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Chloe snapped her mouth shut. She hadn’t meant to ask that, had had no intention of ever sharing that final humiliation with anyone. She’d never even told Rhea.
“What?” Ariston asked, his attention sharpening as if he realized she’d let something slip she didn’t want to.
Hurting and lost after making the only decision she could once she’d found out about Ariston’s plans to divorce her, Chloe had called her father and told him she was on her way home. She’d intended to return to the house she’d grown up in, familiar if not a warm haven of memories.
That hadn’t happened.
Because her father had been and would always be a coldhearted man.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I must disagree. You brought it up.”
She had.
And unlike her parent, or even Ariston, Chloe was no master prevaricator. “He had another prospect in mind for once the divorce was final.”
Another arranged marriage waiting in the wings, an older businessman worth tens of millions, if not a few billion like her ex-husband. Eber had known the marriage wasn’t going to last beyond its three-year term and had sought to take advantage of that fact.
To this day, she didn’t know how her father had found out about the divorce papers Ariston had drawn up in New York before that final trip to Greece. She only knew that he’d had proof. The morning Ariston had flown to Hong Kong for what was supposed to be a short business trip, Eber had sent Chloe a fax—divorce papers signed by her husband and dated not two weeks before their arrival in Athens.
Though they hadn’t yet been filed, much less served, there was only one interpretation of her husband’s actions and once Chloe had made it, her own decisions at the end of her marriage rose up to torment her with just how naively hopeful she’d been.
“This upset you?” Ariston didn’t look or sound in the least surprised by news of Eber’s backup plan.
Chloe had to wonder if he’d known about it. Those two were peas in a pod, knowing things they shouldn’t when it came to one of their business ventures. And hadn’t her marriage to Ariston been nothing but that?
She’d tried to convince herself otherwise toward the end, but ultimately she’d been proven spectacularly wrong.
“Yes,” she bit out, unable to believe even Ariston could have thought otherwise.
But then, he’d never known her as she knew him. He hadn’t made the effort to do so because he’d never loved her as she loved him.
Needing some distance, even if it was contrived, she dipped her head and took a sip of her coffee. “My father said his business associate was looking for the right trophy wife. It wouldn’t even matter that I hadn’t managed to get pregnant during my three years of marriage to you, since he already had three full-grown children.”
“He believed you incapable of conception?” Ariston asked carefully.
“Yes.” She hadn’t told anyone, even her sister, about using birth control, though Rhea had been the one to suggest it in the beginning.
Rhea had believed the idea of becoming a mother immediately was why Chloe had balked at the idea of being married in a business deal. Her sister had spoken to her privately about taking measures to give herself some time before taking on the responsibility of children.
Eber would have been furious if he’d known—either about the conversation, or that Chloe had ultimately decided to act on her sister’s advice. For her own best interests, something her father cared nothing about.
“And his plans for you to marry again came as an unwelcome surprise to you?” Ariston asked as if checking his facts.
“I already told you that.”
Ariston’s expression turned thoughtful. “He was disappointed by the results of our deal and was making the best of it.”
“I’m not surprised you would see it that way. You probably would have agreed with him about the divorce settlement.”
But she hadn’t and in this one instance, her will had prevailed.
“I’m sorry?”
“He thought I should sign the check over to him. He said it was the least I could do for the company after you ended up with a big chunk of stock and he didn’t get a billionaire son-in-law out of the deal anymore.” Her voice bled not only some bitterness, but pain and she made a concentrated effort to pull her emotions back in check as she sipped her coffee.
Ariston made a sound as if she’d finally shocked him. “You didn’t sign the check over, though. If you had, you couldn’t have financed your new life on the West Coast.”
“No. During that phone conversation, I accepted that my father sees me as nothing more than an asset to exploit,” she admitted. “And I was done being treated like a bargaining chip. I wanted nothing to do with him or his company ever again.”
Chloe had hung up on her father and that conversation was the last time they’d spoken.
For as much as Eber’s indifference during her childhood had hurt, that knowledge hurt even more, adding more pain than she could handle to her already devastated soul.
Chloe had just lost the love of her life, even if it had ultimately been her decision, and her father’s only concern had been adding to the financial coffers of Dioletis Industries. Again.
She hadn’t been surprised at all to discover that Eber now expected Rhea to sacrifice her happiness to the altar of Dioletis Industries. Chloe was here to make sure that didn’t happen.
Her own marriage had been a bust, but Rhea’s could be saved. If her sister could get out from under the burden of a failing empire and their father’s expectations.
It wasn’t just Rhea who had asked Chloe for help either. Rhea’s husband, Samuel, had come to Chloe, desperate to save his marriage but equally certain there was only one chance to do it. A chance he wasn’t sure Rhea would take even if it was offered.
Samuel wanted his wife back from the grasping jaws of Dioletis Industries. He wanted a family, something Rhea had said she wanted as well … before she’d been forced to take over chairmanship of the company.
Now Rhea was too busy trying to run a failing company to see the cost to her personal life and Chloe knew that without intervention, her beloved sister could turn out way too much like their father. And not even realize it.
“You never expressed discontent with your lot while we were married … at least not verbally.” Ariston interrupted her thoughts in a precise New York drawl that showed none of his Greek heritage.
Her gaze flew back up to his. “Why would I have told you how I felt about being used as a bargaining chip in a business deal?”
It wasn’t his problem and the truth was, she’d been almost certain it wouldn’t matter to him.
Besides, in the beginning, she’d considered they were in a similar boat—her father pushing her into marriage for the sake of the company, Ariston’s grandfather pushing for him to settle down with a nice Greek girl.
More American than Greek in many ways, Ariston had insisted on a woman raised in his adopted home country.
Chloe had met both men’s requirements, her Greek heritage and family winning approval from the older Spiridakou and her American citizenship garnering Ariston’s acceptance. The fact that marriage to her would get him significant shares in what had looked like a thriving private concern at the time hadn’t hurt anything either.
“Perhaps you owed it to me, since I was the other side of that bargain and it resulted in our marriage.”
“A marriage you would have cheerfully jettisoned? Give me a break. We didn’t share confidences and you certainly weren’t interested in my heart.” Whatever she was doing here, they weren’t going to rewrite history to his specifications.
“I’m not the one who walked out.”
“You had divorce papers drawn up and ready to serve. No doubt they attempted to do so while you were in Hong Kong, but I’d already left for New York.” At least she’d assumed that had been his plan.
She hadn’t even bothered having her own papers created, knowing his were sufficient to the task. The speed with which she’d been served upon returning to the States had certainly implied she’d been right.
“What are you talking about?” Ariston asked in a tone that could have frozen rolling lava.
“Stop it,” she demanded. “I’m not playing these games with you.”
“Explain yourself.”
“You. Had. Divorce. Papers. Drawn. Up,” she enunciated very slowly and clearly. “Before we ever left New York for our spring trip to Athens.”
Following Ariston’s lifelong practice since reaching adulthood, he and Chloe had lived one month in four in Greece. It made for a lot of travel, but she hadn’t minded.
And multinational tycoon that he was, that sort of thing was simply everyday living for Ariston.
“How did you know that?” he asked with unperturbed curiosity, making no effort to deny it at least.
“My father faxed me a copy.”
“And he got them how?”
“I have no idea. Probably through the same underhanded channels you use.”
“I do not engage in corporate espionage.” Ariston sounded genuinely offended.
She was hard-pressed not to give in to a gallows-style humor. “Call it what you like.”
“Highly developed business acumen and contacts.”
“Fine.”
“So you left because you believed I was going to file for divorce?” he asked with a very odd inflection to his tone.
She wanted to scream, Yes, that’s right, but she simply shrugged. “I left because that was the only course open to me at that point. Our marriage wasn’t working.”
“I thought it was working very well.”
“You would.” And still he’d had the papers drawn up, presumably because in the one important area, to him at least, their marriage had been a bust.
She hadn’t gotten pregnant.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
She shook her head, not about to admit her love for him and how the emotional distance between them had killed her a little more each day. “We wanted different things.”
“On that I would have to agree.” Again the strange tone, but this time it was tinged with an inexplicable anger.
Right. Their marriage hadn’t been what either of them had wanted. She’d known that. Hearing him say it shouldn’t hurt now. It did. But it shouldn’t.
One thing was certain—she needed to move forward with her life. Irrevocably.
She’d thought she’d done that—leaving him, accepting the divorce without contest. Moving across country and opening her shop and gallery had been her way of cementing the break.
But if she couldn’t get a handle on the memories and emotions that had hurt far more than they’d ever helped, she was never going to be free of him, Chloe realized with awful clarity.
CHAPTER TWO
ARISTON sipped from his cup—matching china to hers that probably cost more than most of the paintings she had for sale in her gallery—and made a face. “I never understood your taste for flavored coffee.”
“Surely Jean could have made you the dark Arabic blend you prefer.” Chloe had always thought his beverage of preference tasted like espresso even when it was prepared in the automatic drip.
And to her way of thinking, espresso belonged in gourmet coffees with lots of milk and yummy flavorings. The thought of drinking it straight out of one of those tiny cups always made her shudder.
He dismissed her suggestion with a wave of his hand. “That would have required preparing two pots, not one.”
Chloe sincerely doubted it. If Jean didn’t have one of those fancy single-cup coffeemakers in the small kitchen behind her own office, Chloe would be shocked.
Which meant that Jean had served Ariston Chloe’s favorite on purpose. Why?
“You told her ahead of time to make my favorite,” Chloe guessed, gobsmacked at the idea and wholly unable to understand what he hoped to gain by doing so.
She was the first to admit she didn’t begin to operate on the Machiavellian level he did when it came to business, but this was beyond her. It was as if he was trying to be accommodating and when it came to business, she knew her ex-husband was anything but.
Maybe he was trying to lull her into a false sense of complacency? To what purpose? He held all the cards in the deck, not just the good ones, and they both knew it.
“Naturally. It was only polite.”
“If you say so.” Realizing how rude that sounded, which had not been her intention, she added, “Thank you.”
“That aside,” he said as if the coffee discussion had derailed them from talking about what really mattered. “Entering such an arrangement with unexpressed resentments for its terms wasn’t very ethical of you, was it?” he chided.
Ethical? Was the man serious?
Needing to move, she jumped up and walked over to the nearest wall of windows. She stared down at the city, people and cars made tiny by distance. “Do you honestly believe I didn’t express my unhappiness at the idea of quitting art school and being forced into what amounted to a medieval marriage bargain to my father?”
Before she’d met Ariston and realized that dreams could change.
“Eber implied to my grandfather that you were entirely on board with the plan.” Ariston spoke from behind her.
She wasn’t surprised that in her agitation, she hadn’t realized he’d moved.
She didn’t bother to turn and face him, however. “Right. And you both believed him. It never occurred to you that he might have simply cut funding to my schooling and living expenses, effectively getting me evicted from my dorm?”
Instead of the city below, she saw the face of the dean of her college when the older man had been forced to give Chloe the news. They’d been midway through the term and she’d been sure her father couldn’t demand his money back.
But apparently powerful men could do things other mere mortals couldn’t.
“I suppose you never guessed he might freeze my accounts because they were all in his name, too? No, I doubt you even thought about why I agreed to that barbaric bargain.”
“Bargains such as ours are common enough among the world’s powerful in both business and politics. You needn’t act as if you were sold into marriage in some medieval contract in which you had no say or personal rights.”
She spun to face him, old anger brought about by a feeling of utter helplessness rising to the fore. “Wasn’t I? I was a twenty-year-old college student, Ariston! I’d only ever worked part-time in an art supply store for hobby money. I had no clue how to even begin going about getting my life back when he took it away.”
