Chapter Three
CHAPTER THREE
T HIS WOMAN — THE putative Mother Mary and mother of his child—gazed back at him as if he was an apparition. As if she was not sure he was truly standing before her at all.
“The father...?” she echoed, but it was as if the words only penetrated as she said them. Because it was then that her eyes widened and her lips parted, and for a moment, all she could seem to do was stare.
And it had been a great, encompassing fury that had driven Anax here. A fury that had taken him from his office in Athens, where Stavros had delivered the impossible news, across the planet in search of Delphine, and to that little clinic in a different part of what Americans called their Mid west—presumably because there was so much West left on either side. He had been focused on nothing else save the same driving need to see for himself. To see if it was true.
To handle this all himself, as if that might solve the problem.
Because, of course, it usually did.
But somehow, in all of this, he hadn’t really considered the woman herself.
He knew things about her. His sister had delivered those details to him—repeatedly. He could list off her stats from memory without any effort. He had been told that she was of medium height, medium build. Brown hair, brown eyes.
All that was true.
But none of that described her at all.
Maybe it was because he’d been jetting all over the world in a particular fury this time. That was nothing new to him. But very rarely were his emotions flying the plane, metaphorically speaking.
In point of fact, Anax preferred to behave as if he had never encountered an emotion in his life. Even though he knew the truth that most men seem to miss. Anger was the primary male emotion, and he had that in spades. He had never met a man who didn’t.
That didn’t mean he acted on his. He wasn’t an adolescent any longer.
And maybe it was because they were standing in a church and he had yet to burst into flame. It seemed that despite all the sins his mother had accused him of over the years, he was apparently not too profane to darken God’s door after all. He couldn’t wait to tell her.
But right now, in this overwarm church teeming with loud children and curious spectators, Anax found himself feeling...caught, somehow.
It didn’t make sense.
Then again, this Constance Jones didn’t make any sense either. She had pushed back the hood of the cloak she wore, in the typical blue to denote the Virgin Mary. Her hair was brown, yes, but it was a thick, rich dark brown that looked as if it might curl. Given the right encouragement. It was coiled on one side of her neck and braided loosely as it fell down over her shoulder. Her eyes were also brown, but it was a fascinating shade. Deep pools of that rich color, ringed in onyx. Like some kind of smoky quartz.
There he went again. Getting whimsical when he was a man known and feared for his relentless practicality.
He had never paid specific attention one way or another to pregnancy, or pregnant women. Why should he have? But this woman was pregnant with his child.
It was astonishing what a difference that made. He told himself that had to be the reason he kept... noticing her in all these ways.
Anax wanted to put his hands on her. He wanted to trace the shape of that enormous belly with his palms. He had the strangest urge to close the distance between them and press his mouth against the crest of that great mound where he knew his child rested—
But that was both insane and inappropriate.
Obviously.
She might be carrying his child, but she didn’t know him. Just as he didn’t know her.
The reality of the situation slammed back into him like a kick to the head. He chose to consider it a kind of clarity.
“Perhaps,” suggested his sister from beside him in her typically icy way, “there might be a place we could speak privately?”
“Oh,” Constance said, sounding scattered. And as shaken as he was. Or would have been, he corrected himself. If he had not known about this pregnancy already. If he had been the one ambushed tonight. He knew this because he remembered precisely how he had reacted two weeks ago. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry, I just...”
“It is a shock,” Anax agreed. Vasiliki shot him a look at that conciliatory tone, it was so unlike him, but he ignored her. “I have had longer to process it.”
“I’m not sure what I should be processing,” she said, and then laughed.
And it was so unexpected, that laugh.
That was what he told himself. It was a surprise, that was all. The light, dancing from the candles that were lit and flickering in all the windows didn’t change. The din in the room didn’t still for a moment. There was no choir singing. The service was over.
Her laugh was unexpected, that was all.
It seemed to take a moment for Constance to remember herself. She blinked once, then again. She held a hand to her belly as she moved around from behind the manger and started for the main aisle, walking with a little bit of a waddle to her step. It should have looked cumbersome. He supposed it did.
But Anax seemed to be caught up in some strange, internal loop. All he could think about was her astounding femininity. A woman so ripe with new life was the very pinnacle of womanhood—
As if he had the slightest idea what the pinnacle of anything was. As if he had spent even twelve consecutive seconds in his whole life before this moment considering the ramifications of femininity.
He had always appreciated it, yes. But not like this.
What was happening to him?
The look that his sister was giving him suggested that she didn’t know either.
“Are you quite well?” Vasiliki asked, a little sharply. In Greek, on the off chance anyone here recognized them. Or was listening in, as the speculative expressions he saw on the faces they passed suggested might be a possibility. “You are acting unlike yourself.”
“I’m not acting like anything,” he replied, in the tone he knew full well irritated his sister the most, dismissive and faintly condescending. “This is the situation we are in. It doesn’t matter how we act.”
His sister did not rise to his bait. She only lifted a brow. “You are handling this so beautifully, Anax, but perhaps you could do something about your jaw. You’re clenching it so hard that I rather fear you will break every last one of your teeth in the next five minutes if you do not stop.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
But he released his jaw. And found himself feeling something like relieved that Vasiliki wasn’t commenting on anything else he might have been doing. Like staring a little too hard at this woman who he should never have met. Because she should never have had any access to him. He was the stratosphere and this was a small farm town that people more than a few miles away had never heard of. That was the truth of things.
It wasn’t her fault. But it wasn’t his, either.
Inside, he felt something click into place at that, like a heavy latch on an iron gate.
At the back of the church, Constance marched through the lobby as if she was unaware it was crowded. Following behind her, Anax found himself faintly amazed that the people simply...parted before her. She didn’t have to ask. It almost suggested that he was missing something about this woman. It whispered of the sort of power a wise man always paid attention to at the negotiation table—
But she did not lead them into any kind of boardroom. The room she walked them into was small. Airless. She flicked on the lights, and it immediately became clear that it was some kind of a classroom. A classroom for very small children, if the desks that looked like toys and barely cleared his shins were any indication.
Constance smiled apologetically as she looked around, as if seeing the classroom for the very first time. “We hold nursery school classes in here. I would invite you to sit, but the desks are rather...”
She didn’t finish.
Anax could not account for the fact he felt he needed to. “Rather.”
He got another sharp look from Vasiliki for that. “We understand this is a delicate matter,” his sister said briskly, jumping straight in as was her wont. “It is delicate on all sides, as must be obvious.”
Then she waited. But Constance did not do the expected thing. She did not stare harder at Anax until the light dawned, and then start issuing effusive apologies. That wasn’t to say she wasn’t staring at him, but if she recognized him, she was hiding it masterfully.
He allowed as how it was difficult for him to imagine that a nursery school teacher here could have even encountered Delphine and her machinations.
“My brother only learned of you two weeks ago,” Vasiliki said, in a tone that suggested that while she wasn’t issuing accusations yet , she could start at any moment.
Constance shook her head, her cheeks still as flushed as they had been in the much hotter main part of the church. And her hands were at her rounded sides, as if holding her belly aloft. “But I’m trying to understand how anyone has heard of me at all. My understanding was that everything was kept private. That’s the whole point of going through a clinic, isn’t it?”
“The doctor you worked with has lost his medical license,” Anax said abruptly. “He allowed a vindictive woman to blackmail him into letting her dispense material that was never donated to that clinic.”
He watched Constance take that in. She only blinked, yet he thought he saw a different sort of trembling as she slid her hands up and folded them over the top of her big belly. In this room, the cloak fell back and he could see that she was wearing a very prosaic shirt and trousers beneath. There was nothing supernatural about her. No choirs. No light.
She was not mesmerizing at all, he told himself, and yet he could not look away.
“Are you saying that this woman... stole that material?”
That iron deep inside him seemed heavier. Colder. “That is exactly what she did.”
“Why would she do that? Why would anyone do that?”
“That is a much longer conversation, and it is an unpleasant one.” Anax ran a hand through his hair, then wondered at himself. He was considered one of the greatest poker players of all time, though he did not gamble. Not with cards. But he did not have the tells that other, lesser men did. He did not fidget. He dropped his hand. “The fact remains that she did this thing. And it looks as if the result of this is about to be born. Unless I am misreading how far along you are.”
Surely, he thought, no woman could be that pregnant and have much farther to go.
“No,” Constance agreed. “You’re not misreading it. In fact I think—” But she shook her head. “Let me make sure I’m following all of this. I’m guessing that you didn’t come here to congratulate me on this happy accident.”
“I had no intention of ever having children,” Anax said, very distinctly, very solemnly. He held her gaze. He did not look away. “I have never had any interest in it. I do not feel my genetics are well suited to continuing on.”
Constance blew out a breath. “Oh, well. Oh, dear. I guess we’ll find out, hey?”
And in any other situation, Anax would have assumed that she was being sardonic. Provoking, at the very least. That this was some hayseed act she was putting on.
But this woman looked nothing but wide-eyed and innocent, and more than a little overawed by him. That in itself was nothing out of the ordinary, but the way she looked at him was more like he was some far-off constellation she’d never noticed in the sky before. As if she found him magnificent, but it wasn’t personal. It was simply a fact, and not an important one.
Frankly, it was distracting. He didn’t like it. Or it was more that he didn’t quite know what to make of it. He was used to women making fools of themselves for a scrap of his attention. He was not used to women having the full force of his attention and behaving as if they were just waiting for him to...put it somewhere else.
It took him a long, awkward moment to understand that the bizarre sensation inside his person was him feeling...disconcerted.
Anax was not certain he had ever experienced such a thing before.
“You do not seem to have heard of my brother,” Vasiliki said then. She was leaning against the door, looking entirely languid. Yet Anax had no doubt that if someone tried to enter, she would deal with them, and swiftly. “Nor do you seem to recognize him.”
It shouldn’t have been possible, yet Constance’s eyes widened even further as she looked at him. “Should I have?”
They had discussed the possibility that Delphine had not chosen this seemingly random woman out of the ether. That she might very well have chosen some patsy or other. Some grasping sort of girl she knew somehow. It seemed as possible as anything else, and frankly, more likely.
Later, Anax knew that he and Vasiliki would debate this moment, but he felt that same gut feeling of certainty that he often did in business. He knew Constance wasn’t putting on an act.
He knew this as well as he knew himself.
She had never heard of him. She had no idea who he was. She had gone to that clinic in good faith, and this was the result.
And somehow, there was relief in that. It brought his fury down several notches immediately, and he preferred that. Indulging his fury was too close to a lack of control, and Anax was scrupulously careful about maintaining control of himself. He wasn’t uptight like his sister. He simply had boundaries he maintained, always.
It was another deep relief that he could ratchet back that dark, simmering thing inside him that had driven him here. Constance hadn’t done anything to deserve it. That mattered.
“Are you someone I’m supposed to recognize?” she asked, and peered at him as if he was a puzzle that needed immediate solving.
“I am a man of some renown,” he told her, ignoring the sound his sister made at that. “Any child of mine will have to be protected. Do you understand?”
“Almost certainly not.” And Constance smiled at him then. It wasn’t that smile she’d been beaming around the church earlier. This one was as warm as it was tired, and it made him...want things he didn’t know how to name. It was another shade of disconcerting and he could not like it. But he also couldn’t seem to look away. “It’s been a long day. It’s actually been a lot of long days and I’m not sleeping well. I’m guessing neither one of you slick-looking folks knows a whole lot about pregnancy, but it’s...a lot. People say it’s a happy time, and I suppose that’s true, but you sleep less and less. Your body isn’t your own. Everything is very heavy and sluggish, and then you still have labor to look forward to. So, really, the only thing I understand is that everything you’re talking about isn’t going to matter to me at all once the contractions hit.”
There was not a single situation, in the entirety of his existence, when Anax had ever been treated to a lecture on pregnancy. Much less invited to think about the contractions that would soon occur in the woman standing before him.
It occurred to him then that he was not used to women that he was not related to speaking to him in so frank a manner.
He should have found it disagreeable.
Yet he...did not.
“I don’t know what they told you at this clinic,” he said then, sidestepping the contractions discussion. “I assume they signed a great many documents and you did, too, but you see, all of them are based on a false premise. I never gave my permission. And so we find ourselves in a strange situation, you and me.” He held up a hand. “I’m not accusing you of anything. You did nothing wrong. But all the same, you are about to have my child . I cannot pretend that that’s not happening.”
She rubbed her belly in a wide, circular motion. “I understand that.”
“I’m sure you already have a plan in place about how you are going to care for the child,” he continued, trying to sound as friendly and nonthreatening as possible, to start. “I would like my first offer, on Christmas Eve, to be my assurance that I will, of course, contribute in any way I can. I want to make certain that the child’s life is as easy as possible.”
“Oh.” She blew out a breath, and that seemed to take a minute. She put one hand at the small of her back. “That’s very nice of you. But I think I have everything I need.”
For a moment, they all stared at each other. Outside the doors, there were the sounds of spontaneous Christmas carols, conversations and laughter, and the pounding feet of running children.
No one moved.
“My brother is not offering you some extra diapers and babysitter,” Vasiliki said after a moment, and sharply. “He is astronomically wealthy. He can have a fleet of nannies and an expert medical team at your beck and call with a click of his fingers.”
Constance frowned at Anax’s fingers. “I have a midwife and friends. So.”
Vasiliki made an impatient noise. “You do not seem to grasp your situation. The child you are about to give birth to will be the sole heir to all that my brother has amassed in his lifetime. This child will inherit the entirety of my brother’s vast empire.”
“That does sound very fancy,” Constance said, and then laughed again. “Buck Lewiston calls himself the cow emperor of the county, but mostly folks laugh at that. There’s not much call for empires, if you want to know the truth. This is Iowa.”
“My brother has homes all over the planet,” Vasiliki said matter-of-factly. “Yet real estate is only a small portion of his portfolio. Anax is a billionaire, Ms. Jones. As the lucky woman who is producing the accidental heir to Anax’s fortune, this is your lucky day. But you don’t seem to grasp that.”
“I’ve always thought Christmas Eve is lucky by default.”
Constance still sounded as if she was laughing. Her eyes looked suspiciously bright. Was that laughter, Anax wondered, or sheer hysteria? Was the poor woman overset by her good fortune?
But she was still talking. “You’ll forgive me, but this Christmas Eve doesn’t seem all that lucky. I was the oldest person in the nativity play by roughly twenty years. I was sharing space with a goat and a donkey and a ten-year-old boy, and I’m not sure which was the stinkiest. Happily, they were all pretty cute. But I’m not sure what your presence has to do with any of this.”
“As I have been at pains to make clear,” Vasiliki began.
Constance shook her head, just slightly, but it was definitive. Another glimpse of that other, more powerful version of her Anax thought he’d glimpsed before.
And shockingly, it actually worked. Vasiliki fell silent.
“I’m not sure what you want me to say,” Constance said in a quiet, firm sort of way. “It never occurred to me that I’d ever have occasion to deal with the father of this child. I’m not sure I want to deal, if that’s all the same to you.”
It was not all the same to Anax, as his presence here should have made more than obvious. But when Vasiliki looked as if she might be about to launch into attack mode, he called her off with an almost imperceptible shake of his head.
“It is a lot to take on,” he said, almost soothingly, to the woman before him. Who was still rubbing her belly, and was now shifting very slightly, side to side. “I apologize. But there is one pressing thing.”
“Somehow,” Constance said, she sounded almost dry, though she was smiling all the same, “I’m guessing that your pressing thing and my pressing thing are not the same.”
“I don’t want my child coming into the world illegitimate.”
Anax had intended to deliver this part of what he had to say differently. He’d expected her to be different, if he was honest. But instead she was Constance , and he didn’t have it in him to follow the expected scripts.
He moved closer to her instead, and watched as her lips parted once more. Following an urge he would not have indulged under any other circumstance, he reached out and put his hand on her belly.
“Forgive me,” he said quietly. “But I’m still having trouble believing this is real.”
He watched something in her soften at that. Her smile changed, and there was a deeper sort of sheen in her gaze. She let out a sound like a sigh, then covered his hand with hers, guiding it to a different part of her belly.
It was like sorcery, he thought.
It was magic.
She talked softly, telling him which parts of the child he was touching. “She’s just about ready to meet us,” she said.
And it all shuddered through him. It was a complexity he had never imagined. He was touching a woman’s belly, and within that belly was a child.
His child, no matter how this had come about.
She , Constance had said.
His daughter. Just there, separated from him and the world, by this fragile wall of flesh. By this surprisingly tough woman, who had not seemed to fight him at all—but had not backed down.
“Constance,” he said then, urgent and low, but necessary. “I understand that this is strange. I understand that you don’t know me. I understand there’s no time for any of that. You have no reason to trust me at all and I am not sure that I would trust you, given the same circumstances. But it’s true that I am a very wealthy man. And I cannot bear the thought that you and this child will not be under my protection in every possible way.”
Something was different between them, then. Something he did not think he could put into words. It was the way their hands were still pressed together. It was the truth of this thing between them, that should not have made sense.
It made no sense at all, but it was beautiful—and theirs all the same.
She carried their daughter. A little girl, who he would meet. And soon.
“I’m sure there are implications that I need to think through,” she said, her low whisper matching his. “But if what you’re saying is true, I can’t blame you for wanting to come here and do this. I would feel the same way. Anyone would. I’m sure we can work something out.”
He felt something else wind its way through him, iron and dark, but shoved it down. There would be time for that. There was always time.
“I appreciate your generosity more than you know,” he told her, gazing down into those marvelous eyes of hers. “But I’m going to ask you for something more. It will be a legal umbrella, that is all. So that you are safe. So that the child is safe.”
She stared back at him, and Anax was aware of so many different things at once. It was the profundity of this moment, he was sure. His hands pressed against his own child, nearly ready to come out into the world when he hadn’t known this possibility existed a scant fourteen days ago.
The fury was gone. Or at a low simmer.
Here, now, there was certainty instead.
“Constance,” he said quietly, “I want you to marry me. Let me take care of you and this child in every way I can.”
“My grandmother always told me that while she, for one, would not go around looking gift horses in the mouth, or any horse for that matter, it was a fool indeed who argued their way out of a good thing.” Constance’s voice sounded rougher than before. Beneath his hand, he felt a tremor. “I can’t think of a good enough reason not to marry you, if it’s just the legal thing.”
“Of course it is,” he said smoothly. “What else could it be? We’re strangers.”
“It is only for your protection,” Vasiliki chimed in.
And he was glad that he and his sister were not looking at each other while they said these things. While they did what they always did—what was necessary.
No matter how it felt to him in this moment, it was necessary above all else.
He needed to remember that.
“If the Baby Jesus could handle three wise men and who knows how many shepherds, I suppose I can do the same,” Constance said after a moment, and she let out a long sigh. “But you’re going to need to hurry. Especially if you’re concerned with legitimacy.” This time, when she laughed, it was tinged with something like hysteria. “Because I’m pretty sure my water just broke.”