Page 48 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

She still wanted a family.

Back then she’d looked around at a life that was perfectly fine and had thought,Fine isn’t good enough. I want more.

Why should this Christmas be any different?

So she pulled away from him, sitting back so she could look him in the eye. So she could stare back at him just as sternly.

“It’s good that we have chemistry,” she began.

One of his wicked brows rose. “Chemistry? Is that what you call it? I would consider it more of an atomic explosion, myself.”

She didn’t fall for that, though she wanted to. “Everything is inside out with us and that’s part of the issue. We had a whole baby before the one-night stand. I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to go.”

“Nothing about you is how it is supposed to go, Constance,” he murmured, and she couldn’t tell if that was a complaint or an endearment. She couldn’t tell if she minded either way, and she didn’t like that.

She sat up then, reaching for the sweatpants that were inside out on the floor and pulling them on, one leg at a time. Anax did not do the same. He lay there, looking debauched, like some feudal lord reclining on a pile of skulls and furs, not that such an image was at all helpful in her present circumstances.

Constance stood and let her hands find her hips. She looked down at him, and she knew—from somewhere deep inside and from the stars she’d just tasted again—that she would never forgive herself if she didn’t take this chance for what it was.

“I want a real marriage, Anax,” she told him, matter-of-fact and to the point. She thought he froze at that, but she pushed on. “And what I mean by that is that I don’t want to be secluded away somewhere, an afterthought that you can only trot out as it suits you. I don’t want to be speculated about in all those tabloids, images of me pored over as if I’m a mystery to solve, if there isn’t something real between us. It’s not worth it.”

She thought he would argue. She braced herself as he sat up, but he didn’t speak.

Constance decided to feel emboldened, and pushed on. “I want to live with you. I want to go to sleep with you at night and wake up with you in the morning. I want to raise our daughter, together. I want to give her sisters and brothers. I want to fall in love with you, Anax.”

She saw him swallow, hard.

So she stuck that knife in. “If I’m honest, I’m in love with you already. I want you to fall in love with me, too. I think you can. Or you could. I want you to try.”

“Constance.” Her name on his lips then was barely a whisper.

“I don’t want to play games,” she told him, and she found that the more she said the things she wanted out loud, the more powerful she felt. The moresure. “And I’m not saying that it will be easy, or perfect, or that we won’t get it wrong a thousand times. But I want totry, Anax. It doesn’t matter how we started. I want to try to make it right. To make it work. To make it be...” She tried to indicate the two of them, the space between them, theentiretyof this thing between them. “I want to make it everything it can be. Because why not?”

She wasn’t sure if the drumming sound she heard was her heart or something more like a heart attack. She wasn’t sure she was breathing, or had even taken a breath since she started talking like this.

What Constance did know was that she had no choice here. It was stand up for what she wanted or give it up forever. The choice was that stark.

And now she’d said what needed saying. It was on him now.

She could see he knew it.

Anax took his time standing. Then carefully, almost too deliberately, putting his clothes to rights.

Only then did he look at her and when he did, she had to fight to keep her knees from buckling. Because once again, there was so much anguish in his gaze. So much pain.

All of that mixed in with the fire she could still feel inside of her.

“I don’t know how to want those things,” he told her, but he sounded...careful. And somehow, that gave her hope. “And I certainly don’t know how to give you those things. What worries me,koritsi, is that I do not have that within me to give.”

And she wanted to melt, right there where she stood. She wanted to rush to him, take him in her arms, and assure him that whatever he could give, whatever scrap of what she’d asked for, it would be all right.

But something wouldn’t let her. It was as if her parents and her grandparents had fused together to make her spine like steel.

It was Grandma Dorothy’s voice inside her, reminding her that strength only bothered the weak, so what was the point of hiding it?

Or maybe it was that little girl upstairs with Maria. The baby who Constance intended to teach to ask for what she wanted. And not to rest unless she got it.

Then again, maybe it was simply Anax himself. Because she looked at him, and that same knowledge that she’d finally accepted had been with her from the start swamped her all over again.

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