Page 5 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

Then he froze.

Because he understood then that he was witnessing some kind of living, breathing nativity scene.

The boy was clearly meant to be Joseph. And the Mary in question that Anax could now behold with his own eyes was not only old enough to be the boy’s mother, she wasactuallypregnant.

Hugely, heavily, distractingly pregnant.

So pregnant it was almost hard to notice that she was also far lovelier, with aglowabout her, than he had ever imagined the Virgin Mother to be.

The kind of pregnant a woman would be if she had gotten pregnant on the precise date and time that the clinic’s paperwork had said the woman carrying his child had. Or if she had been subjected to the sort of divine intervention the character she was playing had been, but he rather doubted that.

Anax imagined that it was unlikely that there were two such enormously pregnant women wandering around this tiny speck of a town that wasn’t on most of the maps he’d looked at.

That meant, first, that it was real. It was happening. Delphine had enacted this revenge in the form of a brand-new human that was soon to be born. Very soon, by all appearances.

And that the woman playing Mary, Mother of God, to a church made over into a stable yard in the wilds of the American Midwest on Christmas Eve, was none other than the very Constance Jones he had come here to meet.

The woman who looked as if she was about to have his child right then and there on a bale of hay, next to a goat.

But Anax could not allow that to happen. Not even in service of a nativity scene on Christmas Eve.

Because he intended to marry her first.

CHAPTER TWO

LEFTTOHERown devices, Constance Jones would never have paraded her hugely pregnant body around at all, much less make a spectacle of herself like this—sticking out in the middle of the church’s nativity play like a sore thumb. An enormously pregnant sore thumb.

People were already talking about her enough as it was.

This, obviously, was not her idea.

Until Christmas Break started a few days ago, she’d run the nursery school here at the church. She’d been doing it for years and she was everyone’s favorite teacher—the children said so every year, without prompting. This year, as her belly grew bigger and the truth about her pregnancy could no longer be hidden, her kids had decided all on their own that she would make the perfect Mary for the traditional nativity play. They’d lobbied their parents. They’d put it to an adorable vote, in which Constance had squeaked out a narrow victory over Patty Cakes, the nursery school’s beloved stuffed elephant. How could she say no?

She hadn’t.

Maybe she should have.

But either way, she—an actual virgin worryingly close to her due date, a sentence she liked to repeat to herself because it was so absurd, yet true—was playing the Virgin Mary in full sight of all the people who had been gossiping about her since her grandmother had died and left her that money in her will. The same folks who had amped up that gossip once Constance had made it clear what she planned to do with her inheritance.

She fixed a beatific smile to her face now, trying to exude holiness despite how much more closely the temperature in the church tonight suggested the opposite of holiness. All the children, dressed as shepherds, various innkeeping assistants, and a questionable heavenly host of angels, were sweating. Visibly.

She, a lady playing the Holy Mother herself, could only hope sheglowed.

But that was difficult to do while locking eyes with the curmudgeonly Brandt Goss in the first row where the Gosses always sat, the better to quietly proclaim their local and regional importance. Brandt openly considered himself the unofficial mayor of their little town of Halburg. Constance had always thought that must be a bone of contention between him and his wife, the long-suffering and stoic Marlene, who was also the actual mayor.

Brandt’s official title was proprietor of the little shop in town that functioned as a bit of a grocery—though it stocked a little bit of everything like any good country store. It was a place for essentials, to tide folks over between runs out to the much bigger towns some ways away that had proper stores. It was also a kind of gathering place, especially when there was coffee. It was there that Brandt had gone out of his way to make it clear thathedid not approve of Constance’s plans or choices.

She suspected he’d figured he could shame her, but he had only made her miss her grandmother with an even more powerful ache than usual. Dorothy Jones—never Dot or Dottie, not if you valued your life—had not given one single hoot about anyone’s opinion save her own for as long as she’d lived. Constance had spent her own life trying to model this approach.

Especially the last nine months.

And now it was Christmas Eve. There was an intense heaviness inside of her that was expanding, bearing down, and felt like more than the simple carrying of the baby that she’d gotten used to by now. Constance felt as certain as a first-time mother could that her child was planning to make an imminent appearance.

In other words, it was too late to worry about public opinion.

But she was, it seemed. Possibly because she was finding it difficult not to over-relate to the role she was playing tonight.

Constance kept reminding herself thatshe, thank goodness, did not have to bed down in a stable. Fred Stewart’s prize goat gave her a reproachful sort of side-eye at that, as if suggesting she wasfancyfor wanting a bed, not a manger. But she didn’t care. She was lucky enough to live in the little house she’d grown up in that her father had paid off long ago, and that gift went a lot further than any frankincense or myrrh. She’d lived in tiny, sleepy Halburg her whole life. Most of her family was buried in the graveyard outside this church—though not Grandma Dorothy, who had proclaimed that as she had always preferred her own company in life, she assumed she’d like it in death, too, and had been interred in the old family plot. Everyone in this church tonight knew her history—and Dorothy’s preferences and proclamations—almost as well as Constance did. This congregation had watched her grow up, had gone to school with her, had entrusted their kids to her care.

---