedes’s behalf, Selene pressed on. “There’s also the catastrophe currently brewing between him and my family. He might say he’ll do anything to stop it, but he’ll probably take one look at the new terms I’ll lay out and tell me to go to hell, then open fire on all of us. Plus, my brothers have been seething ever since they found out about my pregnancy. If their testosterone-driven collective finds out Alex is his, I have two predictions. Either they’ll gang up on him and tear him limb from limb, or they’ll gang up on him and me and force us into a shotgun wedding.”
“But the guy won’t need to be forced into a wedding! He already offered.”
“Sure. And when I refused he must have felt so relieved, and probably righteous to boot. Now he can go back to his hard business and fast women with a clear conscience. If he has one.”
Kassandra looked at her, her green eyes filled with the need to shake her, and the need to hug her, console her.
Kassandra finally let her shoulders slump. “At least give yourself some time to think about it. For me? I’d love to design your wedding dress. I’ll design you a whole trousseau!”
Selene hugged her friend, loving her more for persisting in trying to talk her out of what she evidently thought a terrible mistake.
But Selene knew the biggest mistake would be to let an emotionally stunted and unavailable man like Aristedes—no matter how much she craved him, no matter that he was her son’s father—into her life.
Selene woke up after a harrowing night of wrestling with tentacles trying to drag her into a bottomless abyss.
The worst part had been when she’d wanted with everything in her to succumb to their pull.
Though Alex was still asleep, evidenced by his tranquil breathing on the baby monitor at her bedside table, she rushed to his nursery. She always needed to see him first thing in the morning, but today, the need was a gnawing urgency.
On her way to Alex’s room, the bell rang.
She stopped in the hallway, squinted up at the wall clock. Eight a.m. Eleni’s usual arrival time.
Then Selene remembered. Today was Saturday. Eleni wasn’t coming. Selene gave her weekends off since she didn’t let Alex out of her sight, making up for the time she spent away from him during the workdays.
So who could it be, this early?
She rushed to the door with terrible scenarios chasing each other through her head. She snatched it open, and…
Aristedes was standing there, in the first casual outfit she’d ever seen him in, immaculate in light blue denim, overpowering in influence. He was brooding down at her, his eyes simmering like steaming ice in the dim golden lights illuminating the spacious, ultrachic corridor leading to her apartment door.
She stared up at him.
Nothing had changed, or would ever change.
Yet all she wanted was to drag him inside, devour him and tell him she’d take whatever he had to offer.
Everything she’d held at bay flooded over her. The longing she’d suppressed. The loneliness and depression she’d suffered during her pregnancy and Alex’s early months. The resignation that she’d be a mother, a businesswoman, a sister, a friend, but never a woman, never like she’d been with him, for as long as she lived.
And she knew she had to do it. Make him an offer of herself without a safety net, just to end this alienation, just to experience that level of intimacy, that state of acute… living she could only attain with him…
She started, “If you’re here to see if I changed my mind, I—”
He cut off her wobbling offer. “I’m here to say I changed mine. I want you to forget everything I proposed to you.”
Five
Selene stared up at Aristedes and understood at last.
Why he was generally known as the devil.
Aristedes Sarantos was an insidious, maddening, heart-stealing, soul-stripping tormentor. He kept coming at those he wanted to control or conquer like said devil, persistent, tireless, endlessly persuasive one moment, overwhelmingly seductive the next. Then when he had his victims in too deep, he churned them dry of everything that made them themselves with all the mercilessness of a capricious, indifferent ocean. Everyone invariably buckled before him, their stamina depleted, their wills eroded.
Aristedes had told her that her father had died after he’d ranted at him. She hadn’t been able to imagine what had driven her father to such a fit of frustration with his longtime sparring partner. Aristedes’s latest terms hadn’t been any more exasperating or restrictive than any he’d made in the past. She’d thought that her father’s approaching death had brought on that uncharacteristic outburst, not the other way around.
But right now, she could see how wrong she could have been. How Aristedes could have chipped away at her father’s endurance, until he’d snapped, at a seemingly unrelated moment.
He’d done the same to her. He’d submerged her under his spell, addicted her to ecstasies only he could provide before casting her out. He’d crossed her path again just to repeat the sadistic game.
In the past two days he’d reignited the dormant sickness inside her, watched her struggle against it, pretended to let her escape only to pursue her again, until she wanted nothing but the reprieve of plummeting into his trap. Then he told her that he wasn’t even going to catch her in it, would let her fall to her fate, whatever it was….
No. She wouldn’t let him destroy her like he had her father, like he had so many others. He’d damaged her enough already, but solely because she’d let him. She’d protect herself at whatever cost. She no longer possessed the luxury of risking injury. She didn’t belong just to herself any longer. She must do whatever it took to keep her mind intact and her soul whole. For Alex.
She couldn’t translate her resolutions into action. He still held her in his inescapable thrall. And she wondered whether he would start laughing like a devil from an old melodrama.