Chapter Ten
CHAPTER TEN
“W HAT IF I wanted to go home to Iowa for Christmas?” Constance asked one bright day toward the end of December.
Christmas was only a few days away, something that seemed impossible. The calendar marched on but here on this island it was all blue skies, sunshiny days, and very little hint that the year was ending.
She sometimes wondered if she was slowly going mad.
Though, as an upside to being completely abandoned by the husband she’d made the critical mistake of falling in love with right before he disappeared for weeks, she was coming along with her swimming. So at least that was one way she didn’t have to worry about drowning. A person could float in water for ages.
Too bad the same couldn’t be said about her strange, sad marriage.
Beside her in the pool Maria looked at her sharply, then away. “That wouldn’t be up to me.”
“I would ask my husband, of course,” Constance said, with studied casualness. “But he is very busy. Very, very busy.”
She and Maria looked at each other for a long while, there in the water. And they did not speak of it again while they stayed in the pool, practicing strokes and treading water and other ways to stay afloat.
But later that afternoon, Maria came into the room and informed her that the plane was ready and waiting.
“If Mr. Ignatios has any questions,” Maria said mildly, in response to the question Constance did not dare ask, “I’ll be happy to answer them for him.”
“Wonderful,” Constance replied in the same tone.
And that was how she managed to take Natalia back home for what was, technically, her second Christmas. But only her first birthday.
She spent the entirety of the plane ride mounting arguments in her head, though there was no one sitting across from her on the flight. There was only her, grabbing hold of her armrests and refusing to look out the windows for hours, until the plane touched down over the cold fields of home.
And she was happy to be back in Iowa, but she was coming back different. For one thing, it was all so easy. The privileges of Anax’s wealth were evident everywhere. The car that met them on the tarmac. The fact that when they arrived at her house, it was warm and bright and welcoming, more than ready for them.
Constance felt guilty that she liked it.
“Mr. Ignatios has many homes,” Maria said as they walked in to heat and light, a perfect welcome after a long trip. Maybe the other woman saw the look on Constance’s face. Maybe she just knew Constance that well by now. “They are always made ready for his arrival.”
Maybe, Constance thought, it was okay to admit that she liked it.
Maybe it was okay that not everything had to be hard.
Besides, it was the twenty-second of December. She was finally back home in Iowa, no longer stranded on that island, trotted out only for the odd Cinderella moment before being stashed away again. More importantly, Natalia was a happy little toddler. She was still finding her legs, preferring to get around on all fours—but happy to stand if she was holding on to things. And today, she seemed delighted to find herself in a new place.
Or an old place she didn’t quite remember.
Constance set out to walk into their little bit of town, prepared to be knocked sideways with all the nostalgia. She felt a bit groggy from the flight and thought a walk would sort her out. And she also expected that she would immediately feel right at home.
But that wasn’t what happened. There was no sigh of relief as she and Natalia made their way into the center of Halburg. There was no sweet sense of homecoming.
Instead, she ran into a neighbor who made it clear, and quickly, that she knew exactly who Anax was, now. That everyone in the county did after all those tabloids had made a meal of Constance’s appearance at that ball. Cheryl Fox, who had always felt she should have been the nursery school teacher and indicated that she had finally achieved that dream, straight out announced that she thought Constance had cleverly targeted Anax from the start.
As in, from before she’d even gotten pregnant.
“How would I have done that, Cheryl?” Constance asked, keeping one eye on Natalia as she entertained herself with standing up and sitting down at the edge of a bench near the church. “You do know that you’re not actually allowed to know who the donors are at the clinic, don’t you? It’s all private. That’s the whole point.”
“I knew your grandmother,” Cheryl replied, with a knowing look that Constance immediately took exception to. She tried to check herself, because she’d always found Cheryl a bit of work...but had she always been so smug ? “I wouldn’t put anything past one of you Joneses.”
She laughed merrily as if it was all a big joke, though the look in her eye suggested otherwise. And by the time Constance made it all the way into the main part of town, still and unchanged from the way she’d left it a couple of months back, she had similar conversations with three other townsfolk she’d once considered, if not friends, pleasant faces to interact with.
Not today, apparently.
This did not exactly put Constance in the holiday spirit.
She walked around in the cold for a while, but her actual friends—who were obviously not expecting her today—were caught up in their usual holiday festivities, or the preparation required for said festivities. She didn’t quite feel up to a run-in with Brandt Goss, not if random neighbors on the street were so comfortable casting aspersions at a glance.
Even Natalia was fussing by the time they started home, though not because she felt judged harshly by the citizens of Halburg. It was far more likely that she, too, had gotten used to that Mediterranean weather.
The truth was, Constance thought a bit darkly as she trudged her way down the center of the snowy road, carrying a whiny Natalia, that she had somehow forgotten the truth about Iowa winters in a hurry. Maybe it was different when it was all you knew. Maybe it was different if you hadn’t just spent weeks swimming in outdoor pools, bemoaning the beautiful sameness of the lovely weather that allowed for summery clothes by day and fires by night.
Whatever it was, the cold and quickly falling dusk seemed more oppressive to her than she recalled. She was shocked—and more than a little upset—that the Iowa blood in her veins hadn’t kept the faith.
And, frankly, she was upset that her nostalgia wasn’t kicking in the way she’d thought it would. It wasn’t that she didn’t love it here. She did. She always would. When she closed her eyes and thought of home , it would always be Halburg.
But today it seemed clear to her that the limitations she’d always put up with to live here were choices she’d made. Not facts of life she needed to come to terms with.
That meant she could choose not to put up with Cheryl Fox’s snide comments. She could choose not to engage with Brandt Goss. She could choose.
It made her feel liberated, and very sad, all at once.
She made it back to the house, and that was where she felt that deep, inarguable surge of love and loss. That felt like the homecoming she wanted.
But the trouble was, she already knew that her grandparents wouldn’t be there when she walked through the door. She’d known for far too long that her parents were never coming back. And now she knew that it was possible to go away and be, if not happy , necessarily, perfectly able to live a whole different life.
It seemed to make her more nostalgic, in a way, for the life she’d dreamed about when she’d decided to start the IVF process two years ago.
Last December, all she’d wanted was to raise a child the way she’d been raised. But now she understood something critical. She could stay here. She could raise Natalia here, just as she’d planned, and it would be a good life. But it wouldn’t be her life.
And her daughter wouldn’t get the same things out of it that she had.
The real truth was that Constance wasn’t that poor, orphaned Jones girl who everyone felt sorry for any longer. She’d stopped being the town’s favorite mascot right around the time she’d started showing. It had been obvious once the baby was born.
People had liked the girl they could pity. They weren’t at all sure about the single mother she’d become, much less the glamorous Cinderella they’d seen in glossy pictures. That had all been made clear to her today.
Now she was notorious, people would treat her differently because of that. Inevitably, they’d treat Natalia differently, too. In her years here, she had always been loved and cared for by public opinion. She hadn’t understood that that pendulum could swing for anyone.
She hadn’t understood that there was a pendulum.
And besides, she’d been to Athens now. Vasiliki had taken her on a whirlwind tour the day of the ball. She’d seen as many wonders in the city itself as she had in that ballroom. Some faces she knew were renowned the world over. Scraps of intriguing conversations that had nothing to do with crops, yields, or the weather. All the practicalities she knew so well.
She remembered thinking to herself that it was funny how big the world really was. And how easy it was to forget that, living her whole life in a tiny farm town.
It was the kind of thing that now, having seen some of that bigness, she couldn’t unknow. It was like the tiny bit of traveling she’d done had unlocked something inside of her.
“The poor thing isn’t used to the cold,” Constance said as she made it inside the house. She sighed happily as the warmth enveloped her, handing the waiting Maria the baby as she struggled out of her many layers of cold-weather clothes. “Neither am I, apparently.”
“You are not Greek,” Maria said with a smile. “You have no excuse.”
Maria took the baby off, cooing to her as she went. That left Constance standing in the middle of the living room, feeling...harassed by her own expectations.
She sighed out a breath, and wondered what exactly she’d thought would happen if she made it back here the way she’d wanted to do. A parade? The ghosts of all her lost family members, lined up against the far wall?
Constance actually laughed at that image, and that felt better. Then she thought she might as well use Grandma Dorothy’s tried and true remedy for a bruised heart, and set off toward the kitchen at the back to rummage around until she found the hot chocolate. Because there was always hot chocolate.
But just as she started to look through the cabinets, the front door burst open with a terrific crash.
Constance jumped, then went to peer out into the hallway, not at all sure what she thought she might see.
Her heart flipped over at once.
Because it was Anax.
And he was looking wild around the eyes and dark straight through.
“Did you truly believe you could run away from me?” he demanded.
“I did not run. I flew. Very sedately.” Constance forgot about the hot chocolate and drifted further out of the kitchen.
Up above her, she could hear footsteps on the stairs, and saw Anax shift his gaze. Then watched that gaze harden. “I will deal with you later,” he said to Maria.
“You leave her alone,” Constance threw out at once. “You’re good at leaving people alone, Anax. If you were so interested in my whereabouts, perhaps you shouldn’t have abandoned me on an island in the middle of the sea with no way to leave. It might as well be a prison.”
“Yes, such a terrible prison. You are so mistreated.”
But she had already had her fill of snide remarks this day. “Why don’t we strand you on an island you can’t get off of and see how you feel about it?”
She realized belatedly that Maria’s footsteps had gone away again. And more, that she had somehow moved halfway down the hall. And he had moved, too, and now there they were, entirely too close.
Dangerously close.
“I don’t even understand how you got here so fast,” she said, because it was that or hurl herself forward—directly into his chest—because that’s where she wanted to be.
It was an outrage she did not entirely understand that she could be mad at him, because of him, and still want him to make her feel better.
“I was already in Greece.” He shook his head as if he didn’t know why he was answering her question. Or maybe not, because then he said, “I was already making my way to you.”
All the breath in Constance’s body seemed to go out of her at once. The night they’d shared seemed to swirl around and around inside of her, the way it always did. She went over it and over it, every last detail. Every last touch.
“You couldn’t leave me fast enough,” she made herself say, and was happy that her voice did not shake no matter how she felt inside. “Why would that change?”
He reached out and slid his hand to her face, to fit her cheek. “ Koritsi , if you hear nothing else I say to you today, know this. It had nothing to do with you. The monsters are all mine.”
And she had told herself so many stories about how it would go.
Sooner or later, she’d been sure, he would return. Sooner or later, he would have to come back to the island to see his daughter. She had practiced whole speeches in the mirror. Stinging set-downs. Interrogations better suited to crime dramas. She had ripped him into pieces time and time again, but not once had she prepared for this .
For Anax in her grandmother’s front hall, his hand on her cheek and his gaze on hers like this.
Honest. True.
Constance didn’t really think it through. She lifted up her hands and slid them around the sides of his neck, and her mouth was moving before she knew she even meant to speak.
“I missed you,” she said quietly.
And then she watched him come undone.
She watched Anax melt, but there was anguish in it, too, and then his mouth was on hers. First sweet, then wild.
Then he was backing her up, kissing her and kissing her again, his mouth drugging and desperate, seeking hers, finding her, and bringing them both home.
And she had no idea how long they carried on like that, wrapped around each other and kissing as if their lives depended on it, before she realized that they’d made it back into the kitchen. She pulled away, took him by the hand, and then led him down the cellar stairs to the finished basement where she’d lived with her parents so long ago.
Down in the basement, there were windows that walked out into the backyard, furniture covered in sheets and shoved back up against walls, but it still felt cozy. Close and warm, this close to the boiler that her father had used to call by a pet name, making up stories about its various noises all winter long.
Constance smiled at the memory as she took her husband by his hands. And she pulled him with her, over to the one sofa that was always left uncovered, because it was the place that she’d liked to come down to to sit and think about her childhood.
Thinking about Anax was better. Because he was here with her. He wasn’t just a memory. He was hot and hard and here.
And it couldn’t have been more different from Athens. There was a wall of windows, sure, but there was snow tugging down the tree branches outside. And the outline of her grandmother’s old vegetable garden, a square set apart from the carpet of white.
Constance pushed him back on the couch and straddled him there, then forgot where they were.
Because here, in the space they made between them, nothing else mattered.
She moved over him, took his face in her hands, and kissed him. Then again, deeper and deeper. She angled her head in the way he’d taught her, and it felt like magic.
Like coming home.
This felt the way she’d imagined returning to Iowa would feel. But it was also harder. Deeper.
Richer, somehow.
And the more they kissed, the hotter it got. The deeper, the wilder it seemed to hum in both of them.
His hands streaked beneath her sweatshirt, then palmed her nipples. She rocked herself against his lap, pressing her breasts into his grip. Feeling the hard heat of him between them, and using his arousal to make that wicked, wonderful fire lick all the way through her.
And then it got even wilder.
Anax reached between them, and she was helping, and they both sighed a little when he pulled himself free of his trousers. He made a low, greedy sort of noise when her hands wrapped around him, but he didn’t let her play for long. He picked her up, twisted her around, and then came down over her on the sofa.
And then everything was a tangle of maddening sensation, of removing clothes, of kicking off shoes. It felt foolish and unwieldy and impossible to stop or slow or think —
Until, at last, he thrust deep inside of her.
Constance shattered instantly. She bit down on his shoulder so that she wouldn’t scream and rode it out as that lightning bolt tore through her, ripping her apart and rocking her down to the bones.
Only when she lifted her head and looked at him again did she see the way his eyes glittered. Fierce. Possessive. And something more.
Only then did he move.
Anax rocked them slowly, surely, to the very end of sanity, then back.
He brought her to that edge again, then danced with her there, as if he could dance forever. She wondered if he could, if they would stay like this, wrapped up in each other, reaching, driving each other mad with all this want —
But this time, he slammed his mouth over hers as they both tore off the side of the world, and found themselves nothing but stardust once more.
It took a long time for her to come back into her own body. She heard footsteps in the kitchen above and knew it was Maria, preparing some food for Natalia. She knew she should go up and offer to help.
But Anax was stretched out over her, and he was so hot, so warm.
He was here.
He had shifted to one side and was propped up on an elbow, playing with her hair. He drew it through his fingers, again and again, looking at her with a softness in his gaze that she had never seen before.
Maybe she was as selfish as she’d always thought she wasn’t, not really, but she couldn’t bring herself to move.
“Do not worry,” Anax told her, his voice almost stern. “I will not leave you alone for so long again.”
And it was tempting to simply float off into that. So deeply, wildly tempting. To take it for the kind of promise she wanted him to make to her. To let that be the end of it.
Maybe she would have done just that if he had said such things to her that morning after in Athens.
But she was lying on this couch, literally surrounded by the ghosts of everyone who had ever loved her. And she’d had nothing but time to think.
Here it was, almost Christmas, and while her world had changed unimaginably in the past year, there were some things that still needed changing.
Maybe it was that she’d been thinking about the woman she’d been when she’d decided to go and get pregnant in the first place. She had wanted a family.
She still wanted a family.
Back then she’d looked around at a life that was perfectly fine and had thought, Fine isn’t good enough. I want more.
Why should this Christmas be any different?
So she pulled away from him, sitting back so she could look him in the eye. So she could stare back at him just as sternly.
“It’s good that we have chemistry,” she began.
One of his wicked brows rose. “Chemistry? Is that what you call it? I would consider it more of an atomic explosion, myself.”
She didn’t fall for that, though she wanted to. “Everything is inside out with us and that’s part of the issue. We had a whole baby before the one-night stand. I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to go.”
“Nothing about you is how it is supposed to go, Constance,” he murmured, and she couldn’t tell if that was a complaint or an endearment. She couldn’t tell if she minded either way, and she didn’t like that.
She sat up then, reaching for the sweatpants that were inside out on the floor and pulling them on, one leg at a time. Anax did not do the same. He lay there, looking debauched, like some feudal lord reclining on a pile of skulls and furs, not that such an image was at all helpful in her present circumstances.
Constance stood and let her hands find her hips. She looked down at him, and she knew—from somewhere deep inside and from the stars she’d just tasted again—that she would never forgive herself if she didn’t take this chance for what it was.
“I want a real marriage, Anax,” she told him, matter-of-fact and to the point. She thought he froze at that, but she pushed on. “And what I mean by that is that I don’t want to be secluded away somewhere, an afterthought that you can only trot out as it suits you. I don’t want to be speculated about in all those tabloids, images of me pored over as if I’m a mystery to solve, if there isn’t something real between us. It’s not worth it.”
She thought he would argue. She braced herself as he sat up, but he didn’t speak.
Constance decided to feel emboldened, and pushed on. “I want to live with you. I want to go to sleep with you at night and wake up with you in the morning. I want to raise our daughter, together. I want to give her sisters and brothers. I want to fall in love with you, Anax.”
She saw him swallow, hard.
So she stuck that knife in. “If I’m honest, I’m in love with you already. I want you to fall in love with me, too. I think you can. Or you could. I want you to try.”
“Constance.” Her name on his lips then was barely a whisper.
“I don’t want to play games,” she told him, and she found that the more she said the things she wanted out loud, the more powerful she felt. The more sure . “And I’m not saying that it will be easy, or perfect, or that we won’t get it wrong a thousand times. But I want to try , Anax. It doesn’t matter how we started. I want to try to make it right. To make it work. To make it be...” She tried to indicate the two of them, the space between them, the entirety of this thing between them. “I want to make it everything it can be. Because why not?”
She wasn’t sure if the drumming sound she heard was her heart or something more like a heart attack. She wasn’t sure she was breathing, or had even taken a breath since she started talking like this.
What Constance did know was that she had no choice here. It was stand up for what she wanted or give it up forever. The choice was that stark.
And now she’d said what needed saying. It was on him now.
She could see he knew it.
Anax took his time standing. Then carefully, almost too deliberately, putting his clothes to rights.
Only then did he look at her and when he did, she had to fight to keep her knees from buckling. Because once again, there was so much anguish in his gaze. So much pain.
All of that mixed in with the fire she could still feel inside of her.
“I don’t know how to want those things,” he told her, but he sounded...careful. And somehow, that gave her hope. “And I certainly don’t know how to give you those things. What worries me, koritsi , is that I do not have that within me to give.”
And she wanted to melt, right there where she stood. She wanted to rush to him, take him in her arms, and assure him that whatever he could give, whatever scrap of what she’d asked for, it would be all right.
But something wouldn’t let her. It was as if her parents and her grandparents had fused together to make her spine like steel.
It was Grandma Dorothy’s voice inside her, reminding her that strength only bothered the weak, so what was the point of hiding it?
Or maybe it was that little girl upstairs with Maria. The baby who Constance intended to teach to ask for what she wanted. And not to rest unless she got it.
Then again, maybe it was simply Anax himself. Because she looked at him, and that same knowledge that she’d finally accepted had been with her from the start swamped her all over again.
He was the one. She had been waiting for him her whole life. And she wanted more than this.
“You are Anax Ignatios,” she said quietly. “You can figure anything out, and have. As a business proposition, you’ve done such things a hundred times or more.”
“Constance,” he began.
But she lifted a hand. “You have until Christmas,” she told him, her eyes steady on his. Not an order, but a statement of fact. “Until Natalia’s birthday. Figure it out, Anax. We’re both counting on you.”