Page 46 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

Her heart flipped over at once.

Because it was Anax.

And he was looking wild around the eyes and dark straight through.

“Did you truly believe you could run away from me?” he demanded.

“I did not run. I flew. Very sedately.” Constance forgot about the hot chocolate and drifted further out of the kitchen.

Up above her, she could hear footsteps on the stairs, and saw Anax shift his gaze. Then watched that gaze harden. “I will deal with you later,” he said to Maria.

“You leave her alone,” Constance threw out at once. “You’re good at leaving people alone, Anax. If you were so interested in my whereabouts, perhaps you shouldn’t have abandoned me on an island in the middle of the sea with no way to leave. It might as well be a prison.”

“Yes, such a terrible prison. You are so mistreated.”

But she had already had her fill of snide remarks this day. “Why don’t we strand you on an island you can’t get off of and see how you feel about it?”

She realized belatedly that Maria’s footsteps had gone away again. And more, that she had somehow moved halfway down the hall. And he had moved, too, and now there they were, entirely too close.

Dangerously close.

“I don’t even understand how you got here so fast,” she said, because it was that or hurl herself forward—directly into his chest—because that’s where she wanted to be.

It was an outrage she did not entirely understand that she could be mad at him,becauseof him, and still wanthimto make her feel better.

“I was already in Greece.” He shook his head as if he didn’t know why he was answering her question. Or maybe not, because then he said, “I was already making my way to you.”

All the breath in Constance’s body seemed to go out of her at once. The night they’d shared seemed to swirl around and around inside of her, the way it always did. She went over it and over it, every last detail. Every last touch.

“You couldn’t leave me fast enough,” she made herself say, and was happy that her voice did not shake no matter how she felt inside. “Why would that change?”

He reached out and slid his hand to her face, to fit her cheek. “Koritsi, if you hear nothing else I say to you today, know this. It had nothing to do with you. The monsters are all mine.”

And she had told herself so many stories about how it would go.

Sooner or later, she’d been sure, he would return. Sooner or later, he would have to come back to the island to see his daughter. She had practiced whole speeches in the mirror. Stinging set-downs. Interrogations better suited to crime dramas. She had ripped him into pieces time and time again, but not once had she prepared forthis.

For Anax in her grandmother’s front hall, his hand on her cheek and his gaze on hers like this.

Honest. True.

Constance didn’t really think it through. She lifted up her hands and slid them around the sides of his neck, and her mouth was moving before she knew she even meant to speak.

“I missed you,” she said quietly.

And then she watched him come undone.

She watched Anax melt, but there was anguish in it, too, and then his mouth was on hers. First sweet, then wild.

Then he was backing her up, kissing her and kissing her again, his mouth drugging and desperate, seeking hers, finding her, and bringing them both home.

And she had no idea how long they carried on like that, wrapped around each other and kissing as if their lives depended on it, before she realized that they’d made it back into the kitchen. She pulled away, took him by the hand, and then led him down the cellar stairs to the finished basement where she’d lived with her parents so long ago.

Down in the basement, there were windows that walked out into the backyard, furniture covered in sheets and shoved back up against walls, but it still felt cozy. Close and warm, this close to the boiler that her father had used to call by a pet name, making up stories about its various noises all winter long.

Constance smiled at the memory as she took her husband by his hands. And she pulled him with her, over to the one sofa that was always left uncovered, because it was the place that she’d liked to come down to to sit and think about her childhood.

Thinking about Anax was better. Because he was here with her. He wasn’t just a memory. He was hot and hard andhere.

---