Page 4 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

A woman he had never met, carrying the child he had never wanted.

He feltentirely too muchabout both of those things. So much that he had worried on the flight here that he might very well decimate the Paraskevas test altogether with the great, driving force of his fury.

Anax would break the whole of America in half if he could.

But that makes you no better than him,he reminded himself curtly.

And he was willing to be many things in this life, but never his father. He had planned to make sure he was never any kind of father at all, but Delphine had destroyed that.

Anax had seen the paperwork with his own eyes. He had read it and reread it. But the DNA matched his.

“Tell me again what I can expect,” he said now, making himself lean back in his seat. He could not relax. That was an impossibility. But he could pretend.

And pretending almost felt like action.

That his sister did not snap at him that she had told him these details a hundred times already—and he knew she had—was a clear indication that she was having trouble getting her head around this, too.

“The mother’s name is Constance Jones,” Vasiliki said, her Greek accent making that very American-sounding name seem almost exotic. “She has always lived in this same village. Her family has been in the area for generations. They were farmers, though her grandfather sold off all the farmland before she was born and she was raised in the town, such as it is. This is all in the paperwork she filled out for the clinic.”

The paperwork that Delphine had pored over while blackmailing her lover, looking for what she thought Anax would consider the mother most below him. A woman who bore no resemblance whatever to the great beauties that he had been seen with all his life. A woman of no status and precious little means.

She likely hoped his child would be raised in squalor.

“Constance Jones is thirty years old,” Vasiliki was saying. “She has worked in the parish church since she graduated from high school. Her parents died when she was sixteen, and she lived with her grandparents. Her grandfather died when she was twenty-five, her grandmother died a little over a year ago. She is single. Never been married. Our people dug deep and there is nothing to suggest she has ever had any sort of relationship with a man.”

“Marvelous,” Anax muttered, and he could not tell if he was being sardonic or not.

“And apparently,” Vasiliki continued, “her pregnancy is a bit of a scandal.”

Anax tried to imagine what that would look like in a place like this, as the car made its way into the town that nestled on either side of what was likely a creek of some kind in warmer weather. Not that it was much of a town, to his mind. A petrol station nearer the motorway. A few buildings scattered here and there. A water tower was the only thing that created some drama against the horizon.

What was a scandal when there were no tabloids to amplify it all and create narratives from thin air?

Here, too, there were Christmas lights everywhere. He kept forgetting what day it was.

Vasiliki was looking at her mobile. “The other car drove to the woman’s house, but it’s empty. They think that everyone is at church.”

“Wonderful,” Anax said bitterly. “As our sainted mother always says, I am likely to bring the place down in flames around me should I dare to enter. Let’s find out.”

His sister only raised a brow at him. But it didn’t matter, because there was only one church in this tiny town, set next to a tidy graveyard that looked old and faintly spooky beneath the bare-limbed trees. They were there in no time.

And this was no time to become whimsical.

Anax got out of the SUV and braced himself against the profound punch of the cold, made worse by the wind. From inside the church, he could hear quite a lot of animated singing. He looked over at his sister as she came to stand beside him, her cheeks already red from the cold, as neither one of them was used to weather like this.

Vasiliki nodded, and together they walked up to the church’s double doors, then let themselves inside.

The place was bright and blazingly hot, an instant furnace. The temperature difference was so extreme it took Anax a moment to make sense of what he was seeing.

The little church was packed full. There were a surprising amount of people stuffed into the pews. There were children running in the aisles. There was also, unless he was mistaken or having a quiet stroke,livestocknear the altar.

“Oh, no!”cried a boy from the front.

Anax squinted at him. He looked no more than ten, though he was swaddled in a voluminous beard and appeared to be wearing a dress.

“There’s noroomin theinn!”

The boy turned with great, grand gestures, and Anax’s gaze followed him, like a reflex.

---