“It kept me grounded. It would have been too easy to get wrapped up in the glitter and glitz surrounding the fashion industry.” She sighed and kissed the hair roughened skin of his chest simply because she couldn’t help herself. “I guess I didn’t want to end up like my mother with my view of life and the world blinkered by the society surrounding me.”
But like her mother, she’d willfully worn blinders in one area of her life…with him. She had refused to consciously acknowledge the transitory nature of their relationship, living only in the present. So, when he ended it—she had been devastated. She didn’t want to think about that right now, maybe never again.
“Why the darkness?” she asked instead.
“I needed it to be only you and I. No more pain. No past. No present. No future. Just us.”
She understood that. Allowing this area of their relationship to be tainted by the differences that plagued them would be like taking a color marker to the Mona Lisa.
They lay like that for a long time, his fingers brushing her side in an absentminded movement while her hand rested over his heart. It reminded her of their last time together and her words then. A strong heart.
“You said your grandfather had another heart attack? You never told me about the first one.”
“It happened while I was in Greece that last time before you left Paris.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why didn’t you tell me who you really were?” he countered.
“I was Xandra Fortune in France.”
“Yes, and you took periodic trips that were not modeling assignments and yet you would not tell me what they were. Presumably they were to return to your life as Alexandra Dupree.”
“Yes,” she admitted.
“I thought you had met someone else.”
She sat up and stared down at him, his beautiful black hair tousled by her fingers, his naked body gleaming bronze above where the sheet rested across his hips. “You thought I was two-timing you?”
Chance would be a fine thing. If he had believed that about her, he would not have stayed. “I had never had another lover. Did you think that now I knew what sex was, I couldn’t wait to try it with someone else?”
She wasn’t prepared for the guilty stain across his cheeks.
“You did!” She didn’t think about it, she just balled up her fist and smacked him right on the chest. Hard.
He grunted and caught her hand in his own. “I did not believe it. If I had, I would have ended our relationship.”
Right. That sounded like him. “But you thought the baby was someone else’s.”
“Yes. I did hold this tormenting belief for a week. I have no excuse.”
She glared at him. “No, you don’t.”
But inside she had to acknowledge her trips home could have looked suspicious to a lover as possessive as Dimitri. He’d hated the fact she had things in her life she refused to tell him about. She’d kept it that way to stop him from taking her over completely. She had loved him so much, she’d needed the defense mechanism of having a part of herself he did not know. Only when she returned to living that part of her life, she took the pain of his loss with her. The defense had not worked.
“My grandfather refused to have necessary by-pass surgery until I promised to set a date for my marriage with Phoebe. I was not ready to give you up, but I was not prepared to let him die, either.”
She stared at him in disbelief. “You cannot be serious. You always told me what a great guy your grandfather was. How could he blackmail you like that into ditching me?”
“He did not know about you.”
This new view of what had happened three months ago left her feeling disoriented. “But still…”
“He wanted an assurance I would do my duty by the Petronides name.”
“And instead you got your mistress pregnant and yourself featured in a public fight with her.”
He grimaced. “Yes.”
“He’ll be furious if you marry me.”
He looked amused. “He will be thrilled to become a great-grandfather and he cannot help but be charmed by so lovely a new granddaughter.”
“I’m not beautiful anymore. You said so.”
He used the grip he had on her hand to tug her down to his chest. “I said you looked ill, not ugly, you foolish woman.”
“But I don’t have sultry green eyes now,” she said, remembering what he used to say about them.
“Now you have eyes that change color with your mood. It is quite tantalizing.”
“My hair is short and mouse brown.”
He laughed and tousled the aforementioned hair. “It is sexy as sin and you know it. As for the color…how can you complain when it shines like liquid sand?”
“But I’m shaped like a pumpkin.”
He used one knee to part her legs so she draped across him in intimate disarray. His male hardness pressed against her. He thrust upward. “Does this feel like I think you are ugly?”
What was the question? She couldn’t remember; she was too busy melting into a puddle of desire on top of him. Silence reigned while he touched her in ways she’d forgotten and brought her body to the peak of pleasure over and over again. She didn’t have the energy to start another discussion when they were done. She found herself slipping into sleep cuddled against his side, feeling more at peace than she had since discovering her pregnancy.
Warm security surrounded Alexandra and she didn’t want to make the trip to full wakefulness. How many times had she had this dream since leaving Paris? She was back in Dimitri’s bed, his arms wrapped around her like protective bands, their lower limbs entwined to make them two parts of one whole. It seemed so real, but she knew if she allowed her mind to continue its journey toward complete lucidity, the fantasy would disappear, leaving cold reality behind.
He shifted against her, rubbing his hairy leg between her smooth limbs and she rocketed to complete wakefulness. She opened her eyes to black curling hair over a bronze, muscled chest. Dimitri. Along with her sensory impressions, memories of the night before blasted her conscious mind.
They had made love. Many times. He had been afraid of hurting the baby, asking her every time if it would be all right and she had reassured him. Again and again. Because she had wanted him. The last time, he’d woken her around dawn and seduced her with a sensitivity that had touched all the way to her soul.
It was incomprehensible that the man who had treated her so tenderly the night before could be the same one who had walked away from her without a backward glance.
Only according to him, he had looked back and found her gone. His grandfather had refused life-saving surgery until Dimitri had set a wedding date with Phoebe. While the knowledge her eviction from his life had not been voluntary soothed some of her still lacerated emotions, it did not soothe them all.
Would his grandfather have made such a demand if Dimitri had told the older man about Alexandra and implied she had an important place in his life? The problem was, she had not had that place at the time. She had been a temporary lover to Dimitri, a mistress to an unmarried man.
Last night had not felt like the joining of a man and his temporary lover or mistress, though. It had felt almost sacred.
Knowing about his grandfather put a new perspective on the events four months ago, but the older man wasn’t the reason Dimitri had denied paternity of their baby. As much as she didn’t want to, she had to take some of the blame for that one. By withholding part of her life from him, she had set up fertile ground for distrust to grow.
In some ways, Dimitri had done the same to her. He hadn’t told her about his grandfather’s heart attack and when she asked about his family, he had been reticent. She knew things about his brother and his grandfather, but he’d always changed the subject when his parents came up. They hadn’t died until he was ten, so it couldn’t be because he had no memories of them. He’d never taken her to meet his family, never invited his brother to the apartment for a meal when the younger man was in Paris.
Now he wanted her to marry him. She shifted restlessly, at once both loving and hating the sense of security his warmth provided. What had changed? The answer to that was obvious, she derided herself. One, she was pregnant with a baby he now accepted he had fathered. For a Petronides male, that would change a lot. Hadn’t she known that when she told him?
At the time she had hoped it would have the exact result it finally had: his desire to marry her. Now that desire felt like too little too late.
The second change was that his wife-to-be had married his brother. Dimitri had acted like the betrayal hadn’t mattered to him, but even if his emotions had not been involved…his pride would have been. A quick marriage of his own would assuage some of the wounds his pride had sustained, particularly if it was to a woman who had adored him like she once had done.
She’d recognized last night that she still loved him, but she didn’t adore him. Did that make her any less vulnerable?
“Have you figured it all out yet?” Dimitri asked from above her head.
She tilted back to look him in the face. “Figured what out?”
“Your life. My life. Our life together.”
“What makes you so sure I was thinking about us? Or that I was thinking at all, for that matter?”