Greek’s Christmas Heir

Chapter Four

CHAPTER FOUR

C ONSTANCE MARRIED THE strange man who showed up at the back of the nativity play that very Christmas Eve, because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Or that was how she remembered it, anyway.

She had no idea how even a man with his intensity and that force all around him managed to get a county judge to attend them in the hospital room. The hospital room Anax Ignatios had brought her to himself after her announcement in the classroom at the back of the church. It had been a whirl of the looks on the faces of the people she knew still milling about in the church lobby, then her awkward and inelegant attempt to climb into the waiting SUV.

But she couldn’t care about gossip or her ungainly form. Not when the contractions started.

And so when the judge appeared by whatever mysterious means, she said what she was told to say and thought very little about it.

Because very early on Christmas morning, her sweet little Natalia Joy entered the world, the most perfect creature that Constance had ever seen.

She would have named her daughter Dorothy, but Grandma had been very fierce on that score. There were to be no Dorothies. Not in her honor.

I will rise from the grave and haunt you myself, she had told Constance a million times throughout her life. The Dot and Dottie curse ends with me.

And if anyone could manage to haunt her family at will, Constance knew it was her grandmother.

The events of Christmas Eve into Christmas were a blur to her, except for Natalia’s actual birth. She knew she’d lived through it, obviously she had, but six weeks later Constance found that she was still trying to come to terms with all of it. The nativity play. The growing sense that things were happening inside her even as she’d met Anax and his ferocious sister for the first time, and led them back into a classroom, of all places.

She supposed she hadn’t been in her right mind. That had to be the reason she’d agreed to marry him. Now she kept waiting for someone to ask her about it, because she had her answer all planned out. That she’d been overwhelmed and alone and he was the baby’s father, after all.

It was true she hadn’t seen any proof of that at the time. But no one needed to know that and besides, Anax’s intimidating sister had furnished her with all the documentation anyone could require before Constance had even made it through her first lactation consultation.

And anyway, no one had asked. Not even Alyssa, her friend and midwife, who had met her at the hospital. It was as if Anax, the most compelling man she’d ever seen, had made himself invisible to everyone but her.

And, she thought now, as she rocked baby Natalia in her arms, all that mattered was this.

Her gorgeous little girl, even more perfect than she’d dared imagine. A living, breathing dream come true.

She had a rosebud mouth, and the darkest, silkiest eyelashes—just like her father’s, though it made Constance feel funny to think about Anax’s eyelashes. Or really anything having to do with Anax, come to that. Instead, she spent her exhausted, exhilarated, dazed days contemplating the fact that she’d found she could not kiss her baby enough. She could not stare at her enough, cataloging her features, committing them to memory. Sometimes the sheer depth and breadth of the way she loved her daughter made her cry. Sometimes it was the lack of sleep that did it.

But then, even that was far better than she’d been expecting.

Not because all of her friends had lied to her about what it was like in those first, tumultuous and overwhelming weeks, because they hadn’t. She was, as promised, sitting in a body that didn’t feel like hers with a piece of her forever outside herself now, which was an enduring heartache no matter how tempered by that fierce, deep love. Constance hadn’t slept well at first, because how could she sleep? There was a tiny, brand-new human who she was feeding every couple of hours and responsible for keeping alive, and it wasn’t that she hadn’t expected that she would have to do that. She’d tried to make sure her expectations were absolutely practical and realistic. It was just that she hadn’t fully understood how it would feel. As if, in a way, all the weight she’d put on during her pregnancy was to prepare her for the heavy weight of that responsibility ever after.

The truth of the matter was, she really had nothing to complain about when it came to sleeping or anything else.

Because Anax had taken her to the hospital, produced a judge, and then had not left...but had somehow managed to walk the line between involving himself in what was happening, without her feeling as if he was intruding. By the time it came time to actually push for Natalia’s birth, she no longer cared who crowded into the room. The only thing she’d been able to concentrate on was the searing pain of it that was matched with her effort, and then, at last, that wriggling, absolutely perfect baby girl in her arms at last.

She had looked up at some point during that first meeting with her daughter— her daughter —and had caught Anax’s dark gray gaze on her from across the room.

Now, weeks later, Constance still shivered at that memory.

She told herself she didn’t know why. Possibly it was the embarrassment she hadn’t felt at the time—that she had been in such a state in the presence of a man who, she was sure, was never in any kind of state himself.

A man she didn’t know.

A man who had no place whatsoever in her life, except for the fact that clinic—that had gone out of business abruptly, she’d learned a few days after the birth—had tangled them together, permanently.

A man she was fairly sure she dreamed about, on the rare occasions she slept deep enough to dream.

Though it had taken her some while after Natalia’s birth to remember that she really had actually married him. As the days passed, that decision became more and more opaque to her. She assumed she’d been overwrought by the nativity play and her role in it, and had decided it was the least she could do for a man in his situation, his material apparently stolen by a vengeful woman.

She had a lot of follow-up questions about said vengeful woman, actually, and the practical considerations involved in stealing material of that sort, but six weeks on, she had not seen Anax since the birth. When she’d gone home from the hospital, she had been greeted at her own front door by a smiling, cheerful woman of indeterminate age who had explained that she had been sent by Mr. Ignatios to pitch in where she could.

And what she was, it turned out, was a miracle.

Every time Constance turned around, the laundry was done, the dishes were washed, and the things she’d been about to look for were there before her, clean and ready for use. Maria was up at all hours, never seemed to need to sleep, and made the first six weeks of Natalia’s life as close to easy as it could get for a first-time mother with a newborn.

Though Constance chose not to say such things to her friends. That would lead too quickly to questions she didn’t want to answer.

If it hadn’t been for Maria’s presence in her house, she might have imagined that she’d fantasized the entire encounter with Anax and his sister in the church. Maybe it was a little-known pregnancy complication—wild delusions of marriage when, really, she’d been stuck on a bale of hay in the midst of a sea of toddler meltdowns and looks from her neighbors and old high school classmates that ranged from pitying to condemning.

What single mother wouldn’t make up the whole surprise appearance of her baby’s father?

Constance laid the baby down for her midmorning nap. She considered whether or not she’d like to take a nap herself, and sat on the couch in a heap of indecision when there was a smart knock on her front door.

Peremptory. Intense.

And she knew before she went to open the front door that it was him.

She knew she hadn’t made anything up.

But still, she was unprepared.

Because Anax Ignatios stood there, in all his glory, in a way that made her want to shift and fidget like one of the little kids she tried to teach how to stand still.

“Oh,” Constance said, though that felt inadequate. She tried again, but all she came up with was, “Hello.”

He continued to gaze at her, then inclined his head in the direction of the house behind her. The house she was unconsciously blocking him from entering, despite the February weather.

“Perhaps you haven’t noticed,” he said in that rough, intensely dark and stirring voice of his that she understood had been echoing around inside her all this time, especially when she slept and dreamed, “but it is extremely cold out here.”

“Of course it is. I’m sorry.” She still couldn’t seem to move for a moment, and that dark brow of his inched up higher, drawing even more attention to those smoky gray eyes of his. She had to force herself to step back, because her body did not seem to want to pay the slightest bit of attention to the order she gave it and she did not know what to make of that.

Just like she didn’t know what to do with... herself . She was wearing what she considered a perfectly reasonable outfit for a brand-new mother with a six-week-old baby. Sweats. A T-shirt too faded and soft to read. Her hair piled on top of her head. And now, she couldn’t think of anything else but how wretched she must look—

Except, of course, the last time he’d seen her she’d been wearing the cloak of the Virgin Mary, covered in hay.

Constance reminded herself that there was absolutely no reason to assume this man even noticed what she looked like, then or now. She took solace in that.

He moved past her, very nearly nudging her as he went to take off his magnificently sleek coat and hang it next to her puffy parka on the pegs in the hall. Their coats, together like that, struck her as an almost unbearable intimacy. Though how on earth she thought there was something intimate between her and this man while she had baby sick on one shoulder and undefined stains everywhere else, was a delusion all its own.

“How is our daughter?” Anax asked, in that way of his that sent sensation spinning through her and around her—but was also clarifying.

The baby .

He was here about the baby, obviously .

There was no other reason that a man like this would be anywhere near her, or Halburg, or possibly the entirety of the Midwest. She beckoned for him to follow her and then she was entirely too aware of him, prowling there behind her. Somehow silent on the old wood floors even though the faintest hint of the scent of him danced all around, teasing her senses. It made her think of cloves. And something else, something decadent and haunting, like a dark liqueur.

She led him into the little sitting room where Maria had set up a bassinet and Constance was known to nap, occasionally. Or lie there the whole time with her eyes squeezed shut, ordering herself to sleep when the baby sleeps like everyone else did.

Then she was standing next to Anax as he looked down at his daughter— their daughter —and found herself flooded with a kind of emotion she wasn’t sure she’d ever felt before.

Constance snuck a look at him while her poor heart pounded hard in her chest.

He gripped the edge of the bassinet and gazed down at tiny little Natalia, who slept on her back with her little fists by her head and that sprinkling of dark hair on her head. She looked so much like her father it hurt, and as strange as all this was—this delusion that wasn’t a delusion at all—Constance found she couldn’t hate it. Maybe as time went on she would regret the circumstances that had brought her here, who knew, but right now she felt a fierce, primal sort of joy that she could look at the daughter she’d brought into the world and look beside her to see the man who had stamped her with his own dark beauty.

“She is beautiful,” he whispered, the words sounding like an oath.

“She is,” Constance agreed. “And more beautiful every day.”

And when there came the sound of someone approaching behind them, they both started slightly. As if they’d been caught doing something...indiscreet.

Though Constance forgot about that strange moment almost at once, and the lingering heat it left behind inside her, because cheerful, bright Maria was bustling into the room holding a tray aloft.

“I took the liberty of making a light lunch,” she said, because of course she had. “I’m sure you’re both hungry. And this will make it easier to concentrate on the things you have to talk about.”

And before she knew it, really, Constance found herself sitting on her own sofa, eating little sandwiches and trying not to stare too much at the man who took the chair across from her. It was her grandfather’s chair. Grandpa Abe had not been precious about it and it wasn’t as if Constance had kept it empty in some kind of vigil for him, but still. It made her feel prickly inside to see another man sitting there.

But not the sort of prickly that led to anger, she understood in the next moment. She was still feeling that heat. As if merely being in this man’s presence left her... flushed .

“How are you holding up?” Anax asked her, the very soul of courtesy.

She doubted he wished to hear about her flush. “Very well,” Constance said instead, trying to match his tone. “Maria is a godsend. I couldn’t manage without her. Thank you.”

“It is nothing.”

He did not eat, she noticed. She was not entirely convinced that Anax Ignatios suffered the pangs of humanity or mortality that everyone else did. Perhaps he was above such things. Perhaps the demands of flesh and blood were beneath him.

She had thought that her impression of him, like some dark angel at the back of the nativity play, had been more of that same fever dream of a near-birth delusion. But if anything, she discovered, she had been underplaying the situation in her memory.

His beauty was almost brutal. It was a shock to her system. She felt uncomfortable , and too hot, that was how intensely attractive he was. Today he was wearing boots, jeans, and a sweater. It should have been unremarkable. But it was obvious that each one of those items was breathtakingly well-made, and no doubt priced accordingly. Or, more likely, made to his precise specifications.

It was also obvious at a glance that he was not from around here. That he was not even from this country. It took her a long moment to understand that it had something to do with how he was wearing that particular sweater, with its high collar. It had something to do with how he sat. With how he held himself. The sophistication in even his smallest gesture and the hint of Europe sunk deep into the fabrics that clothed him.

Another thing that felt ridiculous even to think, but that didn’t make it less true.

“I’m afraid that most of what happened on Christmas is a blur,” Constance said into the silence since she was terribly afraid that he would see right through her to all these likely offensive thoughts she was having about him. “I’m not sure I thanked you.”

“I am not the one who was busy delivering a human being into this world,” he replied at once, and yet something about the way he said that scraped at her, just slightly. It was the perfect thing to say, of course. It was lovely, even.

Yet there was something in his tone. There was something about that careful way he regarded her as he spoke. Maybe it was the stillness in him and the way he sat there, as if he was...waiting. If he was holding himself back —

Constance thought then that really, she needed to figure out a way to spend more time outside of this house before she really did lose the plot entirely.

“What I don’t understand,” she continued, because she was determined to talk her way out of this. Whatever this was. “Or, I guess, what I missed , is how you got anyone to marry us on Christmas Eve in the first place.”

“I am very persuasive.”

“I suppose you’d have to be, to get a judge to do anything, much less on such short notice. It probably wasn’t legal anyway, because—”

“It was legal.” There was something, then, about the way his mouth nearly curved. It seemed to scrape its way down the length of her spine. “That you can depend upon. My sister, in addition to her many other charms, is something of a legal scholar. She prides herself on being the final word in such things.”

Constance opened her mouth to say something like She seemed like a lawyer , but thought better of it. And then was glad she hadn’t started speaking, because she would have swallowed the words whole.

Because Anax stood and pulled a small pouch out of his pocket. She stared, unable to imagine what he could be holding there—and so she was completely unprepared when he tipped the pouch over and two rings landed in his palm with a soft, metallic sound.

“I took the liberty of finding some jewelry for this purpose.” Anax’s face was unreadable.

Constance worried that her face was anything but. “Jewelry?”

He set the rings down before her decisively, one clink and then the next. She stared down at them, sitting there on the coffee table that had sat in this living room for as long as she could remember. Though she was sure it had never been set with two gleaming rings of what she felt certain was platinum, one with an exquisite solitaire and the other etched in a sort of pattern she felt certain was desperately fancy. She’d never seen anything like it before.

“Rings do not seem like a little legal matter,” she heard herself saying, almost desperately. “They seem... Like something else.”

His gaze found hers and she watched as his lips curved again, and she found it...

Well. She wasn’t sure what it was but once more, it wasn’t a smile.

Yet in the next moment, she doubted herself. She didn’t know this man. Maybe this was his smile, like the calm before a storm.

“Consider it a point of clarification, nothing more,” he said after a moment, his gray eyes even smokier than before. “And a token of my esteem, if you will. You have given me a daughter, Constance. You don’t need to wear the rings if you do not like them. Consider it a gesture of celebration, nothing more.”

She thought about that quite a lot, after he left.

Weeks turned into months. Natalia changed so much that it seemed impossible to keep up with and yet Constance knew she was so little, so new, and had so far to go. Iowa winters were long and grueling, but she took advantage of every hint of decent weather she could. She bundled up the baby and went outside. To breathe. To move. To not stay in her house.

To walk down the length of her driveway to the main road, and sometimes into what passed for town.

Slowly, she started to feel like herself again.

Six months on, Constance was starting to not feel quite so panicked about things. She was grateful that Grandma Dorothy had taught her how to economize, as she’d been able to take a lovely, long maternity leave. She’d been able to spend all winter and the whole of the spring getting used to her new life.

And longer still if she’d taken Anax’s offer of a hefty bank account to use as she pleased...but she’d declined. He could create all the bank accounts he liked for Natalia, but she wasn’t a charity case. Dorothy Jones would haunt her personally if she’d decided otherwise just because a gorgeous man was offering.

She’d be tempted to haunt herself.

“Lovely day,” Brandt Goss said to her one day in June.

The weather had gone too quickly into the summer heat for Constance’s peace of mind, though that might have been because she had a six-month-old strapped to her wherever she went. Today she had decided that she could pick up a few things at the Goss grocery, and get a walk in while she was doing it.

As ever, she had not been thinking about Brandt. Until it was too late.

“It’s been a very pretty spring,” Constance said, the way she would have replied to anyone.

But she should have known better, because Brandt shook his head, almost sorrowfully. “I’m sorry to hear this decision, Constance. Though it is only to be expected.”

Natalia was singing nonsense words to herself. Constance smiled, and didn’t ask Brandt to just ring up her three items already. “I’m sorry. I have no idea what you mean.”

“The church.” When she only stared back at him, he made a clucking sound that she found...deeply insincere. “Why, the nursery school. There was a vote, Constance. No one feels that it’s appropriate to let you continue teaching nursery school. They’re so impressionable at that age, you know. We wouldn’t want to give them the wrong message.”

“You mean, messages about loving people for who they are, Christian charity, that sort of thing?” Constance shot back.

“You’re an unwed mother.” He didn’t bother smiling then.

And Constance felt something almost alien take her over, it was so unlike her. She leaned in rather than smiling and walking away. As if she was Dorothy Jones’s granddaughter after all. “I don’t know how to tell you this, because I’m sure that it will spoil the glee you’ve been taking in what you think is my downfall, but I’m not an unwed mother. Natalia has a father. And I married him before she was born.”

And to underscore it, she pulled on the chain she’d taken to wearing around her neck, so that the rings stayed close to her. Because they seemed so fancy, she’d thought. And she couldn’t wear them. Just think of all the mundane things she did with her decidedly country hands. Like changing diapers. Or cooking. Or simply existing in the world, in Halburg, Iowa.

“See?” She shook the rings so that the diamond gleamed. “I’m sorry to disappoint you. Perhaps you need to return to the nursery school yourself, Brandt. We can talk about things like casting the first stone.”

And that was so satisfying that it fueled her all the way home, where she immediately regretted the rashness of her actions. Because once her phone started ringing, it didn’t stop. Everyone wanted to know if it was true, and why hadn’t she told anyone, and was that why those big black SUVs were sometimes seen around town. Rumor had it that old Charlie Hannon had just been having those fits of his again.

Constance didn’t know how to answer them. Because Anax had taken to dropping in with some regularity over the past six months, though he never did it unexpectedly again. He always gave Maria notice. He came, he saw the baby. He usually exchanged a few words with Constance, it was always strange and intense, and then he left again.

This time, she knew, she was going to have to confess to him that she’d let their secret out of the bag.

“What secret?” he asked when he arrived a few days later.

“The marriage,” she said, and she wouldn’t say it was comfortable , now, to stand in her house and feel the immensity of him and that force of his that filled every room. But she’d grown more accustomed to him even so.

Today he’d arrived as usual and Natalia had been awake and in one of her smiley happy moods, clapping her hands and blowing raspberries. Her dark hair was getting longer. She looked more and more like her father by the moment.

Constance had picked her up, gone over, and thrust her into her father’s arms.

Natalia went to him with such delight that Constance lost the thread of the conversation entirely for a moment or so.

What was it about watching him care for their daughter? Why did it seem to wrap around her like that—so tightly she sometimes lay awake at night, unwinding those strings?

When she remembered herself again, she didn’t tell him that her friends had been none-too-pleased to hear that she’d been keeping secrets. That was her business. But the rest... “It’s just that Brandt Goss is everything that people imagine a small town is, and I hate it. Small-minded, moralistic, and always telling everyone else how to live. I shouldn’t have said anything about you. I’m sorry.”

“Why?” Anax asked. He looked over at her, and the open expression he wore for Natalia...shifted.

He was dressed in a more summery version of his usual sleek outfit. Jeans. A lighter shirt. Shoes that looked rugged and yet sophisticated at once.

But he looked at her the way he had in church last Christmas Eve.

“Why?” she echoed.

Anax returned to studying Natalia. The baby was studying him back. They both looked solemn, but his grip on her seemed firm. He settled her on his knee and she smiled at him, and then they were both smiling, and something in Constance seemed to...roll hard, and then keep on rolling.

“Why are you sorry? We are married. It is fact.” His dark gaze found hers again, a quiet storm. “I have found that it is a deep waste of time, Constance, to trouble myself with apologies. You should not bother with them either.”

She couldn’t have said why that felt so much like a chastisement. But it did.

That kept her awake, too.

For weeks and weeks.

More months rolled by and soon enough it was fall again. Her favorite season and this year she got to enjoy it with Natalia, who seemed like such a big girl to her now. She was so alert and interested, into everything, and very much her own little personality. Constance also got to be done with summer, which had been less fun.

Because while fielding the usual confusing interactions with Anax, Constance had been on a local damage control tour.

Her friends had all expressed amazement and betrayal, repeatedly, that she hadn’t told them anything about her lightning-quick wedding on Christmas Eve. Most of it joking—but not all of it. She’d had to explain that she still wasn’t all that sure she hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing.

Well, Kelly had said with a laugh, those rings sure look real . Mike could never.

The town found it harder to take. Or maybe it was that Constance had been na?ve. She had truly believed that because she was her , people would accept what she was doing. What she’d done. She wondered if maybe they would have, if she hadn’t thrown Anax into the mix. After all, she was hardly the first single mother in Halburg. And for all Brandt’s big talk that day in the store, the fact was, they didn’t have anyone else for the nursery school. During the months she’d taken off, it had floundered—because Constance was the only one who’d ever been so dedicated to it.

If she hadn’t said anything about Anax, she could have become another one of those stories people told around here.

Always a bit of an odd bird, they’d say. She lived with her old grandma all those years. Then she went and got herself a baby, but not the old-fashioned way. She did it on an exam table.

But there was her mysterious husband. And her rings. And the fact that folks knew, now, that Anax kept turning up, but Constance never brought him around so people could get a look at him. It was a mystery that had kept everyone buzzing straight on through September.

What it was not, she supposed, was grandmotherly. Maybe that was what everyone found unforgivable.

Tonight was one of the town’s harvest festivals. There were those that liked Halloween and those that hated it, but like most things in Halburg, everyone got a bit of what they wanted in the end. They called it a harvest festival, but there was trick-or-treating up and down the street, and half the town made no bones about the fact that all the decorations were Halloween-based.

Constance had dressed herself as a chicken and Natalia as a cutely cracked egg, and she felt that they were obviously the cutest joint costume around. As well as a little bit of pointed commentary. Grandma Dorothy would have cackled.

She walked with Kelly and should have been having a good time, but she couldn’t seem to get past all the whispers that followed around after her.

“I hate that people are talking about me,” she said, shaking her head when her friend looked at her with a query in her gaze. “I really do.”

“You decided to have an interesting life,” Kelly said, and laughed. “That’s on you. You could have very easily coasted along the way you were. You could have kept your head down and no one would’ve had a bad word to say about you. But then, you wouldn’t have Natalia, would you? Or a mysterious husband whose name you won’t even share with your friends.”

“That’s in case it’s really a delusion,” Constance replied, grinning over her chicken feathers. “It would be so embarrassing if it turned out I made myself an imaginary friend, wouldn’t it? I’d be worse than Charlie Hannon and his conspiracy theories.”

As she said that, she felt a stir behind her on the main street they’d blocked off to traffic, not that there was ever much in the way of actual congestion in Halburg. Still, everyone in the county was out in the streets tonight, enjoying the cool, clear night. Constance told herself it was that chill in the air that prickled over her, the cold creeping in. Winter on its way.

Even though the sort of string she untangled nightly after one of Anax’s visits seemed to pull tight around the center of her.

Beside her, Kelly’s eyes got round and she stopped muttering threats in the direction of her misbehaving, sugared-up children.

“I don’t think you have to worry about your imaginary friend, Constance,” she said in tones of awe.

“That’s what I love about you,” Constance said merrily. Or maybe hopefully. “Always so accepting.”

“That’s not it,” Kelly replied. “He’s here.”

“What?” But as she asked that, she was turning.

And it was like something out of the sort of dreams she pretended she didn’t have on those nights she pretended she didn’t have trouble sleeping in the first place.

She turned and he was there, striding through the crowd as if he didn’t see all the people who leaped out of his way.

Maybe he didn’t. As far as she could tell, his gaze seemed to be trained entirely on her.

There was a lump in Constance’s throat. Her mouth was dry. And every single part of her body, a body that was only starting to feel like hers again and even more so when he was near, lit up immediately.

Like she was nothing but a pile of Christmas lights, jumping too soon into the season.

“Anax,” she said when he stopped before her, all that force and mastery of his beating back the night.

She could tell that something had changed. There was something about the way he was looking at her, something...but it couldn’t be possessive, could it? Why would he look at her like that?

“Koritsi,” he said, as if that was her name, and there was no mistaking the thread in his voice then, that dark current of victory. Triumph. It was lighting up his eyes. There was something dark in it, something compelling. “I have come to take you home.”