Page 35 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

Or maybe it was simply that she had understood that for the first time in all her life, she comprehended precisely what her body was for.

Even ten months pregnant and about to give birth.

Even then, while she’d worked so hard to pretend all of those sensations were simply part of what it was to be so heavily pregnant, something deep within her had known otherwise.

His mouth shifted on hers, she was dimly aware of the change in the background noise on the other side of the glass doors, but not enough to stop. Not enough to keep herself from tentatively opening her mouth beneath his and accepting him into her mouth.

It felt like some kind of explosion. It felt messy and perfect. It felt like everything she’d ever wanted yet had never imagined she would feel.

Then he angled his chin, took the kiss deeper, and once again hurled her back into her memories.

The actual moment of giving birth. Of looking down the length of her own body, to see Natalia—tiny, alien andhers.

They had laid her daughter next to her heart and she had felt scraped raw, as if the process of labor was not simply to bring this perfect new human into the world, but to expandherfrom the inside out. To make it possible to contain all the love she felt, complicated and messy and almost as painful as the labor pains themselves.

Constance had looked up from that brutal, beautiful moment and he had been there. Waiting. Watching.

With a look of such extraordinary intensity on his face that she had not allowed herself to think of it since. It was too much. It was naked and unbearable.

It shook her, deep.

And that, too, was its own kind of recognition.

There on a balcony outside the ball, he pulled back. And once again, that look on his face was extraordinary. Impossible.

Once again, she felt as if his kiss was less of a surprise and more of an awakening—to a particular kind of daylight that had been pouring all around her all this time.

And now, at last, she could see it.

She wondered if he could see it, too.

Anax stared at her for what felt like a lifetime. Then he pulled her back inside and into the embrace of all that heat and conversation and music. He swept her out into the dancing once more, swirling them around and around, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to stop in the middle of a waltz to kiss his wife in the dark.

Constance looked over toward the balcony and realized that it was more lit up out there than she’d noticed. And that it was likely everyone here had seen that kiss. Surely that was something she ought to have been embarrassed about—

But she couldn’t quite get there.

Everything inside her was sensation and need, wrapped all around each other with little barbs that sunk deep and confirmed for her that this had been what she’d wanted from him all along.

Without even knowing it. Not on the surface, anyway.

“If you keep looking at me like that,” he said then, in a deep, rumbling sort of way that she could feel beneath her hands even as she heard it with her ears, “everyone in this ballroom will think that my wife is a debauched libertine who thinks of nothing at all but taking me to her bed.”

She understood something then, in another burst of clarity that she thought might have something to do with the fact she could still taste him on her lips. The Constance she had been before she’d gone down this road, before she’d decided to have a baby without waiting around for the right man the way everyone told her she should, was not the Constance she was now. The Constance who had soldiered on in the face of the sniffs and the raised eyebrows in town. The Constance who had lived the past year with this man in her house, who had spent many a sleepless hour telling herself that anything she felt about the situation was hormones, nothing more.

All of those versions of her made this version of her possible, but she wasn’tthemany longer. She was what they’d made her.

So she turned her head to look at him. She held his gaze, lifting one shoulder and then delicately lowering it again. “They would be correct.”

And she had the very great pleasure of watching him...ignite.

It started somewhere in the backs of his eyes, burst into flame, and then took him over.

“Koritsi,”he said, but it was like a growl.

And before she knew what was happening, he was taking her by the hand and tugging her through the ballroom once again. This time in the opposite direction. She saw him nod curtly to his sister, standing near a grand pillar in a knot of very well-to-do-looking people with the security chief at her side.

A car pulled up in front of them as he led her outside. And Constance did not question how it was that everything in this man’s life seemed to work like clockwork, as if the earth on its axis rotated purely at his command.

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