Page 3 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

Step by violating step.

Anax found his hands in fists, there in the back of the hardy SUV that was whisking him from the airfield they’d landed in to...wherever they were headed. A tiny village, by all accounts. His assistants had showed him endless maps, but he hadn’t taken it in.

He still couldn’t take it in.

The past two weeks had been a blur, but one part was monstrously, unequivocally clear.

Delphine had disappeared from Anax’s view, but not from his life. She had not moved on at all. What she had done instead was enact her vile plot.

What he could not understand was how that shallow woman, who he barely knew and who had certainly never known anything substantive about him aside from his body and net worth, had managed to come up with the one weapon that would actually hurt him.

Maybe he would never understand.

Beside him, his personal assistant—her actual title wasexecutive assistant, but Vasiliki preferred to be called hischief of staff—shifted in her seat. She tapped his arm and widened her eyes in the direction of his fists.

She didn’t have to tell him to unclench his fists. They had grown up in the same house. They had been subject to the same rages, the same tantrums, the same bursts of shouting and sudden attacks.

Anax threatened to fire her at least three times a week, but he never would. His sister was invaluable. She was an excellent executive assistant. She could take on that role anywhere and would likely take over the company. But here, with him, she also acted as his barometer.

The Paraskevas test, they called it.

And he was failing it.

He let his fingers uncurl.

“We are nearly there,” she said, looking out the window, her expression unreadable.

He felt a rage in him he had always sworn would never grow there within him.Never. “Good.”

But there was nothing good about this. It was a tragedy in real time and once again, he could not stop it. He could not end it. He could only deal with the fallout.

Delphine had gone to America. Anax’s men had pieced together her movements after she’d landed in New York and as best they could understand, she had infiltrated the bar at a medical conference outside Manhattan. That she had fully intended to seduce one of the doctors was clear, but in case there had been any doubt, Anax’s team had found the old footage the hotel kept for its own security purposes.

The doctor in question was a highly regarded fertility specialist in a clinic in another one of those places that sounded fake to Anax’s ears. He was also married. That had likely been another requirement for Delphine, who had showed up at the man’s place of business after the very steamy week she’d spent with him.

They had records of that, too.

Her threats to the man could only be imagined.

The rest they’d had to figure out backwards, based on the contents of the letter she’d sent.

I warned you this would get worse,Delphine had written.Congratulations, Daddy. Too bad the child of the mighty Anax Ignatios will be little more than a grubby little peasant farmer in the middle of nowhere. I can’t wait until the tabloids find out.

When his security team caught up with her earlier this week, Delphine had been living it up in St. Barts. She had been only too happy to spitefully tell them exactly what she’d done—though she’d coyly pretended it was a book she’d read, so as not to overtly implicate herself. A story about a terrible man and a woman who had taught him a lesson by helping herself to the contents of a condom they’d used, preserving it, and then having her married fertility doctor impregnate a nobody with it.

I asked her why she would do such a detestable thing,Stavros had told Anax.And she said, I am afraid, that she did it because she could. Because that was what you have always done.

The injustice of that had burned in him. It still did.

When pressed, Stavros had also admitted that Delphine had laughed uproariously and had then toasted Anax in absentia.Shoe’s on the other foot now, isn’t it?

Though she had used more profanity.

It would be difficult to prove what she’d done, his lawyers had told him. It was easier to make sure her married lover never worked again. Anax had started there.

And now there was this.

He was going to meet the woman who was pregnant with child.

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