Greek’s Christmas Heir

Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

A NAX ’ S ISLAND WAS like something out of a dream.

There had once been an old fishing village on one end of the bright little spit of land in the middle of the raucously blue sea. All that were left were the remains of colorful buildings, picturesque and lonely at once. The sands were blinding white and olives grew on the trees. There was an old temple in a forgotten grove, barely more than rubble and the hint of offerings long past.

On the other end of the island stood Anax’s house. From a distance it looked like its own small village, with different levels and buildings scattered over a hill, with trees and views to spare. Whitewashed walls, red tiled roofs. Closer in, it was clear that all the buildings were connected by walkways and pools, patios and terraces and balconies to let the sky and sea in. The fall sun was warm and bright, pouring over everything, and flowers still grew.

It was objectively lovely, no question.

Constance hated it.

“Maria will stay with you,” Anax had told her on the first day when she had been certain she would never sleep again, and had gone back into the stateroom to be with Natalia, shooing Maria away. She and her daughter had slept curled up with each other on the surprisingly comfortable bed, but that had been its own problem, because landing on the island in the glare of a new morning had seemed...impossible.

She’d pinched herself, certain she was still asleep in her bed back home.

But she’d been all too wide awake. Alert enough to look around her in a mix of wonder and anxiety, especially when the sprawling house came into view. She had visited whole towns in Iowa that were less expansive than Anax’s house. This singular house in his vast portfolio, as he and his sister had been at such pains to tell her.

She had, accordingly, refused to comment on it. She had refused to acknowledge the sheer scale and glory of the place. After all, she reminded herself, she didn’t want to be here. It didn’t matter how pretty it was.

But when Anax told her, in his peremptory fashion, that Maria would be staying with her here, she laughed.

“You mean the spy who stayed in my house?” She did not look at the other woman as they all stood there in the shade of an outdoor space that flowed from eternity pool to sitting area to another sitting area inside actual walls. Maybe it was the Greek version of a front hall, she’d thought. How could anyone tell when everything, everywhere, was so flowy ? “The woman who I thought was a friend? An ally, at the very least? No. Maria will not be staying. Not within my sight.”

But when Anax’s plane took off again, Maria stayed behind on the island all the same.

Constance told herself it was just as well to know precisely where she stood. To fully apprehend the shape of things, no matter how bracing it might have been.

“I’m sorry if you hate me,” the other woman had said, though she had not looked sorry to Constance’s eye. Or not sorry enough. “I love Natalia. And I think of the two of us as friends, too.” She sighed. “But you must understand that Mr. Ignatios changed my life. He personally helped me out of a very bad situation and he helped my family climb out of a particular sort of hole, and I...” Maria squared her shoulders. “There’s nothing I would not do for him.”

And Constance could think of a lot of responses she could give to that, but she remembered her grandmother’s sage advice.

Confrontations are for people who don’t know the joy of a long-held grudge, Dorothy had always proclaimed.

Constance decided she, too, could choose the sharp joy of her people. “Natalia loves you,” she replied coolly. “And now I know you. I only wish you’d given me that courtesy from the start.”

And to her credit, Maria did flush slightly at that.

Which was as close to an apology as she was likely to get.

Then there was nothing to do but...settle into this dream she couldn’t wake up from. After an admittedly self-pitying day—okay, two—Constance told herself, briskly, to get ahold of herself. It would be much like it had been these last ten months. She would focus on Natalia. Only now she would do it entirely without friends or even her nosy neighbors, trapped on an island she couldn’t even swim away from if she’d wanted to.

The astonishing luxury that assaulted her at every turn might be a hurdle, she’d thought, but she’d handle it.

But the first thing that was different, immediately, was that Anax was back the next night. Constance had assumed that she wouldn’t see him for weeks, the way it had always been before. She would have time to...prepare.

That was what was needed when it came to Anax, she told herself. Adequate preparation.

“What are you doing here?” she asked as she walked out onto the patio where her meals were served, complete with lanterns hanging from above, heaters should the balmy night grow cold, and a soft, admittedly beautiful view over the length of the island to the sea. She’d had to accept, reluctantly, that there was something to the whole seaside thing after all. But she had come prepared for more oceanic beauty, not the more masculine beauty of Anax. She frowned at him, because that was better than being flustered. “I thought you had important, billionaire things to do that would keep you chained to your desk. Doing them.”

“Athens is not far.” He lifted a brow, indicating that she must have done something with her face. “By helicopter, it is more or less an hour. I will be here whenever I wish.”

They gazed at each other as the lanterns glowed and the stars above outshone them all.

“How wonderful,” Constance said. It was not wonderful at all.

She skipped dinner and ate crackers in her room.

But it was a good reminder, she told herself sternly later that night, that she was not the sort of woman who wafted about from fainting couch to chaise, in a thousand pieces while her life did as it pleased around her. What she needed to do was spend less time contemplating the ocean and more time plotting her escape.

Yet that was a bit trickier than it should have been. It was one thing to imagine what she could do, if necessary, but she had to consider doing it with Natalia and that changed every far-fetched plan she came up with.

Constance was willing to risk herself. She was not willing to risk her baby.

Even if she could get around the Natalia factor safely...what could she do? Her first thought was that she would rouse all her friends back home in Iowa and see if they would come and rescue her. But how would she explain where she was? She could find the island on the map in her phone, but she had no idea how to tell someone to actually get here . They would have to rent helicopters or boats or planes.

Who could she ask to do such a thing?

Besides, her friends were a little too easily persuaded that she’d gone off with Anax...simply to go off with him.

As if that was anything like her.

You did just randomly decide to impregnate yourself last year , Kelly texted back when Constance pointed that out. You went from being entirely dependable to being a mystery, Constance. I don’t know what to tell you.

Tonight she heard the helicopter come in as she walked from her part of the sprawling house to what she thought of as the dinner patio. And she absolutely did not walk any faster because of that, she assured herself.

But maybe she did, because when she arrived, he was already there. He was standing with his back to the house and his eyes toward the sea. And her breath seemed to be coming a little too quickly, all of a sudden.

“Sit,” Anax said as he turned, though she hadn’t thought she’d made any noise. He beckoned toward the table. “We will eat. We will be civilized.”

She wanted to snap back at him and say something like, That’s what you think. That felt unworthy of her. Because he already had all the power. She didn’t have to act childishly on top of it. That would only give him more and he had enough as it was.

Constance took her seat at the table as gracefully as she could. And as she did, it occurred to her that all of this was a performance that he was putting on. An island that he owned. Private jets, helicopters. The mind-boggling luxury was the point.

He was wealthy and important. She wasn’t.

But very few things put steel into her spine like being condescended to. Even obliquely.

The seat he’d indicated she should take was catty-corner to his. She sat there, ignoring what she felt inside, and tried to pay closer attention to the stagecraft of all this.

Anax was exquisitely dressed, as ever. Tonight it was the sort of bespoke suit that she had only ever seen on the pages of magazines that she, personally, would never buy herself. She only knew that word, bespoke , because of those magazines in the first place, because folks around Halburg put suits on very rarely. A prom, a wedding, or a funeral. And in all of those cases, they looked as little worn as they were. They were stunts. Costumes.

That was clearly not the case with the suit that Anax was wearing. She had a sudden understanding of what it truly meant to have something made specifically for a person. The suit fit him as well as a pair of jeans, and he wore it, jacket unbuttoned and no tie, as casually.

He exuded a kind of casual, yet cosmopolitan, elegance that she should have found off-puttingly showy. Because it was.

But she was not as put off as she should have been.

She watched the way he reacted to the dishes of food that his kitchen staff placed before him. She watched the way he scrutinized the wine that was presented to him. How he tasted it, swirling it around his glass in what seemed like an offhanded manner until he nodded at the hovering servant, indicating that the wine was acceptable.

Then he sat back in his chair and focused on her.

And all she could see was that particular gleam in his dark eyes, which was not exactly calming.

Constance folded her hands on the table in front of her and smiled at him, hoping he really was paying close attention to her. And especially the cargo pants and slouchy sweatshirt she’d gotten from Walmart. There wasn’t a single thing on her body that cost more than thirty dollars. Altogether, she doubted that it would tally up to the cost of one cuff of that coat of his.

She was delighted by the contrast. Just in case she needed reminding who she was.

“What’s the purpose of all this?” she asked, and her voice was calm. At least she had that.

“Generally speaking,” Anax replied in that low voice of his that seemed like a rebuke and a lure at once, “civilized human beings break their fast at the end of the day. Some consider it a convivial, communal experience. You’re welcome to sit in silence, if that is what you would prefer. I understand that your will has been thwarted. That can be very upsetting.”

“How would you know?” She let her smile widen when he stared back at her, his brows rising. “I was under the impression that no one dared thwart you. Ever.”

“If it was up to me, koritsi , you would feel nothing of the kind.” He didn’t explain what that word was that he’d called her back in Halburg, too. She refused to ask. “It is obviously in our child’s best interest to live where she is protected. Where she will want for nothing.”

“And what did she want for back home?” Constance asked. “You had a spy in my house from the start. If you had concerns about Natalia’s well-being, you should have communicated them instead of all that subterfuge and drama.”

“I permitted you to keep her in that place for nearly a year. That is certainly not something I was required to do, Constance. It was a gift.”

“How thoughtful,” she said, scathingly. “I don’t know how I failed to notice that while being kidnapped and transported across borders without my consent.”

She decided that there was no earthly reason why she should sit there and break bread with a man she would, all things considered, prefer to throw things at. So why was she doing it? She had agreed to legalities for Natalia’s sake, not... dinner .

She stood up, regretting that she hadn’t made more of a production out of it when all he did was gaze back at her mildly.

“Have a lovely evening,” she told him. “I think, in future, I’ll have my meals sent straight up to my jail cell.”

And she felt that was satisfying, in its way. It didn’t matter if Anax responded or not, what mattered is that she felt little more control than before. The only thing she could control was herself, so that was what she would do.

But he kept coming back.

Despite her claims, she did not take all of her meals in her room. For one thing, it was hardly a jail cell. It was luxurious in the extreme, past the point of embarrassment. She spent enough time in that room as it was. Why sign up for more?

Not that she intended to tell him that.

Besides, she liked that view.

“Does this constitute a prison break?” Anax asked one night when she came down to find him sitting at the table as if he did that all on his own, whether she was there or not. She didn’t care to examine the strange sort of feeling that gave her, deep inside.

“How could it?” she asked lightly. “When the warden is still here?”

He let out a low sort of laugh at that, she detested herself at once, because there was no pretending that laugh didn’t affect her. She told herself it was another affront, but that was a lie. That was not at all the way the sound of it felt as it danced over her and through her.

But then, all of it felt odd. Sitting there, eating , felt like an unbearable intimacy.

Everything was inside out with this man. He had watched her give birth. She was married to him. Yet they had never so much as kissed. They had never touched .

They shared a daughter, but nothing else.

And yet she sat there as if they were, at the very least, friends of some sort. She told him about the successful weaning process she had just gone through with Natalia. She told him how she felt both liberated and nostalgic at this indication that their child was already growing up.

What astounded her more was that he was easy to talk to.

Shockingly so—when they were discussing her.

“I thought I read that you came from some pretty humble beginnings,” she said when the first and second courses had been taken away. Anax was playing with the potent, dark coffee it somehow did not surprise her he favored after a meal. Constance felt overexposed, having talked too much about weaning to a man who was, factually, the father of the child in question.

But it had still felt a bit shocking to be discussing her breasts , essentially, with...some man.

And she didn’t think she’d read that about his childhood. She knew she had.

“That is a very sanitized way to describe it,” Anax said, after she’d started to wonder if he would reply at all. He did not look at her. It was as if he suddenly found his coffee fascinating. “I come from a long line of regrettable human beings who made their lives a misery, and made certain to pass that misery on to everyone in their orbit. This misery was always coupled with various addictions, very little money, and vanishingly small goodwill. So yes, I suppose you could call that humble .”

That was supposed to shame her into ending the conversation, she thought. Or that line of inquiry, anyway, but it didn’t. “I suppose we were poor,” Constance said, almost musingly. “But no one ever called it that. And everyone around us seemed to be in the same state. So comparatively speaking, we always seemed fine.” She considered. “My parents were both teachers. When I was little, we lived in my grandparents’ furnished basement, which I thought was absolutely delightful. We all played games together, to see who could cut the most coupons and have the most money saved at the end of the week. When my grandfather died, he left the house to my father and the new game we played was to see how quickly we could pay the rest of the mortgage down. I never thought of these things as stuff poor people did. It was just what we did.”

“What you are describing would have been a dream come true for me,” Anax told her, in that same low voice, though he raised his gaze to hers. And she found herself somehow unable to move. Scarcely able to breathe. “My father was usually drunk. We preferred it if he was paralytic. That way we could pour him into bed and there would be significantly less violence. But we were rarely so lucky. My mother didn’t make up games to play, she made do. It was a blessing when the old man died, in a gutter, as had always been his fate.”

Constance studied him, not sure why that look on his face didn’t warn her off the way it would any wise woman, surely. Instead, it made something inside her chest feel...softer. It was the way his eyes had gone from smoke to steel. It was the set to his jaw.

It was how hard she found it to breathe, still.

“My parents died when I was sixteen,” she said quietly, because breathing seemed an indulgence. While telling him her story seemed...imperative. It occurred to her that she hadn’t told anyone this story before, because where she came from everyone already knew. Somehow that made it both more difficult to breathe and more important that she speak. Her belly trembled from the force of both. “They were driving home from a weekend in Iowa City. They liked to go every now and again. Listen to some lectures, see some art, meet up with some friends. They both grew up in and around Halburg and knew each other, but didn’t start dating until college. And it’s a bit of a drive home, but they’d done it a million times before. Even in the snow. You have to come to terms with driving in the snow or you don’t go anywhere all winter.” It mattered that he was listening intently. That he did not interrupt, or even look away. “But that night there was a storm. It cropped up quickly and then turned into ground blizzards. They must have gotten disoriented. It would have been zero visibility.” And now she could breathe, but it wasn’t easier. She blew a breath out, hard, but she kept going. “They went off the side of the highway, into a ditch, and crashed into a tree. We didn’t know until the next day.”

“Did you mourn them?” he asked, something dark and electric in the question. In his gaze.

“I mourn them every day.” She had no idea why she was whispering. “They were good, solid people. They deserved more time. I wish they’d had it.”

“No one mourned my father,” Anax said in that same darkly stirring way, as if he was as much a part of the night as the stars, the faint breeze. “If anything, people wondered why it had taken so long for him to meet the grim end he had always been courting.”

Constance shook her head, not sure why it felt as if she was under some kind of spell, here. She picked at her plate, not certain when a sweet slice of baklava had appeared before her, oozing with honey.

“Is that why you think that all of this, all this excess, is better than everything else?” She ran her finger along the edge of the pastry, and then put it to her lips, not thinking twice about it.

Until she looked at Anax again and found him watching the movement with a certain hooded intensity.

Constance felt...stunned.

She felt it rebound through her, sharp and hot and unmistakable.

She felt herself flush from head to toe, and couldn’t pretend for one moment it was hormones. Or a sudden fever.

And she curled up the finger she’d licked into a fist and hid it in her lap.

“Do I think that I am better than a monster?” Anax laughed, though the sound was...raw. A rough touch that did not help the heat swamping her. “I celebrate this difference. Every day.”

“I suppose it makes sense that you think that what your daughter really needs are all these things .” Constance waved her free hand around at the immensity of it all. The house that went on and on and on. The high ceilings. The art, the chic décor that she was afraid to sit on, the staff and their nearly unseen hospitality. “You do know, don’t you, that it’s not the trappings of things that matter?”

Anax stared at her for a long moment and she thought she saw his nostrils flare, just slightly. She became aware of the tension in his jaw and the muscle that flexed there, making him even more attractive. He picked up the small coffee before him, and tossed it back. And then it was his turn to stand up from the table with what looked to her a lot like his own dollop of melodrama.

“How would you know?” he asked in a certain silken tone that felt like an insult no matter how smooth it was. Or maybe it was how he looked down at her, as if pointing out their difference in station.

“How would I...?” Constance blinked and ordered herself to concentrate. “How would I know what matters?”

“How would you know whether trappings such as these make a difference or not? As you have been at such pains to tell me, your life has been happy, yet humble. I believe I am meant to take from this that you grew up in some idyllic state of being, merrily suspended in cornfields, taught the true meaning of things by the very earth below you and the sky above. Is that not so?”

His laugh was darker now, and she thought he knew full well that it danced all the way down her spine, then wrapped around to send heat spooling into the most fascinating places in front.

And he wasn’t done. “This is nonsense. A farm is a farm, koritsi . A village is a village. There is no moral value assigned to either, there are only the banal home and hearth fantasies of those who live in them. And that is the difference, you see.”

She had to tilt her head back to stare all the way up the length of him, and was aware that he wanted that. He wanted her to have to gaze so far above herself, at all his offhanded elegance and manicured perfection that should have made him look soft—but he was too masculine for that. There was too much belligerence stamped raw and unmistakable into all the rangy lines of his body.

And she still couldn’t manage a decent breath. “The difference between what?” she dared to ask.

Anax’s mouth curved in that way he had that was not a smile. It was nothing so soft or yielding. “The difference between your farmland, your cornfields, your microscopic village that no one has ever heard of, and the kind of neighborhoods that I called home. We did not fantasize, Constance. That was dangerous. And futile. We focused on making it through one day, then the next. No future, no past, no convenient virtue.” He leaned in, and Constance felt her heart thump in her chest. Like a sledgehammer. She could feel the reverberations in her ears. “And yes, I think my daughter is safer here, away from all of that.”

Then he left her there, and it was between Constance and the stars, how long it took to remember how to breathe again.

She thought about that conversation a lot more than she liked as the days slipped by. She found she truly loved the freedom of no longer breastfeeding, but also mourned the loss of that connection to Natalia. And despite her intention to freeze Maria out, it was impossible to stay furious in the face of all that relentless cheer.

Besides, she had no one else.

“I want to learn how to swim,” she told the other woman one morning. “It seems prudent to learn how. Since we’re on an island.”

“And, of course,” Maria said placidly, though there was a gleam in her gaze, “who knows? You might have to swim away from here one day.”

“You never know,” Constance agreed merrily.

But Maria began to give her lessons, every morning. They moved from one pool to another. Some were saltwater, some fresh. Some were heated, some cold. In every one of them, she learned to put her face in the water. To blow bubbles. To float.

Slowly, slowly, she learned to swim.

As November chugged along, Constance decided that the most diabolical part of this imprisonment was how easy it was to acclimate to it. It was sunny and warm during the day and there was a chill in the air at night, and it felt heavenly. Nothing at all like Iowa’s slide into the dark season. And maybe, if she had been a different sort of person—even the person she’d been right after she’d had Natalia—she might have simply soaked it all in.

But she’d already had a break from her usual routine. She hadn’t managed to restore her position at the nursery school, but she’d been making headway, and she’d started working at a day care in town in the meantime because she didn’t like staying home.

She didn’t like this idle life. It made her feel depressed.

“There are extensive libraries,” Anax told her in repressive tones at dinner one night when she dared say so. They had moved inside to a room with art on the walls and a glass ceiling that brought the weather in. It was a stormy night outside, nearly December, and the staff had gone all around lighting fireplaces and candles so that everything glowed and very nearly felt festive. “There is no limit to how you might improve yourself.”

Constance looked at him narrowly. She had taken it as a particular badge of honor to wear only the same Walmart sweatshirt and cargo pants when she saw him. No matter what else she might wear during the day when he was not around, the moment she heard that helicopter coming in for its landing, she changed back into the most trailer-park version of herself she could manage.

She’d tried to tell herself she didn’t know why she felt this compulsion.

But that was a lie.

The truth was that she was Dorothy Jones’s granddaughter. If necessary, she, too, could live on spite alone for years. And Anax might not admit it, but she could see that her uniform bothered him. She took a distinct pleasure in that shudder he managed to repress less and less every time he caught sight of her.

That shudder ensured that she would never stop her own pointless little protest.

In keeping with the Walmart outfit and synthetic fabrics that she was sure appalled him to even share space with, she made certain to keep her hair in the same messy knot on the top of her head. As if to suggest she never washed it.

She told herself it was all part and parcel of the same resistance.

But at moments like this, sitting at another intimate dinner with this man who she would have sworn she did not miss—but raced to see when he came back each evening—she wondered. Because her whole body was lit up from the inside out, as if she was one of those fireplaces the staff had lit for them tonight.

She couldn’t pretend it had something to do with his role as a father. That was its own sort of heat and tenderness, but this was different.

This was the flush that never went away.

This was an ache inside her body that woke her in the night.

These were the strings she never managed to untangle, forever wrapped too tight all around her.

If she was honest with herself, she felt that way in his presence... a lot.

It didn’t matter how many times she sternly told herself that she did not wish to be seen as a woman, not by him. She was a woman. And she suspected there was a huge part of her that, tragically, wanted him to see her as a woman anyway.

That wanted Anax, specifically, to see her that way.

But Constance didn’t want to have to dress to his standard for him to notice her.

There was a part of her, and, oh, how it shamed her, that wanted her husband to fall head over heels in love with the woman he’d seen in two costumes in Iowa and only this uniform here.

She knew it was delusional. Especially since, having nothing else to do, she spent a large quantity of time researching the man on the internet. She knew exactly what kind of woman he found beautiful and it certainly wasn’t the image she deliberately presented to him.

It wouldn’t be her even if she was dressed in her best, but as she never achieved that standard nor cared to, she could pretend.

And that truth shamed her so deeply it seared into her like a scar.

Or maybe that was simply his effect on her.

Tonight Constance told herself that she didn’t want him to see her as anything. She was wearing these things as armor, to make certain she would never lower herself to wanting the likes of him.

Especially when he spoke of her improvement as if that was something she should want above all else. As if that was something she sorely needed. She opened her mouth to announce that she would never read another book again as long as she lived, but caught herself just in time. If she said something like that she would feel honor bound to do it, and there was such a thing as cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

“And what improvements do you think I should undertake?” she asked instead, looking at him without bothering to smooth out the expression on her face.

“We are all of us human, are we not?” Anax seemed unduly restless tonight and was not sitting in his seat. He was prowling around the dining room, glaring at the portraits on the wall. “Surely there is no one who could not use as many improvements as possible.”

“What of you, then? In which areas do you think you need improvement?”

And maybe it was the storm outside, rattling at the windows. Maybe it was all those lit-up parts inside of her, blazing with that heat she didn’t want to feel. Maybe he knew anyway, because he was the kind of man who knew such things . She didn’t have to know them herself to understand that.

But when he turned to look at her there was something on his face, something stark that she didn’t know had a name.

Does it need a name? whispered something inside her. Or do you worry you already know what you would call it?

And the starkness of it made her eyes felt damp with an emotion that felt almost too hot, too heavy, to bear. His eyes seemed darker. It did not seem as if there was a table and half a room between them. It seemed as if they were sharing one breath, as if all of these intimacies over the past months were embroidered into them, threaded through bone and flesh.

As if that storm beating down above was in both of them, too.

As if she’d been fooling herself all this time, pretending she couldn’t see it—

But the door opened then, and Maria came in. She was carrying Natalia, who wailed when she saw her mother and held out her small, chubby arms.

“She had a bad dream,” Maria said, apologetically, looking up at the glass ceiling to suggest the storm was the culprit. “And she would not settle. I’m sorry to interrupt your evening.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Constance said, taking the sweet weight of her daughter in her arms. “Natalia is never an interruption.”

She glanced at her husband while she said that and saw that odd, arrested expression on his face.

But it wasn’t until later, after she carried Natalia back to the nursery, aware that he followed her. After she put the little girl down and sang to her, with a hand on her belly to keep her warm. After she kept going until the baby fell asleep.

It wasn’t until then that she found herself standing in a dark hallway with Anax, as if they were still in that same, stark moment.

“You never answered the question,” she said, and in her head, she wanted that to sound businesslike. Brusque and to the point.

But they were standing outside their daughter’s nursery. It was later now, and this part of the house was not so gleaming or bright. There was only the two of them and too many shadows.

And that heat embroidered into everything.

Her eyes adjusted just enough so that she could see that gray gleam of his gaze.

“What question?” Anax asked and his voice, too, was altered. Lower. Like a rough scrape along the surface of her skin.

She told herself that was the cold outside, the storm that was still rolling over the island. “How would you improve yourself if you could?”

Somewhere in the distance, she could hear the wind outside. But deep inside her, she could hear her own heartbeat, loud and insistent and drowning out almost everything else.

He leaned forward, and his hand moved, and she had the most absurd notion—

As if the purpose of it all was to lower his face so they were at eye level—

Once again, she couldn’t breathe. Her heart stopped, then slammed back into her ribs. Because she thought, she knew, she wanted —

That gaze of his dropped to her mouth, and everything in her went still. Then burst into flame once more when he dragged that gaze back up to hers.

“What I need to remember,” he said, very quietly, almost achingly, “is that I’m going to need to stop fighting monsters who aren’t in the room.”

She thought he leaned forward.

He did, she was sure of it. Her eyes felt weighted and heavy, and against her will, they fluttered shut.

When she opened them again, he was gone.

But Constance was not the same.

Because she’d made the very perilous mistake of desperately wanting her husband—the man who’d only wanted their daughter, never her.

And, worse, showing him.