Page 26 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

She decided that there was no earthly reason why she should sit there and break bread with a man she would, all things considered, prefer to throw things at. So why was she doing it? She had agreed to legalities for Natalia’s sake, not...dinner.

She stood up, regretting that she hadn’t made more of a production out of it when all he did was gaze back at her mildly.

“Have a lovely evening,” she told him. “I think, in future, I’ll have my meals sent straight up to my jail cell.”

And she felt that was satisfying, in its way. It didn’t matter if Anax responded or not, what mattered is that she felt little more control than before. The only thing shecouldcontrol was herself, so that was what she would do.

But he kept coming back.

Despite her claims, she did not take all of her meals in her room. For one thing, it was hardly a jail cell. It was luxurious in the extreme, past the point of embarrassment. She spent enough time in that room as it was. Why sign up for more?

Not that she intended to tell him that.

Besides, she liked that view.

“Does this constitute a prison break?” Anax asked one night when she came down to find him sitting at the table as if he did that all on his own, whether she was there or not. She didn’t care to examine the strange sort of feeling that gave her, deep inside.

“How could it?” she asked lightly. “When the warden is still here?”

He let out a low sort of laugh at that, she detested herself at once, because there was no pretending that laugh didn’t affect her. She told herself it was another affront, but that was a lie. That was not at all the way the sound of it felt as it danced over her and through her.

But then, all of it felt odd. Sitting there,eating, felt like an unbearable intimacy.

Everything was inside out with this man. He had watched her give birth. She was married to him. Yet they had never so much as kissed. They had nevertouched.

They shared a daughter, but nothing else.

And yet she sat there as if they were, at the very least, friends of some sort. She told him about the successful weaning process she had just gone through with Natalia. She told him how she felt both liberated and nostalgic at this indication that their child was already growing up.

What astounded her more was that he was easy to talk to.

Shockingly so—when they were discussingher.

“I thought I read that you came from some pretty humble beginnings,” she said when the first and second courses had been taken away. Anax was playing with the potent, dark coffee it somehow did not surprise her he favored after a meal. Constance felt overexposed, having talked too much aboutweaningto a man who was, factually, the father of the child in question.

But it had still felt a bit shocking to bediscussing her breasts, essentially, with...some man.

And she didn’t think she’d read that about his childhood. She knew she had.

“That is a very sanitized way to describe it,” Anax said, after she’d started to wonder if he would reply at all. He did not look at her. It was as if he suddenly found his coffee fascinating. “I come from a long line of regrettable human beings who made their lives a misery, and made certain to pass that misery on to everyone in their orbit. This misery was always coupled with various addictions, very little money, and vanishingly small goodwill. So yes, I suppose you could call thathumble.”

That was supposed to shame her into ending the conversation, she thought. Or that line of inquiry, anyway, but it didn’t. “I suppose we were poor,” Constance said, almost musingly. “But no one ever called it that. And everyone around us seemed to be in the same state. So comparatively speaking, we always seemed fine.” She considered. “My parents were both teachers. When I was little, we lived in my grandparents’ furnished basement, which I thought was absolutely delightful. We all played games together, to see who could cut the most coupons and have the most money saved at the end of the week. When my grandfather died, he left the house to my father and the new game we played was to see how quickly we could pay the rest of the mortgage down. I never thought of these things as stuff poor people did. It was just whatwedid.”

“What you are describing would have been a dream come true for me,” Anax told her, in that same low voice, though he raised his gaze to hers. And she found herself somehow unable to move. Scarcely able to breathe. “My father was usually drunk. We preferred it if he was paralytic. That way we could pour him into bed and there would be significantly less violence. But we were rarely so lucky. My mother didn’t make up games to play, she made do. It was a blessing when the old man died, in a gutter, as had always been his fate.”

Constance studied him, not sure why that look on his face didn’t warn her off the way it would any wise woman, surely. Instead, it made something inside her chest feel...softer. It was the way his eyes had gone from smoke to steel. It was the set to his jaw.

It was how hard she found it to breathe, still.

“My parents died when I was sixteen,” she said quietly, because breathing seemed an indulgence. While telling him her story seemed...imperative. It occurred to her that she hadn’t told anyone this story before, because where she came from everyone already knew. Somehow that made it both more difficult to breathe and more important that she speak. Her belly trembled from the force of both. “They were driving home from a weekend in Iowa City. They liked to go every now and again. Listen to some lectures, see some art, meet up with some friends. They both grew up in and around Halburg and knew each other, but didn’t start dating until college. And it’s a bit of a drive home, but they’d done it a million times before. Even in the snow. You have to come to terms with driving in the snow or you don’t go anywhere all winter.” It mattered that he was listening intently. That he did not interrupt, or even look away. “But that night there was a storm. It cropped up quickly and then turned into ground blizzards. They must have gotten disoriented. It would have been zero visibility.” And now she could breathe, but it wasn’teasier.She blew a breath out, hard, but she kept going. “They went off the side of the highway, into a ditch, and crashed into a tree. We didn’t know until the next day.”

“Did you mourn them?” he asked, something dark and electric in the question. In his gaze.

“I mourn them every day.” She had no idea why she was whispering. “They were good, solid people. They deserved more time. I wish they’d had it.”

“No one mourned my father,” Anax said in that same darkly stirring way, as if he was as much a part of the night as the stars, the faint breeze. “If anything, people wondered why it had taken so long for him to meet the grim end he had always been courting.”

Constance shook her head, not sure why it felt as if she was under some kind of spell, here. She picked at her plate, not certain when a sweet slice of baklava had appeared before her, oozing with honey.

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