Page 52 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

“Constance.” He shook his head. “Do you not understand? Do you not know how much my time is worth?” When her frown deepened, he growled at himself and pushed on. “There is nothing that I can give you that is more precious to me than my time. And if I’m honest, I expected to hate every second of this. But I was willing to do it for you.”

She was fully scowling, then. “That’s not really what I was looking for from this experiment, actually.”

“If this is what you wish, what you truly want, then we will stay here,” he told her rashly. But even as he said it, he realized he meant every word. “I can work from anywhere. If you want to live here, then it will happen. We will raise Natalia in this place, as you were raised. Because if she grows up to be like you, then I must assume that she will be perfect.”

Constance looked as though she had started to respond, but then his words penetrated. “Perfect?”

He moved closer, as the snow floated down all around them, a hushed carol all their own.

“A year ago this night, I told myself that the reaction I had to you was simply because I knew you were carrying my child,” he said, his voice quieter. But no less intense. “But that is not so. How could it be? Because you are like your name, Constance. You are steady. You are you, no matter what.”

“Ask around and you might discover that many folks around here do not consider that a plus,” she said.

He only shook his head, watching snowflakes melt against her freckles. “I cannot bear to be without you. It is torture. I will not suffer it again.”

And he watched her as she breathed in deep, then let it out, making clouds in the cold night air.

“You don’t have to,” she whispered. “Anax. You never have to, if you don’t want to.”

“My chest hurts,” he told her, because it did. Because he ached. Because he was wearing a costume but had never felt more like himself. “My heart pounds all the time as if I’m dying, and yet I live. After that night in Athens, I saw my physician, certain that something was wrong with me, but he said I was in perfect health.” He let his mouth curve when she looked as if she might argue. “It’s you, Constance. You do this to me. You make me feel—”

But he couldn’t seem to form the words to that terrible song that got louder and louder inside him by the moment—

“I think you are in love,” she said softly. She took his hand, though it was covered in a glove and she pressed it to her own chest. And somehow Anax was certain that he could feel that same hammering from beneath her ribs, though they were separated by layers of fleece and down. Constance smiled, and it was brighter than any high noon. “Ask me how I know.”

He let the song take him, then. He let the melody crash into him. He let it rush all over him and do as it would.

Once again, he leaped out into nothingness, hoping against hope that he’d figure out how to fly on the way down.

“I don’t know how to be in love,” he told her, with a deep urgency that felt like a part of the song and its own song, too. “I don’t know how to feel the things that other people feel. I’ve always seen them as weaknesses. They were beaten out of me when I was young.”

But she didn’t take that as the warning it was.

“Says the man who keeps his sister close to him, closer to him than any other person alive.” Constance laughed. “And who, according to your sister, visits your mother regularly. I think you do know how to love, Anax. You just don’t know what to call it.”

“I will call it whatever you want me to call it,” he vowed. “I have built empires already, Constance. I will build you whatever you like. You can call it whatever you wish. I will do anything, as long as you’re with me.”

“Anax,” she began.

“Just tell me what you want.” And it was possible he was begging. Something he did not think he’d ever done before. Still, the shock of it did not stop him, because nothing could matter more than this. Why shouldn’t he beg? “Please, Constance. Only tell me and I’ll make it so.”

She looked at him for a long moment, out there in such a dark, cold night. There was one streetlight down near the church, and it glowed. There were some twinkling lights on the trims of the buildings, only the twinkling visible through the snow.

But otherwise, it was as if they were the only two people alive in the world.

Anax was sure that he could handle it, if so. Because she was all he needed.

Just Constance, because from Constance came everything else that mattered.

She looked at him, then she smiled, that great, big, beautifully bright smile that made everything all right. It was like hope on earth and joy to all, like the words of the carol the congregation had sung on its way out of the church tonight.

It wound its way into that great song inside him and made it sweeter.

“What I want is simple,” she told him, and she swayed closer to him as if she thought the snow might steal her words away. “What I want is for you and me to live happily ever after, Anax. Forever.”

He pulled her closer then, and he held her the way he wanted to hold her for the rest of his life. And he smiled down at her, because he knew that given a task, he would not simply complete it. He would ace it.

And he would learn how to sing that song, at the top of his voice, if it killed him.

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