Anax froze.

Because she was actually pregnant.

Hugely, heavily, distractingly pregnant.

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.

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. 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.