Chapter Eight
CHAPTER EIGHT
A NAX ’ S HARD MOUTH descended upon hers, claimed it as if they had kissed a thousand times before, and everything changed.
Just like that.
Constance forgot...everything.
Where she was. What they were meant to be doing. The fact they were not in private, not even out here in the dark with only glass between them and the rest of the ballroom.
She forgot all of those things in a deep, hot rush, while at the same time there was a deep shock of what she understood at once was recognition.
A deep, intense, all-encompassing understanding of not only who this man was to her, but the responses to him she’d been pretending she didn’t understand for almost a year now.
He held her in his arms, his mouth on hers, and it was as if she was falling. Soaring. Tumbling head over heels, back through time, as one image after the next scrolled through her mind.
She had seen him the moment he’d walked into the church in Halburg. She’d seen him, she’d known , and then her conscious mind had rejected what the rest of her body felt.
With the same intense throb of deep recognition.
Almost as if she had known who he was, there and then. Before he’d even come to speak to her.
As if somehow, cosmically, the baby inside of her had recognized its own father.
Or maybe it was simply that she had understood that for the first time in all her life, she comprehended precisely what her body was for.
Even ten months pregnant and about to give birth.
Even then, while she’d worked so hard to pretend all of those sensations were simply part of what it was to be so heavily pregnant, something deep within her had known otherwise.
His mouth shifted on hers, she was dimly aware of the change in the background noise on the other side of the glass doors, but not enough to stop. Not enough to keep herself from tentatively opening her mouth beneath his and accepting him into her mouth.
It felt like some kind of explosion. It felt messy and perfect. It felt like everything she’d ever wanted yet had never imagined she would feel.
Then he angled his chin, took the kiss deeper, and once again hurled her back into her memories.
The actual moment of giving birth. Of looking down the length of her own body, to see Natalia—tiny, alien and hers .
They had laid her daughter next to her heart and she had felt scraped raw, as if the process of labor was not simply to bring this perfect new human into the world, but to expand her from the inside out. To make it possible to contain all the love she felt, complicated and messy and almost as painful as the labor pains themselves.
Constance had looked up from that brutal, beautiful moment and he had been there. Waiting. Watching.
With a look of such extraordinary intensity on his face that she had not allowed herself to think of it since. It was too much. It was naked and unbearable.
It shook her, deep.
And that, too, was its own kind of recognition.
There on a balcony outside the ball, he pulled back. And once again, that look on his face was extraordinary. Impossible.
Once again, she felt as if his kiss was less of a surprise and more of an awakening—to a particular kind of daylight that had been pouring all around her all this time.
And now, at last, she could see it.
She wondered if he could see it, too.
Anax stared at her for what felt like a lifetime. Then he pulled her back inside and into the embrace of all that heat and conversation and music. He swept her out into the dancing once more, swirling them around and around, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to stop in the middle of a waltz to kiss his wife in the dark.
Constance looked over toward the balcony and realized that it was more lit up out there than she’d noticed. And that it was likely everyone here had seen that kiss. Surely that was something she ought to have been embarrassed about—
But she couldn’t quite get there.
Everything inside her was sensation and need, wrapped all around each other with little barbs that sunk deep and confirmed for her that this had been what she’d wanted from him all along.
Without even knowing it. Not on the surface, anyway.
“If you keep looking at me like that,” he said then, in a deep, rumbling sort of way that she could feel beneath her hands even as she heard it with her ears, “everyone in this ballroom will think that my wife is a debauched libertine who thinks of nothing at all but taking me to her bed.”
She understood something then, in another burst of clarity that she thought might have something to do with the fact she could still taste him on her lips. The Constance she had been before she’d gone down this road, before she’d decided to have a baby without waiting around for the right man the way everyone told her she should, was not the Constance she was now. The Constance who had soldiered on in the face of the sniffs and the raised eyebrows in town. The Constance who had lived the past year with this man in her house, who had spent many a sleepless hour telling herself that anything she felt about the situation was hormones, nothing more.
All of those versions of her made this version of her possible, but she wasn’t them any longer. She was what they’d made her.
So she turned her head to look at him. She held his gaze, lifting one shoulder and then delicately lowering it again. “They would be correct.”
And she had the very great pleasure of watching him... ignite.
It started somewhere in the backs of his eyes, burst into flame, and then took him over.
“Koritsi,” he said, but it was like a growl.
And before she knew what was happening, he was taking her by the hand and tugging her through the ballroom once again. This time in the opposite direction. She saw him nod curtly to his sister, standing near a grand pillar in a knot of very well-to-do-looking people with the security chief at her side.
A car pulled up in front of them as he led her outside. And Constance did not question how it was that everything in this man’s life seemed to work like clockwork, as if the earth on its axis rotated purely at his command.
Tonight, she would believe it.
And though she was sure it would shock her staid and quiet ancestors, she simply allowed herself to be swept up in all of this well-oiled wealth and consequence. She crawled into the back seat and sat there as if she was born to it, still buzzing from before. Everywhere he touched her she could feel it, like heat.
And her mouth was like a naked flame, hungry for more.
She heard him say something in Greek to his driver, then he was sliding in behind her. Sharing the back seat with her, so big and so male that he seemed to claim the better part of it, and it wasn’t until he closed the door behind him that she noticed the car had a privacy screen. And it was engaged.
And that meant that there was no reason on earth that she should resist it when Anax pulled her onto his lap.
No nod toward propriety necessary. No need to concern herself with what anyone might see or say. There was no one around to gossip about it later.
There was only the feel of his hard body beneath her. And then, gloriously, his mouth on hers once more.
He immediately made it clear that what had passed between them in that ballroom had been an exercise of holding back. Of complete restraint.
Because this kiss consumed her whole.
His hands moved to frame her face between his palms and he took control, completely.
And then he set about teaching her... Everything.
Everything she didn’t know about the ways that the word kiss was entirely too small, too banal, to encompass what his mouth could do to hers.
Everything about how to kiss him back until she made him groan, too.
Everything that built the fire higher, that made her ache, until she found herself squirming there on his lap because she couldn’t get close enough. Because she wanted to... Do things with this body of hers that felt brand-new in his arms.
“Careful,” he murmured. “Or we will give my driver quite a surprise.”
She had no idea what he meant by that, but she could feel the hardest part of him between them, she found herself...fascinated.
Constance knew what it was when a man grew hard. She’d read about it. She lived in the same world as everyone else, even in her quiet life in Halburg, thank you. She’d watched enough television and film to fill in the blanks. But she had never understood how a thing that happened to him would feel inside of her . She had never understood that her own body could feel so jittery and liquid, hot and cold at once, simply because he was so unrepentantly hard.
Or that all of it was wonderful.
How amazing, she found herself thinking, that people are wandering around the world feeling like this all the time, and I never knew.
He muttered a curse against her lips, and then he was lifting her up, settling her beside him, and looking at her in a way that she could only describe as baleful.
And yet her response to that was to feel inordinately proud of herself.
“You will make me disgrace myself,” he said, as if he was offering an explanation.
“I can tell that that’s meant to chastise me,” she said, somewhat surprised that she could actually form words after... all that . “But I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She watched as a certain sort of consideration moved over his face. A dawning kind of awareness.
“You are truly untouched, then,” he said, but there was a note of something like awe in his voice, and as embarrassing as it was to be thirty years of age and untouched, of all things, she didn’t mind it when he looked at her like that.
She wouldn’t mind anything, as long as he looked at her like that.
“As of before this evening?” She nodded. “But I am...slightly more touched now, obviously.”
That seemed to worry him, almost. He frowned. Something about that fire in his gaze seemed to shift.
She wanted to track that. She really did. But she wanted that fire, just the way it was. So she reached out a hand and smoothed it over one rock-hard thigh, then trailed her fingers along the seam of his trousers, right there where she could see the proof of all of this.
And he let out a sound as if she had punched him in the gut.
“Maybe,” she whispered, “I can touch you, too?”
And the noise he made then was indescribable. Deep and low and guttural, and then his mouth was on hers again, and somehow it was even better. Even wilder.
The car came to a stop and she hardly noticed until he tore himself away from her, muttering darkly beneath his breath. So that all she caught were little scraps of Greek words she didn’t know.
She would know Greek, she told herself then. Her daughter was going to learn it and she would learn it right along with Natalia, so one day she would know everything he said, not just half.
But she couldn’t allow herself to think too much about language classes, because he was leading her out of the car and then into a strange building through what appeared to be some kind of private entrance. Then she was in a gleaming lobby, and wondered if they were in a nose-bleedingly fancy hotel. He herded her into an elevator, pressed the single button available, and then held her with a certain ferocity—and at a deliberate distance—as the elevator rose.
It felt the way she already did inside.
And then the sleek doors slid open, delivering them directly into the living room of an apartment that, at first, she thought was entirely made of glass. She could see Athens from all sides. She could see the Acropolis in the distance, gleaming atop its ancient rock in the night. Everywhere she turned there were more lights, and shadows that made her want to fly low over this age-old city to explore it. To relearn those old myths she’d pored over as a child, but from the inside out this time.
When she’d turned around in a full circle, she found Anax shrugging out of his jacket and tossing it to the side. Toward what she belatedly realized was some sort of piece of relentlessly modern furniture.
And then he was coming toward her once more.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“It is my flat, of course. What else would it be?”
“Some dramatic hotel. Open only to people like you, with secret entrances and private elevators and all this glass .”
“Koritsi,” he murmured as he stopped before her. “There is no one like me. Allow me to demonstrate.”
Then he swept her up into his arms. And he kissed her again, deep and stern, and for a moment she couldn’t tell if she was simply dizzy from the glory of it all—but then she understood that he was carrying her through this apartment made of glass, turning away from the windows at the last moment to lead her down a hallway, gleaming white and spare, until she found herself set down in a sprawling, rambling bedroom that was glass, still more glass, and chrome. With accents of the deepest onyx.
And there was something about all of that, anesthetized and pristine, that caught at her.
But she couldn’t follow the thought because Anax was before her. And there was a look on his face that made her heart lurch. Because it was clear that for all these moments of recognition that she had ignored, for all the times she had felt she knew him better than she should, there was this part of him that she didn’t know at all.
It thrilled her.
“All this time,” she managed to say. “This whole long year, and I never realized...”
He stilled, even while that look on his face became starker, more intense. More sensual, something in her whispered, when that should not have been possible.
“I look forward to your visits,” she confessed in a rush. “I even started missing you when you weren’t there. Even now, when I should hate you for taking me away from everything I’ve ever known, I spend my days listening for that helicopter to land so I know you’re coming. So I can pretend that I’m looking forward to showing you how little I care.”
And he was so close, standing there in front of her in a darkened room with the lights of the city gleaming in. So she reached over, a daring act that felt like swinging on a trapeze or running full tilt along a high wire, and slid her hands onto his chest.
She felt something like a shock at the point of contact and pulled her palms back, swallowing the gasp that was surprised from between her lips. When she looked up, he was still gazing down at her in that same way, dark and hot and...encouraging.
That part felt like a balm...or perhaps more heat.
Either way, Constance put her hands back onto that hard, hot wall that was his chest. She cleared her throat.
And then she tipped her head back up to look at him again. “I wanted you the moment I saw you,” she told him, like another confession. Or perhaps like a vow. “You walked in and I thought, There he is . And I’ve spent a long time pretending I didn’t know what that meant. Maybe I didn’t. Until tonight.” And she wasn’t sure she could say the last part. But the words were on her tongue and he did not look away, and her mouth tasted of him anyway. So she dared. “But now, Anax, I very much want to know everything.”
“Then your wish will be my command, my darling wife,” he gritted out, and the roughness of his voice made her skin seem to prickle with awareness.
She felt everything between them burst to life, alight and wild with flame. The next breath she took seemed to shake all the way in and then more on the way out. And some part of her wanted to careen off into that feeling. She wanted him to lift her up, toss her on the bed, and throw himself down beside her—
But what he did was far more devastating.
He reached over and ran his thumb over her lips, as if memorizing the shape. Then he slid his fingers back, deep into her hair. He kept on until the whole mess of it fell down around her and she could smell the fragrance that was caught in the heavy strands, flowers and musk.
His gaze dropped to her dress and his face took on a look of a kind of sensual concentration that didn’t help her shivery responses any. But the fact they got worse felt even better, somehow.
He turned her around, his hands on her body and not a single word spoken, so that she was facing that great window before her. It felt as if, with one step, she could free-fall out over the city and soar down so she was one more gleaming old ruin, a song sung on the wind, a goddess in need of only this one man to worship her.
And slowly, almost as if he was timing it to her shaky breaths, he began to unfasten the back of her gown. And she heard his own deep humming sound, something deeply male and approving, when he finished and it pooled at her feet.
He turned her back to him. And now she was near enough to panting, because she was only wearing a bustier beneath and pair of highly impractical panties that she had thought were silly when she’d put them on.
Now she thought they were magic.
So did he. She could tell.
And Anax began to talk, then. Only occasionally in English.
His voice was like another touch, dancing over her skin, making her senses feel heightened. Making her aware . Making her moan and shiver and sigh. Because he took his time, unwrapping that last bit of her. He treated her like a precious gift for his mouth and his hands, and lit his way, one fire into the next.
His voice moved over her, too, using words she didn’t know...but could feel in every part of her he touched.
She didn’t have to know what he was saying to understand that he was worshipping her body, claiming it, exalting it. She didn’t have to speak Greek to comprehend his deep male approval.
She gloried in it.
And when he was done he had tasted almost every part of her body, and stripped her completely naked.
It was only then that he lifted her and carried her over to the bed. He spread her out there and looked down upon her as if he had never seen anything so beautiful.
In that moment, Constance believed it.
He stripped his own clothes from his body, never seeming to take his eyes from her. And as he unwrapped his own male beauty for her to stare upon, it was as if more and more connections she’d never understood became clear to her. Why men were shaped the way they were. Why there was something in her that deeply celebrated the fact that his chest, for all that was hard-packed lean muscle, was also covered in a smattering of dark hair that she could not wait to put her hands on. To bury her face in.
She wanted to feel him, to breathe in his scent, to lose herself in his heat. She wanted to taste him, everywhere. She wanted to follow that hair-roughened arrow of muscle to its logical conclusion, down the length of his body to where the boldest part of him stood there, proudly, as if waiting for her attention.
But before she could follow that thought, as if he read her mind, he shifted forward onto the bed. Anax crawled between her legs so that her knees seemed to hook themselves on his broad shoulders, and that easily, she was wide open before him.
“I have been wanting to taste you forever,” he growled.
And then he did.
For a time, then, Constance lost herself entirely.
There was no thought, no analysis, no contemplation of any kind.
There was only his mouth on that tender part of her, eating her alive. There was only the way he was looking into her, indulging himself in that most private part of her as if she was the sweetest dessert he’d ever tasted.
It seemed to take an eternity—and no time at all—before she was arching up against him, a thunderstorm pounding into her and then exploding back out, so that she could do nothing at all but let it take her. Until it was tossing her from one storm to the next.
Until she was nothing at all but heat and glory.
“ Koritsi , you are perfect,” he was murmuring, as he climbed up the length of her body, kissing her and tasting her.
He paused at her navel, and again at one breast. Then the next. Tasting them, weighing them, making her nipples ache so hard they pointed their way toward him. As if her own body was begging for something she hadn’t imagined could possibly be so intense, so sensual, and have nothing at all to do with the way she’d been using those same breasts for the last ten months.
She wanted to tell him that bodies were amazing and his was even more so. But he was moving, until he could kiss her once more—deep and hard and intensely. Until she could taste herself, and him, and her body felt wild all around her.
And then, at last, she could feel him. The broad head of that silken, hot part of him, nudged against the sensitized flesh he had just tasted so thoroughly.
Even the feel of it made her light up all over again, and he was going so slowly.
She tried to move her hips toward him, but he laughed and adjusted the way he held her, so he controlled the way he eased toward her, one little bit at a time.
Constance opened her eyes to find him watching her, and then they were both there, suspended in that intensity. He slid inside her so carefully, so smoothly, both of them braced—together—for a pain that didn’t come.
And he kept going.
Deeper and deeper, filling her up and making her body adjust to fit him. Her heart was pounding. Her breath was coming too fast. She found herself curling her hands into fists at his chest and then she was following the urge to lift herself up and press her face between the flat planes of his pectoral muscles, because she could smell him there. Taste him.
Because it felt right, and good, and hers.
Everything about him felt like hers, even this. Maybe especially this.
She felt him nudge the very deepest part of her. They both were still, for a moment. A breath.
He called her that name again. Koritsi .
If she could have answered him, if she could have spoken, she would have.
But then he began to move. And once again, it was as if everything she thought she knew shattered apart, then came back, different. Better.
Because with every stroke, Constance finally understood.
Who he was to her. What she felt for him.
What this was.
Who she was.
None of it was verbal. None of it managed to come out as words.
There was only the way she raised her hips to meet his. There was only this old, deep knowledge within her, soaring up inside her as if her body had always known exactly what to do with this man.
The same way it had known what to do once before, on a primitive level.
This felt a whole lot better. She lost herself in the fire, the slick heat and the growing storm. But this time, all of that thunder and all of that rain, roared in both of them.
He told her to follow him, but she was already there, and together they shook apart.
Again and again, careening out there in the universe, dancing through the stars as if they had been made for this.
As if they had been waiting their whole lives, all that stardust trapped in bone, to make it back out to this place where they could finally be free.
It was hard to come back down.
It was hard to accept that she had to go back into her own body, separate from his.
It felt too much like grief.
But he was there beside her, then turned over onto one side so he could stroke his way down the length of her cheek, then back again.
“Again,” Anax murmured. “How can I want you again, already?”
“And somehow it is not soon enough,” she whispered back.
His laugh was dark, thrilling.
It was only the beginning.
And by the end of that night, by the time the glorious dawn crept over the city on the other side of the windows, Constance felt more like stardust and less like herself than she ever had before in all her life.
She thought that it made sense now. That they could fly if they liked, just like this. Whenever they pleased.
That it was all going to work out after all.
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.