Page 47 of After-Hours Heir

It didn’t matter. He had married her for the baby. But quite apart from that there was…

This need. Desire. Everything else was an illusion. Their prior relationship was an illusion. But this…this was something he could hold. He could touch her. He could taste her. He could have her.

And so he claimed her mouth, over and over again. He kissed down the tender side of her neck, made her shiver. Made her tremble.

“I didn’t know you could be such a very good girl,” he whispered.

He felt her quake. Not the same sort of shiver as before, but felt how close she was to orgasm with those words.

“Is that what you like? Do you like being told what a good girl you are? How you are perfection? Exactly what I want. Exactly what I need. Sylvie, you are the most glorious of creatures. I could not ask for more. I could not ask for better.”

She buried her face in his neck, and he heard a muffled cry on her lips.

“Is that all it takes?”

She met his gaze. “You’re a bastard, do you know that? How can you be so—”

“I might be a bastard. But I’m a bastard that you want.”

She grabbed hold of his face, stretched up on her toes and kissed him. And she poured all of her frustration into it. And then when they parted, it was like when she looked at him she saw straight down into his soul.

“I want you,” she said. “I have wanted you from before I really knew what it meant. And I was desperate to fantasize about a man who wasn’t you. So desperate to feel something for the nice man who showed me compassion in my texts. But you’re right. I always wanted you. I always wanted what you had. That ruthlessness. I always wanted to know what it would be like to feel it… For you to touch me. For your hands to be all over me. I always wondered.”

He felt a shudder not unlike the one he had just felt in her body go through his own. How was she doing that? How was she zeroing in on his weakness? On his vulnerability.

This aching, desperate need to be…

To be wanted.

Even thinking it made him feel small. Weak. Ridiculous. And yet, he craved it so much he could not silence her. He couldn’t tell her to stop. He wanted to hear it. Wanted to hear those words flowing endlessly from her lips.

That she had always wanted him. That there was something in him that she saw…

There is nothing in you.

He pushed that away, and he consumed her. Stripped her naked so that he could finally see her beautiful body.

She was glorious. More than he had ever imagined that she could be.

Her nipples, rosy and tight. Begging for his mouth.

Her curves a revelation.

That strawberry-gold thatch between her thighs, pushing his lust to extremes.

If he would’ve seen her that first night…

He would’ve walked away. This would never have happened.

He didn’t believe in fate. He didn’t believe that there was any larger, guiding force in the universe. If there were, life wouldn’t be so brutal. Some people wouldn’t be chosen to live, while others died. You chose. You either found the hardness inside of yourself to push through whatever life gave you, or you didn’t.

But she made him want to believe. And something bigger. Because how was it possible that she was here, and they were having a baby?

He was having a baby.

Christos Onassis, a man whose heart had never beaten for anything half as soft as another human being, was going to be a father.

He gritted his teeth, pushed that thought away as he lowered his head and sucked one nipple deep into his mouth.