Page 7 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

But there was no changing what was, only what could be, and Constance wanted a family. Not her sweet ghosts, but a living, flesh and blood family to carry on with.

And so, thanks to Grandma Dorothy, she’d set out to make herself one.

When it had gone much easier than she’d expected it would, she’d taken that to mean that she had Dorothy’s approval.

One of her best friends from school was a midwife. Constance knew that if she looked, she would find Alyssa’s eyes in the crowd, ready to wade in and get Mother Mary out of the crowd if her time came in the middle of the service. For all the people who gossiped about her and said she was uppity and all the rest, there were also her actual friends. Who supported her. Cared for her. And were nothing but supportive when she told them that she was choosing to have her own baby, with no input from any man.

I wish I’d done the same,declared her friend Kelly, who always talked about her husband Mike as if he was another one of her toddlers.It’s the smarter way to go, in my opinion.And easier in the long run.

Constance took a breath. She tried to focus on the children, because the nativity play was where the children of Halburg got to shine. Every child who wanted one had a part, and if it wasn’t the strictest interpretation of the Bible story, well. It made everyone happy.

That was the point of Christmas, to her mind. And she hoped that one day, her own child would take part in it, too.

“Just not tonight,” she murmured beneath her breath, knowing she would be drowned out by little Ally Martingale’s piercing rendition of “Silent Night,” in her role as the singing sheep.

She and little Tommy made their way behind the trough serving as the manger, where, happily, they could sit on one of the bales of hay that had been set there. Tommy bounced back up again, while Constance had to fight back a sigh of relief.

And once her body felt slightly less...heavy,she let the singing make her heart happy the way it usually did, and congratulated herself on beingthis closeto the finish line.

She hadn’t wavered in her goals along the way, no matter how much commentary her pregnancy had caused. She was going to have this baby. She was going to make a family. People like Brandt were so convinced that she would soon be taught the folly of her ways that she didn’t bother to tell them that if she wanted, she might go ahead and have another baby one day—because she’d always wanted a big family. Growing up as an only child who became an orphan in her teens did that to a person.

There had been physical challenges, to be sure. She had watched her body change in expected ways and also wholly unexpected ways, and had tried to tell herself that it was a marvel no matter what. Sometimes that even worked. She had not found herself turning into some kind of beacon of maternal, pregnant energy, that was for sure. She’d met women who claimed they’d never been happier or felt better than when they were pregnant, but she couldn’t say the same.

Still, Constance knew that she was doing the right thing. She already loved her baby more than it should be possible to love anything, much less a being she’d not yet met. She thought she was reasonably apprehensive about labor, but mostly, she was just excited to meet her daughter.

Her sweet little daughter, who she would teach all the things that her mother and her grandmother had taught her. Her daughter, who would make her a mother and who would make the two of them a family.

Thinking about her child helped with the beatific smile, and she looked at the rest of the congregation, which was bursting at the seams tonight. It was standing room only. The children’s nativity play always drew a crowd, and she could see almost all of her friends and neighbors there before her. That felt like its own gift. A gift for her baby’s birthday, which she was beginning to think was going to happen sooner rather than later.

“Welcome to the world, little girl,” she murmured beneath her breath. “I can’t wait to watch your beautiful life.”

And it was then, surprisingly, that she had a pang she hadn’t really had before. The sudden thought of what it would be like if she could share this moment with someone. If she had that husband she’d come to accept she never would. How marvelous it would be to meet his gaze at a time like this, across the shouting children, the proud parents gazing on, the candles and the crowd. To share this notion that there was a pageant being thrown tonight and their soon-to-be-born child had the starring role already.

It’s a good omen,she would say.

Our girl will have nothing but good omens,he would reply.

It seemed almost real. She was something like wistful...

Then it was as if she lost access to the ability to think altogether.

Because there was a man standing there at the back of the church. And it was as if everything in her body hummed out a response to the sight of him, a song that sounded a lot like,There he is!

But that didn’t make any sense.

It seemed to her that he was staring right at her, though she didn’t see how that could be true. Her brain spun around, feeling sluggish and a lot like the time her grandmother had overserved them both her favorite Kahlúa coffee. The man had to be someone’s out-of-town relative, she told herself sternly. Here in town for the holiday.

Though for the life of her, she couldn’t imagine whohecould possibly be related to.

Old Sally Howard was always talking about her fancy son with his real estate license over in Galena, but Constance somehow doubted that a small-town Illinois real estate broker would command a whole church with a glance like this man. Similarly, she doubted very much that Dirk Brown’s long-lost son, the infamous Jared Brown, rumored to have lit out for the big-city splendor somewhere coastal, would come back in shockingly fancy-looking clothes like this.

Constance couldn’t have said what it was about what the man was wearing that indicated he was fancy, she only knew that he was. It was that sumptuously dark coat, and more, the way he wore it. Where anyone else would have looked bulky, he looked...sleek.

And that should have been difficult on a man so tall, with shoulders that broad.

His hair was as dark black as his coat. Even from the front of the church, she could see that his eyes were intense, a kind of smoky gray that made that song inside her lift into a sort of crescendo. And there was something about his face. She tried to figure it out. It wassomethingabout the angles, the planes, the hint of an uncontainable shadow on his jaw. He had cheekbones that should have made him look haughty, but there was that boxer’s chin. It might have been belligerent on another face. But instead, this man looked...expensively, hypnoticallydangerous.

Not something a girl saw every day in rural Iowa.

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