Page 14 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

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.TheDot and Dottiecurse 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 thatthings were happeninginside 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’seyelashes.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 wouldfeel.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 actuallymarriedhim. 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, hismaterialapparently stolen by a vengeful woman.

She had a lot of follow-up questions about said vengeful woman, actually, and the practical considerations involved instealing materialof 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 motherwouldn’tmake up the whole surprise appearance of her baby’s father?

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