After The Billionaire's Wedding Vows…

“But you don’t. Not the things that matter.”

And finally, after five years, he might be starting to understand the distinction. “I’m working on it.”

“But you lied then. You lied when you said you loved me.”

“I did not lie. I just didn’t understand what I needed to do to keep those words true. And I do love you.”

She laughed like that was a great joke, only she didn’t sound happy about it.

“You are my wife, by my choice. I am not lying.” The words sounded hollow to his own ears as he realized just how stopped up the ears were they were falling on.

“A man does not treat a woman the way you’ve treated me when he’s in love with her.” Pollyanna sounded so certain in her own mind, so sure of her interpretation of the years of their marriage he knew denial would be useless.

He said it anyway. “A man too focused on his business and keeping peace within his extended family does.”

A man still grieving the loss of his father and afraid of how close he’d come to losing his mother. Despite how much he wanted to fix what was broken, those words would not leave his lips. Alexandros had never been an emotionally vulnerable person.

It was not his nature.

It was not how his bigger-than-life father had taught him to be.

Unimpressed with the words he had managed to utter, Pollyanna shrugged, turning her head away, and he knew the words again had fallen on deaf ears.

Or maybe they had been the wrong ones.

“I will change,” he promised. Had already started changing, but he didn’t expect her to trust that.

“Not on my account.”

“Naturally on your account, but on mine too. I want what we had in the beginning.”

“It’s dead.”

He didn’t believe that, but clearly he hadn’t just failed, he’d destroyed the fragile bonds of trust between them. All right. Okay. He’d taken over businesses that looked like they could never be revived. Some of those companies were his biggest earners now.

Let the rescue bid for his marriage commence.

When they were going over her schedule during breakfast on Wednesday, without another unexpected turn-up of Alexandros, Beryl told Polly not to worry about preparing for travel to her appointments with the doctors that Alexandros had set up.

Apparently, he had arranged for the appointments to take place at the mansion. There was already a massage table in the room off their personal gym, used by both her and Alexandros’s personal trainers.

She wondered if Alexandros knew that Polly had stopped seeing her personal trainer the second month of her current pregnancy.

And then reminded herself she didn’t care. Polly did what she had to in order to keep the peace, but no more. She’d built a life for herself in Greece that resembled the life he expected her to lead, but was not actually that life.

Except for a very superficial resemblance.

She was on charity committees, but not the flavor of the month, only the ones that really resonated with her. Most did not have the wherewithal to throw the glittery balls her mother and sister-in-law were so fond of. She’d made friends from those charities, not others from Alexandros’s set, but normal people who cared enough to sacrifice time and money for causes they believed in.

Polly wore designer clothes and used a car and driver like Alexandros insisted. But she donated from her wardrobe twice yearly to charity auctions and only bought exactly what she would need for each season. Her walk-in closet never getting more than half-full. Her driver was

a retired veteran with a disability that still allowed him to drive, but not a lot else to earn a living. Her car was the same one bought for her use the first year she married Alexandros.

Alexandros arranged for a new car for her every other year and she donated them for the use of the directors of the charities she knew needed them most.

Polly attended only the functions with her husband that she could not get out of and never gave up dinnertime with her daughter. She didn’t fight about it; she simply didn’t show up, and her husband had learned that time with their daughter was sacrosanct to Polly.

She wasn’t unhappy. She loved being a mom. Loved her husband even if she knew he did not really love her. She did believe he was faithful. That moment in the car had been all pregnancy hormones, but he’d taken her seriously and that in itself had been a novel experience.