Page 58 of A Diamond Deal
‘You wish to have sex?’
Her mouth ran dry. She wasn’t prepared. For the smell of him. A cologne both bitter and sweet. A scent her body responded to. Her pupils widened. Her nostrils flared. Heat arrowed to her pelvis.
She swallowed. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. At Versailles she’d wanted him. She wanted him.Still.But sex…it wasn’t what they needed.Not now.
His eyes blazed. ‘If not for sex, why do you no longer wish to enforce the contract?’
‘We need to forgive each other. We need to heal, Konstantinos,’ she told him on a breath. ‘We need…closure. But we can’t have any of those things,’ she continued, ‘if we keep doing what we always do.’
‘What we always do?’ he repeated.
‘Start conversations and end them in bed.’
‘We haven’t slept in a bed together for longer than I can remember.’
‘If we takethisconversation to bed—our marriage, even after the divorce, will be…unresolved. We owe each other—’ she held her hands up wide, palms forward ‘—more thanthis. More than a contract that divides us further. Because if we keep it up, this power play for control, someone will lose. And haven’t we lost enough already?’
He flinched. An almost imperceptible jump of his flesh. But she saw it.Felt it.
Her lips grappled with the air. ‘I still want a divorce, Konstantinos,’ she said. ‘Too much has happened for us to do anything else. But I want to trust that you’ll give one to me, without a contract.’
His jaw clenched. ‘Why?It will change nothing.’
‘I… I should have trusted you to do the right thing. I… I lost my head at the ball, butyoukept yours,’ she reminded him. ‘You kept your word, even though I didn’t want you to.’ She bit her lip. ‘I trust you, Konstantinos. I wantyouto trust I’ll do everything you have asked me to do. We always trusted each other before everything…imploded.’
His pupils flared, until there was nothing but black rings of intensity holding her captive.
‘What exactly do you want from me,agape?’
Her command to her lungs to breathe slowly,deeply, disobeyed her.
Confrontation,still, it made her heart pump, her stomach twist, but this was the only way.
He’d abandoned her on a private jet after Versailles. Abandoned her. Sent her back to Greece. Alone. To be guarded by a team of strangers. Security that patrolled the island’s borders. Staff to feed her. Clean up after her. Just as she had been living for weeks—months—before and after the funeral.
She wanted to show him she wasn’t the wife he’d married. She wouldn’t be amenable. Compliant to the rules that no longer served him or her. She wasn’therany more. The woman he could leave on the other side of the monastery all alone.
She was here.
He was here.
She wanted—needed—to have the conversations they hadn’t.
She wouldn’t leave their marriage open.Unresolved.
She needed closure.
‘I want to talk about what happened at the ball,’ she repeated. ‘I want to talk about why you left. Why you needed to get away from me.’
‘You know why,’ he growled.
She walked past him—broke the too tense pull between them. She sat down on the sofa, pressed her knees together, and looked up at him from her seated position.
If she wanted him to talk, she had to lead by example. She had to let herself be open to change. She had to let herself be vulnerable. Nothing would ever be different between them unlessshedid things differently.If things never changed, she’d never have closure.
‘I do,’ she agreed. ‘And we need to talk about it.’
She dragged in a fortifying breath.
