Violet rolled her eyes and turned toward the elevators. “Be careful what you wish for, huh?”
* * *
The apartment was in fine shape. If it wasn’t for the faint smell of drying paint, Violet almost wouldn’t be able to tell anything had happened in her kitchen. Knox went down happily for his afternoon nap while Violet, Aidan and Tara worked on unpacking their suitcases. Violet started a load of laundry and then she and Aidan settled on the couch in the living room with glasses of iced tea.
“That guy was a real ass,” Aidan said. Even though over an hour had passed since Beau walked off, they both knew exactly who he was referring to.
Violet was well aware that her ex-fiancé was an ass. He may not have deserved Violet cheating on him and having another man’s baby, but he wasn’t the right man for her by any stretch of the imagination. “I know. He does have moments where I can see the guy that charmed me in college, but they became few and far between as we got older. What scares me the most is that I almost married him. I was quite upset at first when I realized I was pregnant, because I knew what it meant for me. Things had been great with Beau since my accident, but I knew it wouldn’t last. Being pregnant meant my chance to walk away from the relationship was over. Having his baby meant getting married. End of story. At least as far as our family and friends were concerned.
“I delayed the wedding by insisting I wanted to wait until after the baby was born. Everyone thought I was just being vain about looking thin on my wedding day, but the truth was that I was looking for any reason to put it off. Then Knox arrived in all his redheaded glory and saved me from having to go through with it. I insisted on a paternity test even though Beau was pushing to be put on the birth certificate and have the baby take his last name. I refused. Something hadn’t felt right, and when the results came back, I knew what it was at last. But if Knox had taken after me with dark hair and eyes I might never have questioned if Beau was his father and married him.”
She shook her head, shaking off the shudder that ran through her at the mere thought of being Mrs. Beau Rosso. Her pregnancy had been such a confusing time for her, although she’d never spoken to anyone about her concerns. She’d blamed it on the accident at first, but still, she’d questioned it. She’d lain in bed at night looking at her gigantic engagement ring, feeling Knox move in her belly and wishing she knew why it didn’t feel right. Something had bothered her about Beau since the accident and she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. She’d hoped that the return of her memory would solve the question, but the answer hadn’t popped up along with all her memories of the time with Aidan. Amnesia was an incredibly frustrating illness, like having a word on the tip of your tongue but being unable to voice it.
“I almost married the wrong person, too. It happens more than you’d think. I guess we’re just lucky we figured it out before we took the plunge.”
Violet turned to look at Aidan in surprise. He’d never mentioned a fiancée before, but then again, they hadn’t spent much time rehashing their old relationships aside from the thing with Beau. “May I ask what happened?”
Aidan sighed and propped his head in his hand. “Do you want the long version of the story or the short version?”
“The long version.” She sensed some underlying animosity in Aidan and she didn’t know where it came from. He didn’t really seem to like people with money and took a lot of offense to how much Violet had. His attitude certainly wasn’t the result of anything she’d done, per se, but she could feel it sometimes. She wondered now if this wasn’t where it originated.
“Back when I was working at the advertising agency, I started seeing a woman named Iris. She was a corporate attorney I met at a party. We were together for about three years before I decided to propose. I knew she had particular tastes—by that I mean expensive ones—but at the time I didn’t mind. I was trying to better my situation and in my mind, part of that was dating a high-class girl with high-class tastes. I could afford to indulge her, and buying her things made her happy. I thought that was just how it worked. My mistake was thinking that our relationship was based on more than that.”
Violet felt her stomach start to ache. She already knew how this story would end because she’d met Iris before. Not his Iris,
but women like her whose loyalty to a relationship lasted only as long as the money did. When it dried up, they went in search of a new source.
“Anyway, so when my father died and I decided to quit my job in advertising to run Murphy’s, I was stupid enough to think that Iris would stand by me. She didn’t. In fact, she called me a damn fool and left me almost immediately for one of the senior partners at my advertising firm. It all happened so quickly, I had to wonder if she hadn’t been seeing him long before all that happened.”
“That’s awful,” Violet said, even knowing what was coming. Breaking up with Aidan was one thing but throwing it in his face like that was just cruel. A woman like that didn’t deserve a man like Aidan. It made Violet wonder if even she was good enough for him. After all, she’d cheated on Beau with Aidan, hadn’t she? It was completely out of character for Violet, and it frustrated her not knowing or understanding why she’d done it, but Knox was proof that she had. In that case, was she any better than Iris?
“How can you do that to someone you’re supposed to love?” she asked instead. Perhaps her lukewarm feelings for Beau had been the cause of her infidelity. They had been arguing a lot at the time.
Aidan shrugged and sipped his tea thoughtfully. “She loved money more than me, I guess. Iris wouldn’t even give me the engagement ring back after she broke it off, even though she knew I needed every penny I could get to bail out the bar. I should’ve known how screwed up her priorities were, but I find a lot of people in this town think just like her. The more they have, the more they love it. Need it. Are willing to do anything for it.”
Violet didn’t like the bitter tone his story had taken even though she understood why he would be upset. “I don’t know that that’s true. There are rich and greedy people everywhere. It doesn’t mean everyone is like that, though.”
“Isn’t it true? I’ll admit I’m jaded when it comes to rich people, but I have reason to be. With guys on Wall Street like Beau willing to do anything to turn a buck... Pharmaceutical companies willing to let my mom die because she couldn’t afford their jacked-up prices on medication... Beau was even willing to claim a child he knew wasn’t his just to...”
Violet sat at attention in her seat. “Just to what?”
Aidan shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong and he loved you and the baby no matter what. But my experience leads me to believe that he’d accept just about anything you threw his way if you’d marry him and he could get his hands on all your money.”
She’d worried about that. It had always been a factor in the back of her mind whenever she dated anyone. Most men in her social circles knew how much she was worth, at least within a couple hundred million. Somehow, she’d hoped that growing up with Beau had negated that. She’d hoped his affections for her were sincere. And yet, when Aidan said the words out loud, she knew it was true. Beau wanted to land the billionaire heiress. He kept coming back around no matter what she did because he really didn’t care what she did. He probably didn’t even love her. He just wanted the lifestyle—the prestige—being her husband would provide. He and his family were well off, but not ridiculously rich the way the Niarchos family was. Marrying her would afford him private planes and yachts and going his whole life without working a day if he didn’t want to. Love and mutual respect had nothing to do with it. That was not what she wanted her marriage to be based on.
“You might be right about Beau. And about Iris. We obviously aren’t the best at choosing romantic partners. But I refuse to believe that everyone out there feels the same way. Money and status aren’t everything.”
Aidan chuckled at her observation. “Only people with money and status would say that. They say money problems are the number-one cause of break ups.”
“No, I’m serious,” Violet insisted. “Beau was all wrong for me. I know that now. But all my parents saw was a successful guy from a good family and they looked the other way at all his other flaws. While it’s nice to be financially stable and well known in the community, it isn’t the most important thing in a relationship. If it were, rich people would never divorce and they do all the time.”
Aidan looked at her curiously. “So what do you think is the most important thing?”
Violet had thought about this a lot since she’d broken things off with Beau. She didn’t want to make the same mistakes next time, so she’d really tried to identify what she wanted in a partner. “Chemistry and attraction can draw you together, but relationships need a solid foundation to last,” she began. “That takes mutual trust, respect and caring for one another. You have to be able to count on your partner to be there when things get hard. To stand by your side when you lose the money and status like you did to run your father’s bar. Those things, to me, are far more important than the other stuff. That’s what I’m going to look for if I ever decide to get engaged again.”
He leaned toward her with a smile that made her stomach flutter. “You mean a poor schmuck like me actually has a chance of winning the heart and hand of a rich, successful and beautiful woman like you?”
There was a light of jest in his eyes as he said the words, but she knew that inside, he wasn’t kidding. Violet’s chest ached at the thought that Aidan believed he wasn’t good enough for her somehow. Why had he put her on a pedestal like that? It made her want to throttle Iris for making him feel like he was unworthy of her love.