Dimitri exhaled a long breath. “I knew the truth long before I went to Nikos and asked him how it could be possible.”
“Why?”
She felt his body go tense against her and she lifted her head off his chest to look into his eyes. They weren’t revealing anything. “My mother and father died in an avalanche when I was ten years old.”
“I know.” It was the only thing he’d told her about his parents and one of the few things she knew about his family.
“My father was bringing her back from the ski lodge where she had been staying with her current lover.”
“Current lover?”
Dimitri nodded, his head moving in a precise movement that was painful to watch. “She fell in love with daunting regularity, only one of those times was with my father.”
She laid her hand over his heart and caressed the skin there in a comforting gesture. “Oh, Dimitri…”
He frowned as if her sympathy bothered him. It probably did. He was a very proud man.
“She had left before. There was even some question as to whether or not Spiros could claim the Petronides bloodline. My father insisted on having the tests done, my grandfather told me, not because he didn’t love my brother but because he wanted to squelch the rumors. I believe he would have paid to have the tests doctored if they had come back negative. They did not.”
“But if your mother was unfaithful, why did your father remain married to her?” She could not imagine a proud Petronides male doing so.
Dimitri’s frown turned to a scowl. “He was obsessed with her. He too called this feeling love. Their marriage was volatile, their reunion s dramatic but in the end her concept of love and his obsession killed them both.”#p#分页标题#e#
No wonder Dimitri had such a jaundiced view of love. A depressing sense of hopelessness came over her. Would he ever allow himself that level of vulnerability after the example his parents had set him?
“It is not a pretty tale.”
But it explained why he hadn’t trusted her. He’d seen too much at an impressionable young age to take the fidelity of a woman for granted.
“We all have memories we would rather forget. Every family has its skeletons.”
“Not according to your mother.”
Alexandra smiled at his attempt at humor, but it was a small one. She didn’t feel like laughing when she’d come face to face with Dimitri’s reason for distrusting love. “Not all women are like your mother.”
He shrugged. “Adultery is not such an uncommon thing.”
“Is that why you were so sure I’d had a lover?”
He’d been waiting for her to betray him like his mother had done, because her betrayal had not only been against her husband. She’d done terrible emotional damage to her children as well.
The tension in him grew almost palpable. “It shames me, but yes.”
“My unexplained trips must have played upon your fears.”
“I was not afraid.”
Right. “You don’t like discussing your feelings, do you?” Why hadn’t she caught on to that before?
“No, but you asked for a reason for my belief.”
“Your mother’s behavior explains why you didn’t trust me. It does not explain what changed your mind.”
“I realized you were not like her.”
Hope erupted in her like Mount Vesuvius. If he already accepted she was nothing like his mother, he might eventually learn to trust her enough to let himself love her.
“I’m not,” she reiterated for good measure. Then, because she was curious and couldn’t help wanting to know, she asked, “When did you realize it?”
“When I returned to the apartment and found the pregnancy test on top of the lingerie.”
“Oh.” So, those final frantic moments in the apartment hadn’t been wasted.
“There was a message in that, was there not?”
“Yes.”
“You connected the pregnancy with our lovemaking.”
He really did understand how her mind worked. “Did it make you remember what it had been like between us?” That was what she had intended.
“Yes.” His expression was grim. “I knew you could not be that way with someone else. I still did not understand why you took trips you refused to explain to me, but I knew they were not to meet another man.”
“Now you know.”
“Now I know.” His expression lightened and the hand on her shoulder ventured lower. “I know something else as well.”
“Oh, what’s that?” she asked breathlessly. That hand had found an already aching peak and gently tweaked it.
“There are things I would rather do with you than talk.”