Page 34 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

He moved with her and she flowed along with him, and Anax could not imagine ever dancing with anyone else. Ever.

“Eventually, my grandfather taught me, too,” Constance told him. “My grandmother always said that knowing how to let a man think he was leading was one of the most important tools a woman could have in her arsenal.”

“Your grandmother sounds like a woman I would have admired a great deal,” Anax managed to grit out.

“Everyone admired her or feared her,” Constance said brightly. “Often both, I think. But as for me, I just loved her. I still do.”

Her memories were a fire she warmed herself by, he saw. His were a gas fire in a trash can.

And Anax could not keep up the conversation. He could not compare blazes, flame to flame.

All he could do was dance. Because Constance was in his arms, at last.

He did not have to pretend, not with the music soaring all around them, and his gaze locked to hers. He did not have to tell himself lies.

He did not even have to redirect his attention to his daughter, because the baby wasn’t here.

There was only this. There was only her.

It was as if the fancy dress glow his sister had engineered had been a kind of stripping down, in the end. Because all he could see now was the truth.

All he couldfeelwas the truth.

It was that truth he was thinking of as he danced her out of the ballroom and onto one of the balconies, in the dark.

Where, finally, he looked down at her and thought that he would count the constellations on her lovely face.

But that would have to wait, because she gazed up at him and he was hit with yet another truth that he’d been denying for far too long—

I want her,he thought, admitting it to himself.

Maybe he said it, too, because her eyes grew wide.

And finally,finally, Anax leaned down and took Constance’s fascinating mouth with his.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ANAX’SHARDMOUTHdescended upon hers, claimed it as if they had kissed a thousand times before, and everything changed.

Just like that.

Constance forgot...everything.

Where she was. What they were meant to be doing. The fact they were not in private, not even out here in the dark with only glass between them and the rest of the ballroom.

She forgot all of those things in a deep, hot rush, while at the same time there was a deep shock of what she understood at once was recognition.

A deep, intense, all-encompassing understanding of not only who this man was to her, but the responses to him she’d been pretending she didn’t understand for almost a year now.

He held her in his arms, his mouth on hers, and it was as if she was falling. Soaring. Tumbling head over heels, back through time, as one image after the next scrolled through her mind.

She had seen him the moment he’d walked into the church in Halburg. She’d seen him, she’dknown, and then her conscious mind had rejected what the rest of her body felt.

With the same intense throb of deep recognition.

Almost as if she had known who he was, there and then. Before he’d even come to speak to her.

As if somehow, cosmically, the baby inside of her had recognized its own father.

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