After The Billionaire's Wedding Vows…

Believing positive reinforcement might work as well with the father as with the daughter, she gave him a warm, approving smile. “I have enjoyed my more relaxed schedule.”

“Do you like the charity work?” he asked for the first time ever.

“You mean my job as your wife?” Because that’s what it was.

Once they’d gotten married and moved her into the family home, he had laid out a whole set of expectations for how she was going to live her life that she had not anticipated.

“Is that how you see it?”

“What else? You even give performance reviews,” she teased.

But it was true. Especially when they were first married, he’d make sure to take time to talk about what he felt she was getting right and what he thought she could improve on in her public role as his wife. Unfortunately, she’d discovered that public role took a lot more of her private time than she’d ever wanted it to.

In the beginning, she would have been happier if she could have gotten a job in her field, but his mother had thrown a fit at the idea of Polly working as a menial laborer, which is how she considered Polly’s formerly demanding career as a pastry chef. Later, Polly would have preferred more uninterrupted time to dedicate to being Helena’s mom.

“No, I do not think I have ever considered your role as my wife in the light of a job before.” And his tone said he didn’t like seeing it that way either. “As to what you call performance reviews, I was only trying to help you find your way in a very different world to the one you left behind.”

“It never occurred to you that it would have been a lot easier to find my way if I had been allowed to maintain what I could from my life in America.”

“What do you mean?”

“If I had been able to get a job as a pastry chef, I would have made friends more quickly and with workmates.” She pulled away from him and walked over to look out the window. “I know those weren’t the people you wanted me to make friends with, but I wasn’t raised in your rarified atmosphere and it would have been a lot easier for me to have some friends who understood my middle-class outlook on life.”

“I thought that in the long run you would settle in better if you made relationships in that ‘rarified world’ as you call it where you were now living.”

She spun back to face him. “Then why dump me in the back of beyond, taking me away from the friends I had managed to connect with?”

“I thought you would be happier in the country. You were raised in rural Upstate New York.”

“With you gone during the week and living in this great honking hotel?” she asked with disbelief. “No wonder your mom and sister considered the move the beginning of the end of our marriage.”

Only no one had counted on Polly turning up pregnant. It wasn’t as if she and Alexandros had been trying for a baby. They’d agreed they wanted to wait at least two years before they started trying, and Polly had grave misgivings about having a baby with him by the end of the first year of their marriage.

But she’d gotten the flu and her pills had been rendered ineffective. Not that she, or he, had realized it. Not until she’d started losing her breakfast.

“I do not know where Stacia got the idea that my buying this house was an indication that I saw our marriage as anything but permanent.”

Polly twisted her lips at how he ignored the truth of her comment as he had so often in the past. “Probably a combination of believing what she wanted to and the fact that for almost the first year after we moved here, you spent most of your work week in the Athens apartment and only came home on the weekends.”

And those had been shortened from Saturday afternoon to before dawn on Monday morning, when he’d fly out again. Polly had no intention of glossing over the reality of what her marriage had been like then.

Even she had wondered if he had intended the move as a way to make her a smaller player in his life, if not a prelude to the dissolution of their marriage.

“I was fighting the takeover and then working like hell to make sure it could never happen again.” Frustration laced his voice. “Everything my father and his father and grandfather before him had built was resting on my shoulders, but also the livelihood of tens of thousands of employees.”

CHAPTER SIX

HE’D BEEN DOING the best he could for his family.

Polly could see now that was how Alexandros had seen it. And honestly? She could not dismiss all those employees and their lives as being unimportant. He’d hurt her, but he hadn’t done it on purpose, and he hadn’t ignored her just to make another few million.

Moving her to the back of beyond and acting like he was doing her a favor? That was something else. Something maybe they still needed to work out between them.

Because she had missed the country, and she’d told him so, but she hadn’t expected that to result in being moved away from the friends she still missed, or the opportunities to cook in the soup kitchens that had offended her mother-in-law so much, or the easier access to him.

“But Stacia didn’t know that.” Neither had Polly, if it came right down to it. “She and your mother took your behavior to mean that you’d lost interest in our marriage. It’s natural they came to the conclusion that you only stayed married to me because I was pregnant with Helena.”

“But you know that is not true.”