Page 69 of After-Hours Heir

To another person feeling things so deeply.

It did things to him. But then, everything about her did.

Everything about her ignited something inside of him.

He wasn’t used to burning. Not like this.

But if there was one thing he recognized about his response to finding out he was having a son it was that he needed to change.

And he had a feeling the only way he was going to accomplish that was silly.

For the first time in his life he was going to have to trust another person.

He couldn’t use his phone. He couldn’t distance himself in any way.

Sylvie was his wife.

And in order to create the right kind of life for his child, he was going to have to figure out what that meant.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THEYSPENTAweek in London, and then they went back to New York. When they walked in, Christos had an expression of naked shock on his handsome face.

“You have hung raccoons on my wall.”

She laughed. Because she had genuinely forgotten that he didn’t know about that. “They aren’t all raccoons. That’s a possum.”

“You say that as if it makes it better.”

“Well, I thought it was stark. It needs a little bit of whimsy.”

He looked at her, his expression stormy. “I disagree.”

“I don’t care.”

She stretched up on her toes and kissed him on the lips, and he softened.

She loved him so much. She knew that he wasn’t in a space to hear about how much she loved him. But that was okay. She didn’t need him to hear about it. Not just yet. They were learning what it meant to be together. Marrying together the years that they had known each other, getting rid of some of the assumptions they had made. Engaging with some of the assumptions that turned out to be true.

Sifting through the relationship they’d had virtually, and figuring out what it looked like to be together in real life.

Also, they were expecting a child.

It was a lot.

She didn’t need to push him. Not anymore than everything in life was already doing it.

They went to work and talked about their jobs at the end of the day over dinner.

On the weekends, she made him go grocery shopping with her.

“I have a service for this,” he said, adjusting a black baseball cap on his head.

He was doing a sort of low-key, incognito thing. Which she thought was hilarious because a six-foot-four stunningly attractive Greek man was never going to be as undercover as he might like to be.

She thought shopping with him was hilarious, too.

“I admit,” he said, pushing a cart through the produce section, “I have not actually gone to look at food and grocery stores myself since I could afford to buy it. It makes me consider what I might actually want.”