Since they were within earshot of Sandra, Axell didn't respond to that remark. He hadn't failed to notice Maya had avoided his earlier question about Constance's dressing habits. He would have to learn to keep the conversation focused around this slippery little fish. Fish!
He swung his attention to Constance's grandmother. "Good morning, Sandra. Have you met Miss Alyssum, Constance's teacher? Maya, Constance's grandmother, Sandra Matthews." He no longer had to introduce her as mother-in-law, Axell realized with an odd feeling of relief. Sandra was nothing to him anymore.
Sandra glared venomously at Maya. "I believe we have something to discuss in private, Axell."
"I can't imagine what, Sandra." Skillfully appropriating Maya's elbow with one hand and opening the restaurant door with the other, he nodded for Sandra to precede them. He'd be damned if he let the old biddy walk all over a tenderfoot like Maya. The schoolteacher didn't have the social daggers to protect herself.
"I'm talking to the judge this afternoon," Sandra ground out, apparently through her neatly capped teeth.
"Tell him hello for me," Axell replied, although his insides were clenched as tightly as Sandra's teeth as he led the way to a table. Stoicism had its price.
"I've tried to be polite about this, Axell," she said, refusing his gesture toward a booth. "But you've gone out of your way to flaunt your improprieties in public. I won't have an impressionable child like Constance living under the same roof as this... this..." Words apparently failed her.
Words had never failed Maya, Axell realized with a groan as she flashed one of her brilliant go-to-hell-happily smiles. Curiosity prevented his stopping her.
"Nine-months-pregnant schoolteacher?" she supplied cheerfully. "And you will note, won't you, that I arrived here seven months ago? So Axell has nothing whatsoever to do with my...'interesting condition.' And if you think there's anything else between us but his old-fashioned solicitude and generosity, then you have bacon where your brains should be. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm after a box from the kitchen."
She swam away, out of the conflagration she'd fueled. Axell could only admire her dexterity as she swept from the room. He'd hate to see how swift she was without the burden of pregnancy holding her back. Like the Cheshire cat, she'd probably leave her smile still spinning in the air behind her.
Popping the top from a water bottle, he leaned against the bar. "Give Judge Tony my regards, will you? And tell him if he wants to make a political case out of this, I'll take it all the way to the Supreme Court. That should thrill him. Constance is mine."
Sandra narrowed her eyes. "Are you certain Constance is yours?" she asked coldly. "My daughter wasn't exactly a one-man woman when you married." She stalked out, spine straight, high heels clicking.
Axell heaved his water bottle across the bar at a row of whiskey tumblers. The sound of shattering glass didn't equal the devastation inside his soul.
October, 1945
I've gone back there every night this week. I can't stay away. She's all I can think about. I can scarcely concentrate on the books for seeing her in my head, her red hair sprawled across the pillow, her white skin pale in the moonlight. I'm not a poetic man, but she makes me want to sing songs.
I've got to stop going there. I'd be ruined if Dolly's father found out.
Chapter 11
I need someone really bad... are you really bad?
Returning from the restaurant kitchen with an assortment of boxes, including one filled with freshly baked cinnamon rolls, Maya discovered Axell sitting at his polished bar, sipping an icy drink, a black cloud almost visibly hovering over his golden head. Her insides did a tumbling number as she remembered one of too many incidents in her childhood involving bar stools and alcohol. Then seeing the half-empty bottle of mineral water sitting on the bar, she breathed easier and approached with firmer tread.
"Drowning our sorrows so early in the day?" she teased daringly, taking the stool beside him and opening the box of rolls. After seeing Axell's human side last night, she couldn't view him as an invulnerable paragon any longer. "Sugar is much tastier than water." She helped herself to a steaming soft roll, and with a sigh of ecstasy, sank her teeth into it as she pushed the box in his direction.
Axell took a bun and tore into it like a vicious dog handed a bone. Maya considered that a sacrilege. She adored cinnamon rolls, even the kind from a can—which