“Au revoir,Tris.”
“I did,” Tristan said, still laughing as Christos disconnected the call.
Ava watched him with those wide blue eyes of hers. “What’s in London?”
He didn’t want to talk business with her, but maybe it was better than the alternative—lifting her out of that chair and into his arms.
“A business venture I have with a couple of friends.” When they’d started Seconds, they’d been twenty and defiant, each refusing to follow in the predestined path his family had outlined for him. Tristan’s family was in publishing on a big scale. And Guillermo—well, Gui’s family were royal and they didn’t approve of owning something so base as a chain of provocative nightclubs.
“I don’t know any of your friends,” she said, quietly.
“Why would you?”
“We were intimate with each other, Christos, shouldn’t we know at least a few of the people who are important in each other’s life?”
He rubbed the back of his neck, wondering if that was why she’d turned to Stavros. Was it because he’d insulated her from everyone else? He didn’t want to dwell on the need he’d had to make her completely his, to become her entire world.
“We were lovers, Ava, little more.”
“Now we are parents and you want us to marry.”
“I believe you want that, too,” he said, unsure where she was going with this. He tried not to think about what she’d said about Theo. He let the boy call himBaba, because to tell him not to would have been awkward, but he didn’t believe he was the boy’s father.
“I can’t be married to a stranger. Not even for Theo’s sake.”
“What do you want from me?”
She pursed her lips as she thought. Always so cautious, this one was. “I want a chance to become friends with you. I don’t know a lot of happily married couples, but the ones I do know…well, they are friends with each other. I think Theo deserves that from us.”
He nodded. It was one of the reasons he’d offered to marry her instead of just taking Theo back to Greece. “That’s amicable to me.”
“You have to stop trying to make everything between us sound like business.”
“Why do I have to do that?”
“Because it makes me want to slap you when you do it.”
“I didn’t realize you have violent tendencies.”
“Only with you, Christos,” she said.
He walked around his desk and leaned against it so that only a few feet of space separated them. “Business is the only way I know how to manage this.”
“Manage what?”
The way he felt about her, but he couldn’t say that. “Marriage.”
“This is a marriage of convenience?”
“It is convenient for both of us,” he said.
She rolled her eyes. “I think we should try to be friends.”
“How do you propose we do this?”
“Have dinner with some of my friends tomorrow night,” she said.
He glanced at his calendar. “I can do an earlier dinner. Perhaps around seven?”
