Page 23 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

But he could not bring himself to calculate the actual amount of time it had been since he’d touched a woman, no matter how something whispered inside him that it had been since before Stavros had walked into his office with the news that would change his life.

All he knew was that he could not touchthisone.

Not even when she was staring at him with a look of such utterlycuteconfusion that he had the strangest inclination that she had no idea what was happening between them.

That she might feel the same compulsion, the same shock of heat he did—butshedidn’t know what it was.

Anax was forced to recall that in all the research his team had done on her, they had never uncovered even the hint of a man in her life. Not one hint.

Something in him roared then, deep and irrevocably male.

He was not certain he could tamp it down the way he should—

But he refused to be a man like that. He refused to give in to his urges. He knew where that led.

How often had he watched the way his father had treated his own mother?

Constance was clearly entirely unaware of the currents running there between them, obvious to any other naked eye. She stepped closer to him, heedlessly, and had to tilt her face up to keep looking at him so steadily.

That...did not help.

“I don’t want to be hidden away on some island,” she told him, and her voice was less steady than before, but still as grave. “How is that any better or any different from living in a small town no one’s ever heard of? If you must offer your protection, why can’t I stay in Iowa? Nothing happens in Halburg that everyone else doesn’t know about by dark.”

“I do not think that you know as much about human nature as you imagine.”

Anax knew he needed to step away from her. She was too close. She hadfrecklesdusted across her cheeks and he hardly knew what to make of them. Or that he found themcute, as expected, despite the looming specter of thechicken suit—

Butcutewas not the word he would use to describe what happened inside of him when he dropped his gaze to her mouth.

Anax had never spent this much time talking to a woman he did not have a clearly defined relationship with. Either she was a subordinate, his sister, his poor sainted mother, or a potential bedmate. He had always kept them all in their separate boxes, where they belonged.

But his wife didn’t fit into any of those boxes.

He found he wanted to taste that mouth of hers more than he wanted to do anything else, including take his own next breath.

And he had never detested himself more than he did at that moment.

Anax moved away from her then, aware that he did it...jerkily. Almost roughly. He didn’t like the way she looked at him, surprised and confused.

He didn’t like any of this. He liked himself least of all.

“You and our daughter will have a lovely little life on the island,” he told her, and he sounded stiff. Too close todefensivefor his liking, when he had no reason to feel that way. “I will be able to see Natalia more often. As a father should. And if, in time, you cannot reconcile yourselves to this arrangement, I have already told you. You are free to go.”

He turned to make his way toward the back of the plane and the stateroom he had made over into an office, so that he need not be in any particular geographic location to continue his business.

But he heard her, all the same.

“Over my dead body,” she said, very quietly and very, very surely, “will I ever be separated from my baby. If you believe nothing else, Anax, believe that.”

And he did believe it, he found—but the reaction that moved in him then, piercing deep and leaving marks, was something he did not intend to acknowledge.

So he left her there, because it was either that or abandon himself entirely. And he refused.

He would not be his father.

He refused.

CHAPTER SIX

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