Page 40 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

This marriage. This life. This situation she’d ended up in. She now knew that if left to her own devices, she would have chosen this for herself.

She would choose it, every day. She would have chosen it that night in the church if she’d thought she could. If she’d been able to imagine such choices were available to her.

But when she got herself out of bed to go look for him, to tell him all these magical things that were coursing through her with every beat of her heart...he was gone.

And when that helicopter landed it was there to take her back to the island.

Without him.

Like it had been nothing but that enchanted pumpkin all along.

And it was high time Cinderella got back to her unfancy clothes and lonely life, far out of sight of Prince Charming and his real life here in the city.

CHAPTER NINE

THEFIRSTWEEKhe stayed away from the island—and her—was torture. He barely slept. He hardly knew himself in meetings. He refused to look at himself in the mirror, for fear of what he might see. He even considered drowning himself in alcohol, something he never did, because surely there he might find oblivion.

He refrained from testing that theory, but detested the fact he’d allowed himself to toy with even the idea of such a descent—to a dark, low place he knew all too well.

By the end of the second week, Anax hated himself thoroughly. But there was no other choice. He had Maria call him on video so he could see Natalia. He pretended that he wasn’t desperate for any hint about Natalia’s mother. He refused to ask after her.

Though he had never been an overly superstitious man, Anax knew better than to welcome in the ghost that already haunted him nightly. And daily. And every second of every hour in between.

He threw himself into work.

He traveled the world too many times to count.

From one day to the next, standing before this window or that, it was difficult to discern what city he found himself in. One boardroom was very like the next. One set of negotiations led into another, and there was a point at which jet lag and exhaustion became so commonplace that he could almost convince himself that that hollowness within him could be explained by time zones alone.

And not the truth he did not wish to admit that he was running from.

The unpalatable, unacceptable truth that he had betrayed every vow he’d ever made to himself where Constance was concerned.

In this way, he was no better than his own father. Paraskevas had never met a promise he could not break, or a vow he did not rush to splinter into pieces. Paraskevas had laughed it off, his lies and his backtracking and his spontaneous retelling of histories they had all lived through, as if he could convince them it had happened another way.

He found himself doing something alarmingly similar, going over that night in his head again and again and again, trying to make it...something other than it was.

Trying to pardon himself for the unpardonable.

When he slept, it was fitful, and he dreamed of her. Of that night. Of the innocence she’d given him so sweetly, so fully. It never failed to make him hard. It never failed to wake him in the middle of the night, reaching for her the way he had that night—

Only to find an empty hotel pillow here, a cool bed there.

Even when he wasn’t asleep, she haunted him.

All those things she had said to him. Going back to the very beginning, when that was the last thing he wished to do, even in the privacy of his own head.

Anax would prefer to pretend that he could not remember that very first night. The hit of all that heat, all that light, all thosepeoplepacked into that tiny little church. And then Constance there, smiling serenely, pregnant with his child and more beautiful—yes, then, how had he convinced himself otherwise?—than he cared to recall.

It was bad enough that she was the mother of his child. That he had married her. That there was no possible way to remove himself from the situation that would not harm his child in some way.

Those things had already been true before the night of the ball. He had already been too fascinated with her.

“Are you fascinated with her?” Vasiliki asked archly after a set of meetings somewhere hot. That was all he retained about the place—the tropical heat. Heat which must have gone to his head for him to admit such a thing to his sister. “Or is it the fact that you’ve never had the opportunity to spend so much timeclothedwith any other woman? Because I think you know the answer, don’t you?”

What Anax knew was that while his fascination with herclothedhad been bad enough, now he knew what it was like without such considerations.

He knewexactlyhow it could be between them. And that was not better, because unlike every other woman he’d ever touched, he wanted her more, now.

---