Greek’s Christmas Heir

Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

“I’ M ALREADY HOME ,” Constance told him, though her voice was a bit faint and her eyes were wide. Always so wide and wondering in that mesmerizing shade, and Anax had waited long enough for this. Too long.

He took full advantage of her surprise. Of her wide-eyed stare . He nudged her aside as she did not quite gape at him, taking hold of the stroller with a curt nod to what he assumed was her friend. Though the other woman, mouth actually ajar, melted off almost immediately as if even she could sense the truth.

That this was a trap that he had set a long time ago and though he had let it run its course, it had done so. Now he was finished playing.

Though that, perhaps, was a little much to imagine was being transmitted to this parade, or whatever it was, that had brought out so many children and adults in various forms of questionable fancy dress.

Constance was the wife of one of the wealthiest men alive. Yet she appeared to be dressed as a barnyard animal.

He did not ask why. Nor what possessed her. He started walking back toward her house, pushing the stroller as he went. And he did not mind that she had to hurry—feathers aquiver—to keep up with his long strides.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” she said as she went, frowning up at him as if she couldn’t decide whether to be annoyed or anxious.

“Yes,” Anax agreed, with a dark sort of laugh. “That has been quite apparent for some time.”

“Excuse me?”

But he didn’t answer.

Maria, the spy he’d installed from the start because he was good at the games he played, had told him all about Constance’s plans for the night and he’d decided that it would be the perfect opportunity to put an end—at last—to these trips all the way out into this hinterland. He had married her, securing his heir and locking her down in ways he doubted she could even imagine. Then he had spent ten months making certain that there was no possible legal loophole for her to wiggle out of, assuming she ever comprehended the danger she was in.

He had managed to secure both her and his daughter against any attempts to separate them.

Forever.

Though everyone agreed it would be far easier all around if Constance and the baby were not off in the abyss of America. Anax had agreed—but he had not achieved the success he had in life by failing to use the best weapons he had to hand.

Like, for example, lulling an opponent into a false sense of security to make sure that when he made his move, he could do so with surgical precision.

Maria was taking care of packing up the house. Vasiliki was overseeing the arrangements. All he had to do was get Constance onto his plane.

Anax had no doubt that he could. And once he did, once she was handled , he could put an end to the unacceptable fascination he could not seem to shake when it came to this woman.

He had it all planned out. He would install them on an island he owned in the Aegean, having bought it purely because it was the sort of unimaginable thing he’d never have believed was possible back when he was a boy. But now it was the perfect place to install a wife and a child.

If he took them to Athens, he would need to announce their existence to the world, sooner or later. And he was not certain that was something he wished to do. Not now. Not yet. It didn’t matter if her neighbors here had been told she was married. It wasn’t as if that Brandt Goss character could alter world events with a single phone call, or at all.

Anax’s world was very different from what passed for life in Halburg, Iowa.

Until he decided how best to hard launch the fact of his marriage and the existence of his daughter, he needed Constance to stay out of view.

His view, specifically.

Particularly while dressed like a chicken , he thought as he pushed the stroller down the dark street. But there was no need to engage with that. With a patently absurd costume that cast aspersions on the Ignatios name by virtue of a member of his family parading around in it in full view of whoever cared to look—

Once she was in his grasp, he reminded himself, and settled in on an island that she could not leave without his permission, she could dress however she liked. With his compliments.

He could see his child as often as he wished, the lack of which had eaten him alive in all these months of carefully spaced-out visits so as not to alarm Constance or alert her to his ultimate goals. He could live his life as he always had, in accordance with his wishes and his schedule, not Constance’s.

“Are those my things?” she asked from his heels as he reached her house. Even Constance, who he had noticed seemed perfectly capable of not noticing the obvious things before her, could recognize her own suitcases as they were loaded into one of the cars. “What on earth is going on?”

“I’ll tell you,” he said, with a swift look in her direction. “But we must hurry.”

And Anax was no liar. He prided himself on that. Lies had always been his father’s department.

But that didn’t mean he was required to guide Constance away from jumping to the wrong conclusion. He saw the way she frowned at his security team. He watched her swallow, hard. If he had to guess, she was recalling the great many things his sister had said about his massive wealth and creating a narrative out of that. A whole story about why he would have to use his security team to pack them up in a hurry.

Then again, maybe she was simply that obedient. Either way, she did not put up any kind of fight. She settled Natalia into the car seat that was waiting in the SUV, crawled in after her, and didn’t ask him another thing until they had boarded his plane.

Something that took her longer than it should have, as she’d had to wrestle her great chicken-feathered crest up the jetway and in through the door.

“Are we actually flying somewhere?” she asked with an odd note in her voice when the plane began to bump along the tarmac.

“But of course.” Anax settled into his comfortable seat across from her. Maria had taken Natalia off to one of the staterooms to see if she would go down for a nap. Constance, he noticed, was sitting in a rigid sort of posture in her seat, her hands clamped down hard on her armrests. “Why else would we go to the trouble of boarding a plane?”

“I don’t know. I thought it was some...rich person thing. Maybe it’s bulletproof. Maybe it’s a bomb shelter. How would I know?”

“I think you’re describing one of those loud and overbright superhero movies. I do not wear a costume.” It was possible he overemphasized the I in that sentence. “My plane is a plane, nothing more.”

“That’s a pity. I thought that’s why we were getting on it. To keep us safe?”

“After a fashion.” He studied her as the plane gained speed on the runway. More specifically, the way the color drained from her face. “Constance. Tell me. Have you never flown before?”

“Certainly not,” she belted out in something of a high-pitched voice. “If human beings were meant to fly they would have wings themselves. That’s what my grandma Dorothy always said and it always seemed like reasonable advice to me.” The plane leaped from the ground into its initial ascent, and she yelped. Actually yelped. “Besides, where would I fly to?”

Anax almost allowed himself a smile. “Right now we are flying to Greece.”

He had built himself up to this moment, he could admit that. He had decided it was a victory worth seeking. That he must win at all costs. And so he had.

But now that it happened just the way he’d planned it, it didn’t change the fact that he was still fascinated by this woman. These months that he had told himself he needed simply to get through had made him...more aware of her. He knew things about her now that only someone who had shared space with her could. The way she looked when she woke, dreamy-eyed and a little bit wild. The little songs she sang to Natalia to lull her to sleep. The way she laughed in sheer delight when the baby squealed out her excitement. The way she looked when she curled up on the sofa and slept, still glowing the way she had in that church when he’d first set eyes on her.

His fascination with her only grew.

And it seemed even more extreme just now.

She was dressed like a pale, rigid chicken. And yet that yelp got to him. It made him...

He didn’t know what it was, that softening in his chest. That worrisome warmth.

“That’s ridiculous,” she shot back at him. He watched her whip her head around to look out the window, then whip it back so quickly that the chicken beak that poked out from her forehead didn’t quite make it all the way back with her. And sat there, forlornly askew, as she frowned at him. “Why would we go to Greece? And more importantly, I don’t have a passport. They’re only going to send me back.”

The warmth inside him intensified at this indication that even now, while scared and quite literally out of her depth, she was still concerned with the practicalities.

The fascination was bad enough, he lectured himself. Surely he did not need to admire her.

“I think you do not understand what it means to be a man in my position,” he said, quietly enough. Because he could afford to be magnanimous in victory. No matter what strange sensations were battling it out in his chest, sending the strangest sensations deep into the center of his rib cage. “Your passport has been taken care of, obviously.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and he watched her chest move rapidly, beneath what looked like a pillowcase with feathers stuck on. It occurred to him that he had seen this woman in a full-on, committed sort of costume more than he’d ever seen...anyone else in costume, ever. Even at the various masquerades and fancy-dress events he’d attended, it was always with the sort of people who expected that a gesture toward the idea of a costume would do the work for them.

That wasn’t what Constance was doing at all. She wasn’t dressed like a sexy devil, or any of the similar not-quite costumes that he’d seen in his time at the sort of parties he’d attended, where women tended to use the fancy dress requirement as an excuse to expose themselves as much as possible.

Constance wasn’t vamping it up. She didn’t look like a sex pot, which wasn’t to say she wasn’t sexy in her way. Mostly, however, he was forced to admit that she looked... cute .

As she sat across from him, pulling in breaths and letting them out, hard, Anax had no choice but to ask himself when he’d ever before considered a woman cute .

He hadn’t. It didn’t require any deep consideration.

Cute was the sort of word that applied to puppies and kittens, and possibly his own daughter when she smiled at him or simply existed . But not a woman .

Or not any other woman.

Just this one.

He was frowning back at her when she finally opened her eyes again, fixing him with that grave, smoky quartz gaze.

An upgrade from cute , he thought, though it seemed that when it came to Constance, it was all tangled up into one. Into her.

“This is not a security situation, is it?” Her voice sounded calm. As if she’d never made that high-pitched noise. Though he noticed she did not look out the windows again. “You wanted me to think it was.”

“My darling wife,” he said, leaning back in his seat the way he did when the negotiations finally opened and the thrill of his imminent win moved over him like sweet, Greek sunshine, “I cannot possibly control what it is you think or do not think.”

She did not so much as blink. “I don’t understand.”

“Natalia is just starting to walk,” he said, very calmly. “You have had these ten months with her. I have had visits . I was happy to let this continue for a time, to encourage the bond that any mother and child must have, but that time has now passed. You are my wife and she is my child. Both of you therefore belong with me, in Greece.”

To her credit, she did not break down.

Though...maybe he wanted her to. Maybe his pulse picked up the way it did because she didn’t respond the way he’d expected she would. He was forced to remember that this was the woman who had gone into labor while standing quietly in a nursery school classroom in the back of a church, and had married him in between contractions. Why had he imagined anything he did could affect her when those things had not seemed to?

Her gaze was grave, and not so wide. “You said our marriage was a legality, nothing more.”

“You have a choice, of course.” Anax inclined his head. “I am a reasonable man. You are welcome to remain in your quiet little town forevermore, with my blessing. All you need do to achieve this is, naturally, sign over your parental rights.”

At that, she cracked. But she didn’t burst into tears or scream, as he’d half expected. Constance actually laughed instead, throwing back her head as if the hilarity was so great that she could not contain it.

“You must have lost your grip on reality entirely,” she said after a moment, wiping at her eyes beneath the chicken beak, that seemed to point his way now in some kind of condemnation. “I assume these strong-arm tactics work in whatever it is that you do for a living, but I’m a real person. Not a billionaire. Not someone who has planes to fly around in, and whatever it was your sister was talking about that night.” She laughed again. “Your real estate portfolio , wasn’t it? I don’t have a portfolio. I have one very old house that’s been paid off for years. I have an ancient car that doesn’t much like the winters anymore, but I keep it going just the same. I have friends and neighbors I’ve known all my life.” She’d sounded as if she was warming to the topic but she seemed to slow a bit then, though her chin lifted. “Things might have changed a bit over the last year or so, but things are always going to change. What will never change is that I have a home, and my daughter will live there. With me.”

He held her gaze. He waited until her chin sank down a notch.

“That time in your life is over,” he said. Softly, but matter-of-factly. “I am sorry if this distresses you, but that is not a factor in what must happen now.”

There was a different sort of color in her cheeks now, a flush to match the red chicken comb on the hooded thing she wore. “I never agreed to this.”

“I have not asked for your agreement,” he replied with a shrug. “You married a very wealthy and powerful man, Constance. It was made very clear to you that you were giving birth to my heir. There was only one way this was ever going to end. Are you so na?ve that you thought otherwise? I can’t believe it.”

“I don’t think it’s na?ve to believe that a person’s word matters,” she shot back. “Apparently you don’t share that belief.”

“I am a man of honor,” he told her darkly, not at all sure why he should bristle at the notion she thought otherwise. “But I did not pledge my word to you. My pledge was to our daughter, who will be raised as the heiress she is. She will not spend her days wasting away as a nonentity in the back of beyond.”

“The back of beyond is a fantastic place to raise a child,” Constance shot back, a flash in her eyes and a new lift to that chin. “I should know. That’s where I was raised. That’s why I went to all the trouble of going to a clinic for IVF treatments so I could have a baby there myself. You have absolutely no right—”

“But that is where you are wrong,” he told her with a certain satisfaction. “I have all the rights. I have seen to it. Natalia bears my name. She already has dual citizenship. You cannot say the same. I believe you can submit an application for permanent residence in two years’ time. And then attempt to become a naturalized citizen some five years later. As long as you are my wife, that is.”

He didn’t have to issue the threat. It sat there, between them.

She looked down at her hands for a moment. A long moment, where all he could see was that red comb trembling slightly to indicate that she was, too. And when she looked up at him again, that gaze of hers was troubled.

He might have felt a sense of shame. If he had anything to be ashamed about.

“Ten months is a long time to pretend to be someone you’re not,” she said, very quietly, that gaze unwavering. “To pretend to be kind. To pretend you intended to work things out with me. Why would you bother if this was always going to be the end result? Are you truly that cruel?”

There was something about her that got under his skin and he didn’t like it. It was the way she looked at him, he thought, but dismissed it instantly.

Because he knew it was more than that.

It was the night she’d given birth. The way she’d worked and struggled to bring Natalia into the world and the truth was, he didn’t like to think of it. It was...too much.

Too raw. Too real. Too starkly emotional.

It was all the days he’d spent with her since. The accumulation of hours here and there. The night or two he’d stayed over in that odd little house, in a bare little room close enough to the attic that should have offended his every sensibility and yet had been... cozy. A word he had little experience with in his life.

It was the fact that he’d seen this woman in every possible state and still couldn’t shake his fascination with her. Up in the middle of the night, crooning to a fitful baby. Standing over her ancient coffee machine in the morning, bleary-eyed but still polite to him when he appeared.

He’d had entire affairs with women and seen less of them, less of their true selves, than he had of Constance.

And he liked Constance a good deal more than any of them.

But that was all in the realm of those feelings he preferred not to entertain. What good were they? What did they ever do but make bad situations worse?

“You want this to be about emotions,” he told her flatly. Dismissively. “But emotions have nothing to do with it. This is about money, but not money the way you must think of it, Constance. Not a credit card or a paid-off mortgage to a small house. Vast, near incalculable wealth. The kind of wealth that cannot be protected in a village so tiny that it has neither a stop sign nor place to eat.” He shook his head at that. “It is a wonder to me that anyone lives there at all.”

She did not laugh the way she had before. She was also not gripping the armrests the way she had been at first. Nor were her cheeks still a match for the chicken head she wore. Anax could not tell if that was progress or not.

“It would seem to me that a town like that is the perfect place for a little girl that no one knows exists,” Constance countered after a moment, still sounding calm. Very much the way she had in that schoolroom. Something about that poked at him, indicating he should pay attention, but then she kept talking and it was gone. “It’s a place where no one will look for her. There being no spotlights, photographers, or whatever it is that happens when rich people go to the same places rich people always go, and then complain that they have no privacy.”

He found himself tempted to smile again, somehow, and tamped that down. “I am not rich people in the way you mean. I made everything I have with my own two hands and my very own head.” Anax found himself warming to the topic, likely because he had only had this conversation with his reflection in the mirror until now. “My child will not have to fight for things the way that I did. I will see to it, personally. She will have the finest education. She will want for nothing, ever. She will never be used as a pawn. Not by me, not by you, and not by the kind of unscrupulous people who would happily hunt her down and do their best to use her as ransom.”

Constance looked alarmed at that, and he immediately regretted saying it to her. “Ransom? You think someone will kidnap her?”

“I don’t,” he replied, perhaps more tensely than necessary. “Because I have seen to it that she is no longer so exposed. You and she will take up residence on an island I own. I do not believe this will be much of a hardship for you, despite your protests. Perhaps you have heard that islands in the Aegean are widely praised for their beauty.”

But his dry tone was lost on her. “I don’t know how to swim,” she replied.

That took him back a moment. “You do not fly. You do not swim. What is it you do?”

A hint of laughter and temper alike flared in her gaze, but her voice was cool. “I live a very happy life in a landlocked place where, if I feel the need to splash out on an exciting trip, I can drive all the way to Chicago in a day. No flying or swimming required.”

“My daughter will know how to swim,” he said, scowling at her in astonishment that anyone could imagine it otherwise. “She is a Greek.”

“I understand you are a man used to things going a certain way,” Constance said then, and there was a new kind of urgency in her voice. A different sort of gravity in her gaze as she leaned forward. Even the chicken on the top of her head seemed stern, then. “I know a little more about you now than I did when you turned up at the nativity play. I read all about your history. I know some of your accomplishments. I also know that all of this is something that was done to you . I’m sorry for that.” She blew out a breath. “But I’m not the one who did it.”

That hit him, hard. And it shouldn’t have. He knew that already. Besides, he was not a vindictive man.

Are you not? asked a voice inside of him. Have you not effectively kidnapped your own wife and child?

He shoved the uncomfortable query aside. And in the next moment, he decided he was tired of this and stood. “I suggest you try to sleep,” he told Constance. “As you have never flown before, you will find it easier to handle the jet lag if you sleep now. You can, of course, ask the flight attendant for whatever you wish. The plane lacks for nothing.”

To his surprise she stood, too, catching herself with her hand in the back of her seat as if she thought the plane might topple her over by surprise though the flight was currently smooth. “You’re punishing me for something I had nothing to do with. How is that fair?”

And Anax noticed too many things, then. She was standing so close to him. Close enough that had he been a different man, or this a different situation, he might have reached over and hooked his palm over the back of her neck to tug her close. That he should even imagine doing such a thing was...odd.

For a number of reasons, but high among them the fact that she was still dressed as a chicken.

He didn’t know what to make of that. It confounded him.

And yet once he’d started thinking this way, it was all he could think about. Anax found himself looking at her differently as they stood there. Or perhaps it was that Natalia was not in the room.

He could not recall the last time that had happened. It had not been for a great many months.

Yet the woman standing before him in a feather-covered pillowcase and a chicken head hood, he could not help but notice, was no longer the outrageously pregnant Mother Mary in a stable in Bethlehem that he had met on Christmas Eve.

Her body shape had changed entirely since then. Had he not noticed it, despite the ways she fascinated him?

Or had he decided not to notice it?

She was now nicely rounded in all the best places, something he could not fail to notice even though he wished in this moment that he could. He noticed too much . He knew her breasts were heavy and round because she was still nursing their daughter. Perhaps he supposed her hips might always have flared like that. Perhaps she proved the point that a woman needed only to be herself, complete with a chicken suit , and that all the extraneous bells and whistles were unnecessary.

Anax was horrified. He had been too long without a woman, clearly. And even as he thought that, he tried to think how long it had actually been and...wasn’t sure.

He considered himself a man with healthy appetites, but he was also quite consciously not the monster some other men in his position were. After the situation with Delphine, he had decided he could no longer trust his instincts where those needs were concerned, so had stepped back until he thought he could be certain of the people he involved himself with again.

But he could not bring himself to calculate the actual amount of time it had been since he’d touched a woman, no matter how something whispered inside him that it had been since before Stavros had walked into his office with the news that would change his life.

All he knew was that he could not touch this one.

Not even when she was staring at him with a look of such utterly cute confusion that he had the strangest inclination that she had no idea what was happening between them.

That she might feel the same compulsion, the same shock of heat he did—but she didn’t know what it was.

Anax was forced to recall that in all the research his team had done on her, they had never uncovered even the hint of a man in her life. Not one hint.

Something in him roared then, deep and irrevocably male.

He was not certain he could tamp it down the way he should—

But he refused to be a man like that. He refused to give in to his urges. He knew where that led.

How often had he watched the way his father had treated his own mother?

Constance was clearly entirely unaware of the currents running there between them, obvious to any other naked eye. She stepped closer to him, heedlessly, and had to tilt her face up to keep looking at him so steadily.

That...did not help.

“I don’t want to be hidden away on some island,” she told him, and her voice was less steady than before, but still as grave. “How is that any better or any different from living in a small town no one’s ever heard of? If you must offer your protection, why can’t I stay in Iowa? Nothing happens in Halburg that everyone else doesn’t know about by dark.”

“I do not think that you know as much about human nature as you imagine.”

Anax knew he needed to step away from her. She was too close. She had freckles dusted across her cheeks and he hardly knew what to make of them. Or that he found them cute , as expected, despite the looming specter of the chicken suit —

But cute was not the word he would use to describe what happened inside of him when he dropped his gaze to her mouth.

Anax had never spent this much time talking to a woman he did not have a clearly defined relationship with. Either she was a subordinate, his sister, his poor sainted mother, or a potential bedmate. He had always kept them all in their separate boxes, where they belonged.

But his wife didn’t fit into any of those boxes.

He found he wanted to taste that mouth of hers more than he wanted to do anything else, including take his own next breath.

And he had never detested himself more than he did at that moment.

Anax moved away from her then, aware that he did it...jerkily. Almost roughly. He didn’t like the way she looked at him, surprised and confused.

He didn’t like any of this. He liked himself least of all.

“You and our daughter will have a lovely little life on the island,” he told her, and he sounded stiff. Too close to defensive for his liking, when he had no reason to feel that way. “I will be able to see Natalia more often. As a father should. And if, in time, you cannot reconcile yourselves to this arrangement, I have already told you. You are free to go.”

He turned to make his way toward the back of the plane and the stateroom he had made over into an office, so that he need not be in any particular geographic location to continue his business.

But he heard her, all the same.

“Over my dead body,” she said, very quietly and very, very surely, “will I ever be separated from my baby. If you believe nothing else, Anax, believe that.”

And he did believe it, he found—but the reaction that moved in him then, piercing deep and leaving marks, was something he did not intend to acknowledge.

So he left her there, because it was either that or abandon himself entirely. And he refused.

He would not be his father.

He refused.