Page 10 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

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 heneededto. “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.”

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