Chapter Three #2
It was a perfectly serviceable and unobjectionable corset, she’d thought when she’d put it on this morning, for all that it was connected to garters to hold up her stockings—but now it all seemed risqué.
She could feel when he got to her waist, because there was a faint breeze in that tiny space between the bottom of the corset and the top of her behind that he could likely see too much of, given that she was wearing a thong—
“That should do it,” he said, as if they were doing nothing more than arranging a few objects on a display somewhere. A scientific display that required no heat or any of these wild, rollercoaster feelings.
Aikaterini turned around carefully, feeling embarrassed and something far more electric. But she made sure to keep her dress pressed tight to the front of her as if she thought he might leap on her if she let it slip.
She opened her mouth to shout at him, perhaps. Or order him to hide his eyes, and both of those things would only embarrass her more, she knew—
But it wasn’t necessary. Because as soon as she turned, he was already moving toward the windows and standing there so he could look out on the party that was still going on down below.
And Aikaterini didn’t know why her overwhelming feeling in response to that was not relief, the way it should have been. What she mostly felt instead was a kind of dismay that he would not watch her change the way she had watched him.
“What is the matter with you?” she breathed out loud, almost without making a sound.
She felt dull and heavy-headed—what she’d been told drunk felt like—but she forced herself to move all the same, because the alternative was to stand here half naked and mortify herself.
She went over to the foot of the bed and scooped up the bundle of clothing that had been left for her, pathetically relieved to find that there was nothing skimpy or particularly alluring in the selection.
They had left her a change of undergarments, her own pair of cozy lounging pants, and a matching long-sleeved top.
And if she had to break out of her own corset, that was what she would do. Because she would not be asking Kyriakos to get that close to her ever again.
Happily, none of those things were necessary. She unhooked the corset and found herself scrabbling around to cover herself back up—
But he didn’t turn around or indicate in the slightest that he even knew she was changing her clothes.
Yet those slight moments of nudity while breathing the same air as he did, right here in the same room—
Aikaterini felt almost as if she might break out into a sob.
She would never know how she managed to keep it inside, but she did.
But she felt as if she had fought a great war when she went and sank down on one of the couches near the fireplace.
And she thought that perhaps he was paying a little more attention to her than he seemed to be, because he turned then. Without saying a word, he crossed back over to that cart that the staff had left for them and pulled out the plates of food that waited within.
He carried them over and set them on the table between the couches. Aikaterini opened up her mouth to tell him that she wasn’t hungry, but stopped.
As it turned out, now that she thought about it, she was ravenous. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten, in fact.
Kyriakos kept bringing plates over until the table was covered.
There was lamb with orzo, grilled meats, dolmades, and spanakopita.
There were platters of fresh bread, olives, and pots of tzatziki and other savory dips and spreads.
There were bowls of every salad possible.
There were cheeses, stuffed mushrooms, and dishes fragrant with lemon and oregano.
There were piles of sugared almonds and baklava thick with honey.
Aikaterini could not have held herself back if her life depended on it. And it seemed that Kyriakos was similarly hungry.
The two of them sat there then, eating together. The party carried on outside—there were actual fireworks now—but here inside this bedchamber, it was quiet. Aikaterini found the shared silence to be almost unbearably intimate.
They were married already. She wasn’t sure that they’d ever sat about like this, so informally. All of their meetings had been arranged under the umbrella of certain protocols, even if Kyriakos delighted in breaking them.
Tonight they were both in casual clothes, sitting together in a silence she wanted to call hostile, but it wasn’t. It was something like companionable, and even as she thought that, she also thought that she ought to do something about it. That surely it was some kind of betrayal of Venediktos.
But she was too hungry. She didn’t have it in her to stop.
“Have you given any thought to where we should take our honeymoon?” he asked some while later when they were both sitting back on their respective couches and Aikaterini, for one, felt shockingly replete. She might have said content, under different circumstances.
Though the word honeymoon was not exactly soothing. She pulled her feet up beneath her on the couch and regarded him over the top of her knees.
“I wonder if we ought to forego the honeymoon,” she said after a moment’s consideration. “I think it’s more important to show the nation that we’re a united front. That our marriage really does mean that we are unified in every possible way.”
She braced herself for an argument—or in their case, as they had never truly argued, a round of his cutting remarks—but he only shrugged.
“As you wish,” Kyriakos said. “We can revisit the idea of a honeymoon in a few months once we see what sort of optics there are.”
She nodded sagely at that and couldn’t understand why it was that it almost felt as if…he’d hurt her feelings. That maybe there was some part of her that had wanted him to insist upon the month-long honeymoon that she and Venediktos had taken.
Though she suspected that if they did take one, it would be very different from her first. It was the way Kyriakos seemed to simmer even as he sat there. She could tell that he was truly relaxed, and even so, his intensity was unmatched.
And now she felt it inside of her. She felt it in that dangerous spiral from the tongue that had tasted his all the way down to the very lowest part of her belly. And every time she looked at him, she thought of that hot, searching mouth on hers, and that spiral seemed to hum.
“This is the first marriage of its kind in a long time.” Kyriakos nodded in her direction. “I’m aware that you know that. I’ve been thinking about how best to position it on the modern stage.”
“I’m sorry,” she said with a short laugh. “I don’t think I realized how dedicated you were to the optics of it all.” When he turned his head to look at her, his brow high, it was her turn to shrug. “You have certainly never seemed overly interested in optics before, have you?”