Eden made love to him and, God willing, he would never know a time without that gift.
"How dare you? It was not like that. We both enjoyed it." Her anger had twisted her features into an ugly mask. "I am important to you. You need me."
"No, I do not."
The tears spilled over, but for the first time in memory the sight of a woman's distress moved him not one iota.
She stopped at the door and turned back to face him. "She was ready to leave you in New York. She wanted to file for divorce. Did your sainted little wife tell you that?"
Something exploded in his brain, like a wall collapsing into rubble. "You are lying."
"No. You only wish I were. This time I am telling the unvarnished truth. I heard your argument about our trip to the theater. She was so angry, she was spitting mad, but it was nothing like the way she went for you in the car on the way to upstate New York."
"You could not possibly know what was discussed in that car ride."
"Of course I can, I had you bugged." She gave him a pitying look and then affected Eden's American accent. "I can't take it anymore, Aristide. I want a divorce."
With one final glare, Kassandra exited the office, but Aristide barely noticed.
His brain was bombarding him with images. The first time he saw Eden outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art—she had been so beautiful, she entranced him. The first time they made love… the birth of their son… so many pictures flashed through his brain at supersonic speed. Then came the car ride Kassandra mentioned…before the accident.
And he knew exactly what had caused that sense of foreboding that had plagued him since discovering he had a wife he could not remember.
Not for the first time since starting the drive, Aristide wished he'd used his chauffeur-driven car. Eden was intent on having a relationship discussion and he couldn't focus on her and the road at the same time.
"What are you saying?" he asked, sure he must have misunderstood her last words.
"You have a choice to make. It's either your precious assistant or your wife. You can't have both."
He bit back a curse. Eden's hormone-driven irrationality had already spawned one major argument between the two of them; he was determined to avoid another.
She hadn't told him she was pregnant yet, but they shared the same bed and he could count. She hadn't had her menses last month and she'd stopped breast-feeding rather abruptly.
He didn't know why she hadn't told him unless she was saving it as a Christmas surprise, or actually didn't realize it herself yet. She might not have put two and two together as quickly as he had.
He remembered how easily she'd gotten distracted during her pregnancy with Theo. Her scatterbrained mentality had been really endearing, but he had never teased her about it because she had been overly sensitive then too.
"I know you do not mean that."
"And on what evidence do you make that assumption?"
"You love me. You are not going to walk away because you have gotten upset with Kassandra over some trivial thing."
"You consider her attempts to undermine the viability of our marriage trivial?" she asked, her voice colder than he had ever heard it.
Damn it. "I did not say that."
"But you don't believe she's trying to break us up?"
"Listen to yourself, yineka mou. Do you not think you are being even a tiny bit dramatic here?"
"No."
He sighed. "Well, you are," he said as gently as he could.
He really did not want to upset her more than she already was.
"I am not being dramatic, but I'm beginning to see you're never going to believe me."
"Be fair. You have never once before this week complained about Kassandra and I have seen with my own eyes her attempts to make you comfortable in a foreign environment."
"Her attempts to show up my ignorance, you mean."
He gritted his teeth, not wanting to lose his temper, but getting angry against his will. "You are not being reasonable."
"What is unreasonable about me wanting my husband to get rid of the woman trying to destroy my marriage?"
"Why would Kassandra want to do that?" he asked, taking another tack. If he could get her to see she was looking at things from a completely illogical point of view, they could end this ludicrous discussion.
"She wants you."
"She is my employee, not my lover."
"She was once, or so she intimated."
Tension gripped him. He had to tread carefully here. He and Kassandra had been lovers once. Very briefly, right around when he met Eden, but once he met his wife, other women stopped existing for him. Kassandra had taken their break-up with the same sophisticated cool she responded to everything else. Neither her heart nor her pride had been particularly affected.
"No way would she say that to you."
"You are wrong."
"Eden…" he growled, his growing frustration making his voice harsh.
"Oh, I forgot, you don't believe anything I say about your precious employee."
"Stop calling her that. The only woman around here who is precious to me is you, even when you are being irrationally jealous," he said teasingly, trying to defuse the tension growing between them.
"I am not irrational and I accepted a long time ago I am not precious to you either."
"What the hell do you mean by that?" he asked in a near roar, losing his hold on his temper.
"Just what I said. I knew you didn't love me when we got married, but I thought my love would make it all right. I was wrong. I've found that being married for the sake of my child and tolerated for the sake of my talent in bed isn't enough. It hurts too much."
"This has gone far enough. You are completely without reason and perhaps your condition is at fault, but you will stop making these wild accusations immediately."
"You're not in the boardroom, Aristide. You cannot order me around like one of your directors." Then she went silent and stayed that way for several seconds.
Good. Maybe she was calming down.
"You know I am pregnant." She said it in a flat voice, void of the joy such an announcement should bring.
"I am sorry if I stole your thunder, but, yes, I know."
"Since when?"
"Since you missed your first period and started craving burnt toast for breakfast in the morning."
"So, when you invited me to come with you to New York, you knew?" Why did she sound so passionless, as if her emotions were in lock-down mode?
"Yes, I knew."
"That explains it. I had hoped… It doesn't matter. I was wrong."
"What did you hope?"
"That you had finally gotten tired of being apart from me, that you wanted our marriage to be a closer one. Isn't that a joke?" she asked with bitter cynicism he hadn't thought her capable of.
"I do not like being apart from you."
Once he realized she was pregnant again, he also realized he was tired of leaving her behind in Greece when he traveled. He had ordered one of the jets to be equipped for travel with infants so she could come with him, but he hadn't told her.
He had wanted to save it as a Christmas surprise, a sort of reciprocal gift for her new pregnancy.
She laughed, the sound strained and blackly amused. "Right. How could you possibly miss me when you've got super-Kassandra along for the ride?"
"She is not my wife."
"She would like to be."
"That is nonsense."
Eden didn't reply to that. In fact, she said nothing for several miles.
It started to rain and he turned on the wipers. "We should be there soon." As conversation gambits went it was not great, but he was leery of starting yet another volatile argument.
"I think it would be best if we separated," she said in a weary, dead voice. "I can move back to New York, or move into a separate residence near Athens if you still feel strongly about the children being raised in Greece. We can work out visitation either way."
He felt like someone had punched him straight in the chest and the air seized in his lungs. He turned to look at her, needing to know if she was serious, hoping with everything in him she was not.
Her eyes were filled with pain-filled determination. "I can't take it anymore, Aristide. I want a divorce."
He couldn't breathe. His chest hurt. She had gone from, "I think we need to separate," to "I want a divorce," in a heartbeat.
He started yelling at her, but it took several seconds of no response and a sideways glance that revealed her blank-eyed regard for him to realize he'd been doing so in Greek. He shouted the one English word he could get out, "No!"
But it was lost in her scream and his eyes snapped back to the road to see a truck had swerved into their lane.