Page 100 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

They rarely made it three steps into the house before they were tearing off each other’s clothes. Before they were climbing on each other, licking and biting and digging their fingers into each other’s flesh, as if they weren’t quite certain if they wanted to feast on each other or simply ride out the sensation.

It was always impossibly perfect, the glory and raw intensity of the things they did to each other.

She learned that despite what she’d imagined all this time thanks to images she’d seen or things she’d read, she actually loved kneeling down before him. She loved taking him in her mouth, and listening to the noises that she could make him let out.

As if she was not the only one who could be torn into pieces in this fire of theirs.

She found that she loved the taste of him, the salt of his skin, the richness that was all man and entirely Apostolis.

There was nothing she did not allow him. There in the dark of the carriage house, it was as if the pair of them were made of nothing but flesh and need.

And if it was harder, every morning, to pull herself together and back into one piece again, she supposed she should have expected that. For surely there could not be such exquisite pleasure, and so much of it, without a price.

“It’s called hate sex,” he told her one night as he moved deep inside her body from behind, his hands gripping her hips as he plunged again and again. “And just think, my darling wife—we have years of this ahead of us.”

The very idea had made her shatter into pieces, there and then.

Afterward, she lay awake in the bed they now shared, tangled up in him in more ways than one. And she wondered how it was possible to survive like this. If she would make it—because it seemed impossible to her that these were the kind of storms that anyone could actually live through.

But then again, she had to. She had no choice. There was someone else to consider beyond these wild passions and besides, she had already come so far. There could be no going back.

Yet as time went on, funnily enough, it wasn’t the long, explosive nights that she feared might break her.

It was the performance of a very different relationship than the once they actually had that they put on, night after night.

It was the way he gazed at her across the table filled with their guests. It was the way he put his arm on the back of her chair and let his thumb gently stroke the bare flesh of her shoulder.

It was the way they danced, now and again, as if the whole of the starry sky above them was nothing next to the flame that moved between them.

She found herself making up stories about the two different lives they led, all wrapped up and tangled into this one.

Maybe he was as astonished by it as she was. Maybe he had not expected this kind of connection either.

She told herself that it was more than likely that they were both as shocked by this as she was. That they were both humbled and exalted and made new, one day at a time.

But she didn’t dare ask him, no matter what she told herself.

“I keep expecting to hear that the Andromeda has been reduced to rubble,” Dioni said on one of their infrequent phone calls. “Or that you’ve both incinerated each other into a crisp or something equally dramatic, and there’s nothing but a crater left behind.”

Her friend didn’t sound like herself. And Jolie didn’t want to ask, because surely Dioni would tell her if she wanted to. She had to pick her way through these fraught and strained conversations, but that was better than not talking to Dioni at all.

“The Andromeda still stands,” she said, with a laugh. “You have my word.”

“That’s a good thing,” her friend turned stepdaughter turned sister-in-law said, and there was the sound of something clanging in the background. Like a cafetière being stirred too roughly with a metal spoon. “Are you happy?”

Jolie longed to tell Dioni the truth. Or some part of the truth. She wanted nothing more than to unburden herself, to open up and lay out for her friend every single thing that had happened since she’d left the island.

But she couldn’t.

Because Dioni looked up to Apostolis. He was, in many ways, her own, personal god. He was the one who had taken care of her when she was small. He was the one she’d run to. Dioni had told Jolie all of this long before Jolie had ever met him.

And, of course, she had never actually met the Apostolis Dioni knew. That was a gift he gave only to his sister.

The Apostolis Jolie knew had always been little more than a wildfire.

How could Jolie possibly tell Dioni, who thought her brother nothing short of a hero, that he was—in fact—simply a man?

A maddening, glorious, impossible man.

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