Page 41 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

His itch was not scratched. His fascination had increased tenfold.

He would rather die than say such a thing out loud.

“Tell me,” he said to his sister, smiling at her in a way that made her eyes narrow. “Are you ever going to put poor Stavros out of his misery?”

She stiffened. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“He would never dare indicate his interest in you, lest it insult you.” Anax eyed her, enjoying that the shoe was not on his foot just then. Enjoying it too much, perhaps. “Or maybe it is that you enjoy playing games with him. A little cat and mouse, is that it? Do you know who that reminds me of?”

His sister glared at him, but to his surprise, did not rise to the bait. “I’m nothing like our father, Anax,” she said quietly.

Quietly enough that he looked away. Quietly enough that he regretted having said such a thing in the first place.

So quietly that he felt a hot wash of shame move over him.

“What’s fascinating to me is that he is your go-to insult,” Vasiliki continued in the same tone. “You were ready at a moment’s notice to trot him out like a weapon. To bludgeon me with him. Perhaps it is not me who has to be concerned about taking on his characteristics.”

It was, of course, no less than his worst fears, spoken aloud.

Because all of these endless nights and all of these weeks later and he could not accept the real truth. He could not run from it. He could not escape it no matter where he went or how many time zones he moved through.

He had forced his sister to lay it bare before him, and it was still the same truth.

No matter how he dressed it up and called itpassion,he had lost control of Constance. He hadn’t hurt her, thank God, but surely it was all the same sort of slippery slope.

He had vowed that he would not touch her.

Then one touch, one kiss, and he had been lost.

She was addictive—or perhaps it was simply that he was an addict. A bright, impossible flame that he had been utterly unable to look away from. Even now, just thinking of her, he could feel the lick of that flame moving over him, changing him.

Making him into the very model of the worst man he’d ever known.

Because Anax knew what was next.

He knew where this ended. The blood, the sobbing. The broken, ruined things in pieces on the floor. The injuries that never quite healed.

The monster looking back at him, ready to pounce.

He remembered his childhood with alarming accuracy.

And so maybe it was inevitable that when he got back to Greece, he did not go to that flat of his that now felt infused with her. As if Constance lurked there, beaming back at him from every shiny surface, as if she claimed the view outside his windows like she was Athens itself.

Nor did he head out to the island, though there was a deep ache in him to see his daughter that was nearly neck and neck with that intense desire to see her mother.

His wife, by his own command and decree, in case he wanted to blame her for that, too.

But there was another need in him when he landed, and this one even more inexplicable.

No matter what it was, or what it meant, he found himself at his mother’s all the same.

He had wanted to set Evgenia up in luxury the moment he was able, but she had wanted none of it. She had eventually consented to a small house set there in the village in the foothills where she’d grown up, before her own father had surrendered to a set of bad decisions and moved the family into Athens. Before that had landed her in the kind of place where Paraskevas had seemed like a good idea.

Anax had grown up in the city and considered himself a city person, first and foremost. He understood Athens. It was why he liked his flat, with its bird’s-eye view of the whole sweep of the ancient place, from the slums he had called home for so long to the rarefied air he could now afford to breathe.

His mother’s little village seemed to get under his skin in ways he could not readily explain as he drove in, and more so than usual. It was not just that it was far away from what he considered the beating heart of things. That was always the case. Today it was something else. Something that moved in him like agitation.

When Anax made it a point of honor to never beagitatedin his mother’s presence.

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