Page 47 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

And it couldn’t have been more different from Athens. There was a wall of windows, sure, but there was snow tugging down the tree branches outside. And the outline of her grandmother’s old vegetable garden, a square set apart from the carpet of white.

Constance pushed him back on the couch and straddled him there, then forgot where they were.

Because here, in the space they made between them, nothing else mattered.

She moved over him, took his face in her hands, and kissed him. Then again, deeper and deeper. She angled her head in the way he’d taught her, and it felt like magic.

Like coming home.

This felt the way she’d imagined returning to Iowa would feel. But it was also harder. Deeper.

Richer, somehow.

And the more they kissed, the hotter it got. The deeper, the wilder it seemed to hum in both of them.

His hands streaked beneath her sweatshirt, then palmed her nipples. She rocked herself against his lap, pressing her breasts into his grip. Feeling the hard heat of him between them, and using his arousal to make that wicked, wonderful fire lick all the way through her.

And then it got even wilder.

Anax reached between them, and she was helping, and they both sighed a little when he pulled himself free of his trousers. He made a low, greedy sort of noise when her hands wrapped around him, but he didn’t let her play for long. He picked her up, twisted her around, and then came down over her on the sofa.

And then everything was a tangle of maddening sensation, of removing clothes, of kicking off shoes. It felt foolish and unwieldy and impossible to stop or slow orthink—

Until, at last, he thrust deep inside of her.

Constance shattered instantly. She bit down on his shoulder so that she wouldn’t scream and rode it out as that lightning bolt tore through her, ripping her apart and rocking her down to the bones.

Only when she lifted her head and looked at him again did she see the way his eyes glittered. Fierce. Possessive. And something more.

Only then did he move.

Anax rocked them slowly, surely, to the very end of sanity, then back.

He brought her to that edge again, then danced with her there, as if he could dance forever. She wondered if he could, if they would stay like this, wrapped up in each other, reaching, driving each other mad with all thiswant—

But this time, he slammed his mouth over hers as they both tore off the side of the world, and found themselves nothing but stardust once more.

It took a long time for her to come back into her own body. She heard footsteps in the kitchen above and knew it was Maria, preparing some food for Natalia. She knew she should go up and offer to help.

But Anax was stretched out over her, and he was so hot, so warm.

He washere.

He had shifted to one side and was propped up on an elbow, playing with her hair. He drew it through his fingers, again and again, looking at her with a softness in his gaze that she had never seen before.

Maybe she was as selfish as she’d always thought she wasn’t, not really, but she couldn’t bring herself to move.

“Do not worry,” Anax told her, his voice almost stern. “I will not leave you alone for so long again.”

And it was tempting to simply float off into that. So deeply, wildly tempting. To take it for the kind of promise she wanted him to make to her. To let that be the end of it.

Maybe she would have done just that if he had said such things to her that morning after in Athens.

But she was lying on this couch, literally surrounded by the ghosts of everyone who had ever loved her. And she’d had nothing but time to think.

Here it was, almost Christmas, and while her world had changed unimaginably in the past year, there were some things that still needed changing.

Maybe it was that she’d been thinking about the woman she’d been when she’d decided to go and get pregnant in the first place. She had wanted a family.

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