GREEK HUSBAND

Chapter 49

'That must've been devastating for your mother. She must've really loved your father to keep on forgiving him.'

'But he loved Athene and obviously, Bastien was almost the same age as I was, so in a sense, Anatole had two families. It was a hideous triangle.' His lean dark features were bleak. 'Anatole couldn't walk away from Athene and my mother refused to let him go. Once when he tried to leave her she took sleeping pills and that scared the life out of him.'

'Of course, it did,' Bella said with a shiver.

'When I was thirteen, Athene died in a car crash and Bastien came to live with us. My mother was so relieved that her rival was dead that she agreed to the arrangement. Naturally, Bastien and I didn't hit it off,' Edward said drily, his lean, darkly handsome features grim. 'However, the volatile nature of my parent's marriage convinced me that I didn't want an atom of that obsessive passion in my own marriage...'

Bella sipped at her soft drink and searched his lean, strong face, recognizing the gravity etched there. 'Meaning?'

'I have never wanted any part of the possessiveness, the jealousy, the arguments, or the overly high expectations that most married couples have of each other.'

'That's the downside of attachment. Love is the upside,' Bella told him gently.

'Not for me, it isn't,' Edward countered with cool conviction. 'I'm not looking for love in our marriage, Bella.'

In spite of the sinking sensation in her stomach, Bella threw him a brilliant smile. 'Neither am I, Edward, but I will expect you to love our child.'

'That's a different kind of love,' he declared.

'A less selfish love certainly,' she conceded, wanting to ask him about his relationship with Marina and biting her lip to restrain herself while she was uncertain of her ground. 'You forgave your father for his mistakes, didn't you?'

'He's a good-hearted man but weak at the core. He dug himself into a hole and he couldn't get out of it. He didn't want to hurt anyone by making a choice and the result was that he hurt all of us.'

Her lashes dipped over her sea-glass eyes, which were clear as jade in the light filling the cabin. 'If you feel so strongly about your father's infidelity, how could you cheat on Marina?'

'But I didn't...cheat on her,' Edward contradicted with a flare of distaste in the brilliant dark eyes narrowed below the lush canopy of his lashes. 'Marina and I got engaged and then agreed to go our separate ways until we got married.'

Her lashes fluttered up in disbelief. 'That's weird.'

'Why? Neither of us was in a hurry to marry and we weren't lovers either, so it wasn't the unsavory agreement you are obviously imagining,' Edward derided.

We weren't lovers. That phrase repeated inside Bella's brain and stunned her. 'You mean, you and Marina...er...never—?'

'Never, but that is confidential.'

Bella was shocked into silence, recalling Marina's comment about Edward's indifference and finally understanding its source. That Edward had been content to stand back and allow Marina to do as she liked during their engagement spoke volumes about the chilling level of his detachment and it was hardly surprising that the brunette had ultimately decided that she would be happier with another man. And Marina's statement that Edward was bad for her ego? Oh, yes, Bella finally understood that and the significant part it might well play in her own future. Would Edward be so detached from her that he froze her out too?

The jet landed in Tuscany and they transferred into a helicopter for the last leg of their journey. By that stage, Bella was fed up bundling her long dress around her legs to cope with steps and looking forward to being free of its confines, not to mention her perilously high heels. She stole a tentative glance at Edward's hard-bronzed profile, recalling his declared intention to remove her dress. Steamy warmth engulfed her treacherous body, anticipation as potent as an electrical storm at its core. But then desire shimmied like intoxicating alcohol through her veins when Edward was close. A heady combination of memory and the physical craving he evoked put her on edge, mortified by her weakness and ill at ease with her own physical reactions.