‘No,’ she whispered, nodding, taking a step back from him. ‘Definitely not you.’ She wrapped her arms around herself, the reality of all this forming an ache low down in her abdomen.
‘Please, wear this.’ He reached for the ring but she held a hand up, shaking her head. ‘It was a gift and it suits you.’
‘It’s very beautiful, but I don’t think commemorating last night is a good idea.’ She grimaced. ‘Let’s just...go back to how things were before, okay? We can forget it ever happened.’
Dimitrios wanted to rail against that. He felt trapped. Trapped between a rock, a hard place, an ocean, a tsunami and a wall of fire. He felt suffocated by indecision. He should say that he loved her. Just say the damned words and let this all go away. What difference would it make if he lied to her?
But he’d never do that, not even to relieve her suffering. Annabelle was brave and beautiful, telling him she didn’t want a sham marriage. She wanted—and deserved—the real deal.
The guilt of the past few years was back, stronger than ever.
What would Lewis say if he knew what situation they were in—what situation Dimitrios had got them into?
God, what would Zach say?
He closed his eyes, his lungs hurting with the force of his breathing. ‘Do you want a divorce?’
When he opened his eyes, all the colour had drained from her face. He ached to pull her into his arms but he knew the importance of the boundaries she was erecting. He had to respect them.
‘Is that what you want?’
‘No, Annabelle.’ He dragged a hand through his hair. ‘I don’t want a divorce. I told you I wasn’t going anywhere, and I meant that, one hundred per cent. But I don’t want you to spend your life miserable and duty-bound, as you see it, to live with me.’
She tilted her face away from him, his outburst clearly hurting her. He swallowed a curse.
‘I’m sorry. I just wasn’t expecting this.’
Her eyes were haunted when they met his. ‘You and me both.’
She chewed at her lip in a way he found far too distracting, given their current state of discord. ‘I want what’s best for Max.’
He frowned. ‘I do too.’ Uncertainty rippled inside him. ‘But not if that’s to your detriment.’
Her smile practically hollowed him out. ‘Letting myself fall any further in love with you would definitely be detrimental to me. Treat me like a polite stranger and I’ll be fine. Okay?’
A polite stranger. He stared up at the ceiling with a pain in his gut that wouldn’t go away. A full forty-eight hours after Annabelle’s confession, and Dimitrios’s mood had gone from bad to worse.
Despite her pronouncement, she’d stayed in his room. ‘Max will notice,’ she’d said simply when he’d suggested he could move into a room down the hallway.
All of this was for Max. They were both in agreement on that. So here they were, polite strangers lying in his bed, on opposite sides of it, neither moving for fear of accidentally touching the other, despite the fact there was enough space between them to form a chasm.
As for sleep, it was a luxury that fell well beyond his grasp.
He shifted to look at her and something tightened low in his abdomen. He couldn’t tell if she was asleep or not. It was possible the same thoughts were tormenting her, keeping her awake, an awareness of him like a form of torture, just as it was for Dimitrios.
But if she was pretending to sleep then it was logical to conclude she would continue to do so even if he moved. Stepping out of bed, he grabbed a shirt from the wardrobe and pulled it on, determinedly not looking back at the bed until he reached the door. Only then did he tilt his face a little, dark eyes that swirled with frustration finding Annabelle, looking for her, hoping to see—what?
She’d rolled over, turning her back on him.
She wasn’t asleep, but she was closed off to him, and he suspected he deserved that.
CHAPTER TWELVE
IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE not to feel the contrast with last Christmas Eve. Annie stared around the beautiful living room, with the twelve-foot Christmas tree Dimitrios had organised, and felt a wave of sadness. On the surface, this was perfection. Everything was so lovely, but Annie’s heart was more broken than it had ever been.
This house, the decorations, the setting...everything was so stunning. She and Max had spent Christmas Eve the year before watching a children’s movie and eating turkey sandwiches, but she’d been...happy.
Not whole, exactly. She knew now that a Dimitrios-sized gap had always been inside her, but it had been easy to live with a gap. His absence hadn’t been as bad, because there’d been an element of not knowing. It had been possible to keep some kind of fantasy alive, even when she’d never really given it much thought on a conscious level. There’d been a level of plausibility.