Page 50 of Husband for the Holidays

The alarm bells continued clanging inside him. He was sexually satisfied, yes, but there was a greedier beast in him that wasn’t yet calm. He had told himself he was marrying her to ease his sense of obligation to Ilias and expose Antoine, but he was marrying Eloise because he wanted to keep her in his life and protect her. He wanted to tend her like a fire, to keep her glowing bright.

He wanted to get her pregnant, apparently, because they’d had sex without protection. He should damned well have thought that through more carefully, but in his most primal of lizard brains, he wanted to have sex again and again until he knew they were bound inextricably by a child. Children.

He couldn’t even fathom what that would look like. But he wanted it. Which made it yet another thing he was deeply wary of reaching for.

With a sensuous little sound, she rolled herself half atop him and set her chin on her hand. Her breasts flattened against his ribs and her heavy eyelids blinked as though she were waking from a spell. Her lips were soft and still pouted from their kisses. Her sigh was one of supreme contentment.

“If I run a bath, will you join me?”

Retreat, he told himself.

He ought to offer to run it in her room and encourage her to sleep in her own bed, but his finger swept her hair off her cheek and tucked it behind her ear.

“I’ll bring the wine.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

NEMOWENTTOAthens to spend Christmas with his family, but Eloise and Konstantin weren’t alone on Christmas Eve. Filomena asked if her children could come caroling. She had two boys and a girl and the older two each brought a friend.

Eloise eagerly welcomed them into the house and accompanied them on the piano, singing along with great enjoyment. She had prepared little bags of sweets that she handed out when they finished up. Then Konstantin made their eyes nearly pop out of their heads by giving them envelopes stuffed with a hundred euros each.

“Kýrie,” Filomena protested, but Eloise assured her she was wasting her breath. If she had learned nothing else about Konstantin, she now knew him to be a ridiculously generous man behind that facade of stony aloofness.

Later, they attended a casual neighborhood party and came home to make love and sleep late.

On Christmas morning, Eloise woke and stretched against her fiancé’s solid heat. She reveled in waking naked against him, thinking that in this moment, her life was as perfect as it could get.

Except for that tiny thread of doubt that continued to run through her, the one that said this was too perfect. Too easy.

She wanted to believe that time would prove her wrong. Eventually, she would trust in this union, but in these early days, she couldn’t seem to keep from feeling quietly anxious that she was kidding herself. That this would all disappear in a blink of an eye.

Which meant she ought to embrace what she had while she had it, literally.

The brush of their skin was pure decadence, as was the right to reach across and caress his back and buttocks. She gave in to the urge to ease atop him and drape herself over his back.

“I feel the weight of expectation,” he said into his pillow. “You want to go downstairs to see what’s under the tree, don’t you?”

“I want to see if you like my gift.”

His back rose and fell beneath her in a sigh.

Why was he so resistant to gifts?

She turned her lips against his satiny skin and kissed his spine, then moved in a whole-body caress. The plane between his shoulder blades felt each side of her face as she stropped like a cat leaving its scent. She shifted higher to kiss the back of his neck. Her breasts swayed against the plane of his back and the hard curve of his backside was caressed by her stomach and the graze of her mound. She bracketed his hip with her knee and slid her arms beneath the pillow alongside his.

“If you’d rather stay in bed a few more minutes, I could be persuaded,” she said.

He rolled so he was on his back and she could straddle his hips.

Afterward, they showered, then bumped their way downstairs, drunk on sex and each other.

Filomena was spending the day with her family so Eloise started the coffee and put the casserole that Filomena had prepared into the oven. It was loaded with peppers and artichoke, herbs and sun-dried tomatoes, then topped with feta cheese.

When the coffee was ready, she brought the cups into the lounge, finding Konstantin at the windows. The pile of gifts under the tree had grown by at least a half dozen.

“What have you done?” She sifted through them, able to tell from some of the wrapping that there was at least one bottle of perfume and a designer scarf.

“Open this one first.” He plucked an envelope from the tree. It was tickets to a symphony performance in New York in the spring.

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