Page 28 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

She’d tried to tell herself she didn’t know why she felt this compulsion.

But that was a lie.

The truth was that she was Dorothy Jones’s granddaughter. If necessary, she, too, could live on spite alone for years. And Anax might not admit it, but she could see that her uniform bothered him. She took a distinct pleasure in that shudder he managed to repress less and less every time he caught sight of her.

That shudder ensured that she would never stop her own pointless little protest.

In keeping with the Walmart outfit and synthetic fabrics that she was sure appalled him to even share space with, she made certain to keep her hair in the same messy knot on the top of her head. As if to suggest she never washed it.

She told herself it was all part and parcel of the sameresistance.

But at moments like this, sitting at another intimate dinner with this man who she would have sworn she did not miss—but raced to see when he came back each evening—she wondered. Because her whole body was lit up from the inside out, as if she was one of those fireplaces the staff had lit for them tonight.

She couldn’t pretend it had something to do with his role as a father. That was its own sort of heat and tenderness, but this was different.

This was the flush that never went away.

This was an ache inside her body that woke her in the night.

These were the strings she never managed to untangle, forever wrapped too tight all around her.

If she was honest with herself, she felt that way in his presence...a lot.

It didn’t matter how many times she sternly told herself that she did not wish to be seen as a woman, not by him. She was a woman. And she suspected there was a huge part of her that, tragically, wanted him to see her as a woman anyway.

That wanted Anax, specifically, to see her that way.

But Constance didn’t want to have to dress to his standard for him to notice her.

There was a part of her, and, oh, how it shamed her, that wanted her husband to fall head over heels in love with the woman he’d seen in two costumes in Iowa and only this uniform here.

She knew it was delusional. Especially since, having nothing else to do, she spent a large quantity of time researching the man on the internet. She knew exactly what kind of woman he found beautiful and it certainly wasn’t the image she deliberately presented to him.

It wouldn’t be her even if she was dressed in her best, but as she never achieved that standard nor cared to, she could pretend.

And that truth shamed her so deeply it seared into her like a scar.

Or maybe that was simply his effect on her.

Tonight Constance told herself that she didn’t want him to see her as anything. She was wearing these things as armor, to make certain she would never lower herself to wanting the likes of him.

Especially when he spoke of herimprovementas if that was something she should want above all else. As if that was something she sorely needed. She opened her mouth to announce that she would never read another book again as long as she lived, but caught herself just in time. If she said something like that she would feel honor bound todoit, and there was such a thing as cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

“And what improvements do you think I should undertake?” she asked instead, looking at him without bothering to smooth out the expression on her face.

“We are all of us human, are we not?” Anax seemed unduly restless tonight and was not sitting in his seat. He was prowling around the dining room, glaring at the portraits on the wall. “Surely there is no one who could not use as many improvements as possible.”

“What of you, then? In which areas do you think you need improvement?”

And maybe it was the storm outside, rattling at the windows. Maybe it was all those lit-up parts inside of her, blazing with that heat she didn’t want to feel. Maybe he knew anyway, because he was the kind of man whoknew such things. She didn’t have to know them herself to understand that.

But when he turned to look at her there was something on his face, something stark that she didn’t know had a name.

Does it need a name?whispered something inside her.Or do you worry you already know what you would call it?

And the starkness of it made her eyes felt damp with an emotion that felt almost too hot, too heavy, to bear. His eyes seemed darker. It did not seem as if there was a table and half a room between them. It seemed as if they were sharing one breath, as if all of these intimacies over the past months were embroidered into them, threaded through bone and flesh.

As if that storm beating down above was in both of them, too.

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