Page 52 of After-Hours Heir

Except…he always felt like a factor.

And then, for a while there, she really had thought she loved him.

Don’t you?

No. That didn’t make any sense. She wasn’t going to indulge that part of herself. That part of herself that reallywantedto confuse sex and love. He was the first one to say that what had happened between them wasn’t real. So why she couldn’t fully grasp that…

She really couldn’t understand.

She really, genuinely couldn’t.

She worked. She threw herself into it. Things were strange around the office, the rumors about her and Christos were mostly true, that was the problem. She was married to him. She was having his baby.

A couple of the women that she considered herself work friends with cornered her at lunch one day.

“How did you not tell anybody that you were banging the guy who was trying to buy the company?”

“I…didn’t know that I was.”

“What?”

She really didn’t see the point in lying about how they had gotten together, so she didn’t.

“You honestly met a guy for sex that you had never seen. Not even one picture of.”

“Not even one.”

“What if you hadn’t been attracted to him?”

She rolled her eyes. “Well, it was dark.”

“I mean you would’ve known if it was—” Elizabeth held up her pinky finger and looked at it solemnly.

It took Sylvie a moment, but the moment she realized what her friend was saying, she nearly choked on her salad. “Well. Thankfully for all involved it wasn’t.”

“Good to know,” she said.

She felt better after that lunch, and she vowed to make more time for actual friendships.

She had been hiding for way too long.

She also realized that she couldn’t keep avoiding her mother.

Christos was interesting, because while people were interested in him in a mythic fashion, his personal life wasn’t much talked about online.

There were no rumors about them.

Christos was the villain of the media industry, and he was really only mentioned in context with the obscene profits that he made or things that he did that other people saw as ruthless. But there was nothing about his personal life.

Of course, if she wasn’t embroiled in his personal life, she would’ve been convinced that he didn’t have one.

She did not invite her mother to lunch. She wasn’t that foolish. Coffee, so her mother could have water with lemon or some other ridiculous beverage that would allow her to perform her hard-won thinness as Sylvie drank a breve.

But this way, it would be over quickly.

Her mother was late, and they sat out on the patio, all the better for her to have her photo taken, because while Christos didn’t deal in that sort of publicity, her mother did.

“I just wanted to let you know,” Sylvie said, “I got married.”