Page 70 of After-Hours Heir

“Food is supposed to be enjoyable.”

“It’s for survival.”

“Christos,” she said, moving around to the front of the cart and stopping it. “You’re allowed to just enjoy things. You’re allowed to like things. And to do them just because they bring you pleasure.” She looked left and right. “You know, things other than sex.”

He seemed to consider that.

They walked home carrying their reusable bags, and she wanted to hold his hand but didn’t. They weren’t quite at the stage where they engaged in casual contact. Not like that. They hauled all their purchases into the private elevator, and he sat and watched while she made dinner. She ended up grateful for her apron, which kept food off her stomach, which was rounding more and more and becoming more of a nuisance.

“I’ll cook for you another night. Although, I don’t know how to make anything good.”

“What do you mean?”

“The time of my life when I was actually shopping for myself, cooking for myself, it was very basic. A lot of hot dogs. Canned chili.”

“Well, does any of it make you feel nostalgic?”

“I’m not sure about that.”

“I’d eat it, if you ever wanted to share that part of your life with me. It must have been happy in some ways.”

He frowned. “It was. I was on my own, but I had the ability to control my life.”

“You’re really very amazing,” she said, dishing pasta onto plates for the two of them. “Very few people could have come out of what you experienced half so functional.”

He laughed, and it sounded vaguely bitter. “I don’t know that I would say I amfunctional.”

“You’re a billionaire,” she said, smiling at him across the table.

“Ah, right,” he said. “I am.”

“We’re going to have to buy a house,” she said. “I was raised in the city, and I know that it can be a happy enough experience. But that isn’t what I want for a child.”

“And why is that?”

She shrugged. “There was always something missing. I don’t know if it was grass. Not that we can’t go to the park. Maybe it wasn’t a place so much as a feeling. Family. But we are going to be a family, aren’t we, Christos?”

He leaned forward and cupped her chin. “I have promised this,agape.”

She smiled. She couldn’t help herself. He had promised, her difficult, hard man. And she knew he didn’t give promises easily. “I know. And I trust you.”

His nostrils flared slightly, the look in his eyes bordering on feral. “You trust me,” he said, his voice rough.

“Yes,” she said. “With everything. Don’t you know? I was never with another man before you because I felt so insecure about myself. I didn’t feel beautiful. I didn’t feel like I had anything to offer. My mother ground me down into nothing. It might seem foolish to you, but—”

“It doesn’t seem foolish. The absence of a mother in my life ruined me. And no, yours was not absent in quite the same way, but it still leaves scars.”

“Yes,” she whispered. He understood her. That feeling was… This was why she was so drawn to him. It was why she had been so drawn to him over text. And sometimes she found she had a barrier with him in person much of the time, even though this time with him had been idyllic.

But she had given him a part of herself in those conversations that she had never given to anyone, and then she had given him her body.

Trust.

Electric desire shivered over her skin.

She thought back to all those text conversations. They had been edgy. They had promised each other things in those texts that she had never thought she would do in person.

And yet with him everything felt possible. Necessary. Like she wanted to prove this. Like she wanted to test the desire between them and the bonds of trust that they were building.