His laugh was soft, his shoulders lifting in a broad shrug. ‘Yes.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘But am I wrong?’
Deny it! Deny him! How ashamed she’d been of how easily she’d fallen into bed with him. She hadn’t put up any resistance, hadn’t asked him any questions. He’d come to her apartment, pulled her into his arms, and she’d simply folded herself against him, lifting her tear-stained face to be kissed better.
‘You’re wrong if you think I don’t have more self-control than I did at eighteen,’ she said quietly. ‘So, far as I’m concerned, this marriage is for Max’s sake alone. I don’t need anything from you. I don’t want anything from you. Behind closed doors, we’ll be as we are now. No one needs to know it’s all a sham.’
‘Do you want it to be a sham?’ he pushed quietly. ‘When we know that we have the potential for this to be, in some ways, great?’
It surprised her. She didn’t respond—couldn’t—and waited for him to speak instead.
‘Our chemistry is still there.’
Her throat felt thick; she struggled to swallow. He was just saying this to make things easier—he probably thought she’d be as easily seduced now as she’d been then. And maybe he was right. If she let him touch her, kiss her, hold her, her self-control would probably crumble into nothing, just as it had then. Which was all the more reason she had to be strong in the face of this.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said after a moment, and the wave of disappointment that formed like a tsunami inside Annie showed her what a liar she was. She still wanted him every bit as much as she had then—and to him, it didn’t matter.
‘Sex is beside the point. But for the sake of appearances, you will be in my bedroom. Max is a child, and children talk. I don’t want him going to school and telling his friends that we sleep in two separate rooms. It will expose him—and you—to the kind of gossip I’m trying to avoid.’
‘But giving a journalist the scoop on Max and me is fine?’
‘He already had the scoop, I simply took the opportunity to control the narrative.’
She accepted that—even the great Dimitrios Papandreo couldn’t have a story in a rival newspaper pulled just because he didn’t like the content.
‘Then we’ll have separate beds in your room. I only need a single...’
He laughed, but it wasn’t a warm sound, so much as a harsh, scoffing noise.
‘We will have one bed—my bed—which is big enough for you to cling to the edge of, if you’re afraid I won’t be able to resist reaching for you in the midd
le of the night.’
She felt ridiculous. Embarrassed and completely childish. And she also felt that his claim that they shared any kind of chemistry was predicated on his need to get her into his life—for the sake of Max.
He reached into his pocket, removing a small black box that he slid across the table. Annie was so caught up in her reflections that she reached for it automatically, cracking the lid with a lack of any fanfare or ceremony.
The ring deserved more.
‘Wow.’ She stared at it, blinked, and stared some more. ‘What—is this?’
‘An engagement ring.’
She lifted her eyes to his, her stomach in knots. ‘It’s way, way too much.’
And it was. In every way, it was ridiculously over the top. A solitaire diamond, at least the size of her thumbnail and shaped like a teardrop, sat in a four-claw platinum setting, with more diamonds running down the side of the ring—each large enough to be an earring, at least. It sparkled even in the dull light of her Sydney apartment.
‘It’s nothing—just what the jeweller had on hand. If you don’t like it, you can choose something else.’ His voice was nonchalant, as though it didn’t matter to him. It was the strangest proposal Annie could imagine being a part of. This whole situation was bizarre.
‘I like it,’ she responded with a small shift of her head. ‘It’s just—how much did this cost?’ Then, another shake of her head. ‘Never mind, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’ She pursed her lips, searching for words. ‘Can you see how difficult life has been for me? I’ve scrimped and saved to be able to afford the things Max wants, and even then always had to buy him second-hand or cheap copies, and you swoop in here with something like this... It’s going to take me a while to get my head around it all.’
‘You should have contacted me.’
I tried. She kept the fact buried inside herself. It would feel like revealing too much of her feelings, as they’d been then. She didn’t want to discuss the past in that kind of detail.
‘The pre-nuptial agreement.’ He pulled it out of his other pocket and slid it across the table top. ‘You should consult a lawyer, of course, but they won’t find anything wrong with it. The terms are very favourable to you.’
‘I can’t afford a lawyer,’ she said with a groan of frustration. ‘I barely know how I’m going to pay for our electricity bill so please just...’ She shook her head, not sure what she’d wanted to say. ‘Explain it to me.’
A muscle jerked at the base of his jaw but he nodded.