Page 22 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

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 notrich peoplein 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 doneto 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 achicken.

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 hedecidednot 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 noticedtoo 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 achicken 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.

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