Those words were so sweet to Ash's ears. No one had ever "been there" for her like Zoe was insisting on doing, or even Nikos had done the day before, or with his phone call just after 6:00 a.m. that morning. He'd somehow known she wasn't sleeping and had called to make sure she was okay.
He had offered to come to the hospital, but she'd known he had enough to keep him busy with his company and her mother's so she'd told him not to come.
"Thank you for being such a good friend to my daughter."
Zoe waved her hand dismissively. "It is my pleasure. She would be my daughter-by-marriage soon if you and my son had not messed up so spectacularly."
Rachel winced. "Point taken."
"Ne…yes, I can see that it is."
Ash reached out to take her mom's hand. "We don't have to think about that right now."
She squeezed her hand convulsively, as if she was afraid she'd pull away. "I would like to talk about it, though…if you don't mind."
Ash chewed her lip nervously. "I don't want you upset again."
Zoe pulled a chair near her bedside and sat down. "I've spoken with the nurse in charge. Breakfast will be delivered in twenty minutes."
It was such a mundane sentence, but it broke the tension starting to permeate the room.
Ash's mom nodded. "Honey?"
"Promise you won't get overwrought again."
She smiled at her use of the old-fashioned term. "I promise."
"What do you want to say?"
She sighed and smoothed her blanket before she began to speak. The uncharacteristic hesitancy caught at Ash's heart. "I approached Nikos with the merger idea after the way I saw he looked at you."
"What are you talking about?" Nikos had looked at her?
Her mom met her gaze, her own unflinching. She could tell she was determined to be fully honest. "I won't pretend it was all altruism on my part. I'd realized long ago you had no interest in running the company. Taking on a partner who could give me grandchildren to inherit the company made sense."
"He could hardly make those grandchildren without my cooperation."
"Exactly."
"So you offered him half your company if he would marry me?"
"Yes, but Ash, I knew he wanted you, too. Personally."
That was something she was still very much uncertain of, but she didn't deny her mom's take on it. She saw no point in doing so. Apparently she had believed Nikos wanted her and that's really all the was relevant to this conversation.
The thing was, she'd overlooked something pretty major in her estimation. "Is that supposed to make it all better? What about what I wanted?"
"You looked at Nikos Petronides the way your I looked at your father when we first met."
"Like what?" Ash asked, more because she was hungry to hear about her parents and what it had been like between them than because she wanted to know how her mom thought she saw Nikos.
"Your father looked at me like a hungry hunter. He was an adventurous man. So, his eyes, the same color as yours, they were filled with both wariness and attraction. I'd inherited wealth, unlike Nikos and I was only twenty-six, when I met your father. Though we worked side by side for years, I'd already almost doubled my family's business holdings."
"Did you love him?"
"Very much."
Something inside Ash cracked at that assurance. She had loved once.
"How did he die?" She'd always known her father died the same day her mother gave birth to her, that there'd been an accident. She'd never asked for details because, well…that wasn't the kind of thing she asked her mom and there'd been no one else.
"We were in a car accident. It was bad. I went into premature labor and delivered you girls but he had an internal bleeding. His brain was swollen and he slipped into a coma. He never came out and died less than a week after my giving birth."