Page 109 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

The things he’d done, so convinced that Jolie was a villain.

“It’s only that you look ill,” the girl whispered. “You’ve gone pale. Are you going to be sick?”

“That,” he gritted out, though he was surprised he could even speak through the upheaval inside of him, “would be an upgrade.”

And he had to wait until the racket inside of him stilled. Not entirely. Just enough that he could feel the destruction and function anyway.

“I think I passed your parents on the way in,” he said when he could speak without thinking it might knock him over. “Do you expect them back soon?”

She swallowed, but didn’t answer—and he understood immediately.

“I’m sorry,” he said at once. “I’m doing this all wrong. I am Apostolis Adrianakis. I am your cousin’s husband, Mathilde. Jolie is my wife.” And that he had claimed her like that, with no mocking aside, made everything in him shake anew. But he kept his eyes on Mathilde. The girl Jolie had given so much of herself for. How could he do any less? “It is time for you to be free.”

Then he held out his hand and waited for Jolie’s cousin to take it.

As if, once she did, it might redeem him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

JOLIEWASMAKINGher way back up from one of the villages, her arms full of flowers, when she saw Apostolis’s plane fly in overhead.

She told herself—sternly—that there was absolutely no call for the leap of hope in her chest. He had made himself abundantly clear when he’d left. He hadn’t even told her where he’d gone.

It was the height of foolishness to think that whatever he’d done when he was away—for two interminable nights, during which she’d slept a combined five minutes, so impossible was it to sleep without him—might have changed his thinking in any way.

But she didn’t feel the least bit tired now. And she couldn’t deny that there was a spring in her step as she made her way back up the winding steps, cut into the hillside, that the locals took from the nearest village to the Andromeda.

She ordered herself to slow down. To take care with the flowers she was carrying to make an extra arrangement that she’d decided to put in the bedroom of one of their guests, a young girl who reminded her of Mathilde.

And herself, she supposed.

Both of them, maybe, if none of the things that had happened to them had been permitted to occur.

Maybe she wanted to celebrate that in another wide-eyed girl before her own life gave her reasons to stop smiling.

She got back to the hotel where there were questions to answer, small fires to extinguish, and then the flowers to arrange in the kitchen and send up to the girl’s room.

Jolie wished that she could have lost herself in all of those things, instead of listening for that Range Rover on the drive. Or looking around every time a door opened, thinking it would be him.

She supposed that this was only to be expected. Some kind of Stockholm syndrome—or maybe it was the sex that was addictive. Never in her life had she felt more like a junkie than the last two nights without.

Or maybe she was simplyused to himby now. She’d had time to think about that, these last couple of nights, lying all alone in that bed that seemed entirely too large and empty without him.

She couldn’t sleep when he was gone, and that had shocked her. She kept waking up, reaching for him, and he wasn’t there.

And there were two ways that she could think about that. One, that she was deeply pathetic to allow herself to have these kinds of feelings for someone who was more often cruel to her than not.

But the other way of looking at it was that they had been fighting their way toward each other all this time. And maybe, just maybe, she just needed to fight a little longer.

For how could she know how delusional she was until he returned?

When she was finished with her tasks, she let herself out the side door of the hotel and started for the carriage house, her pulse skyrocketing because she saw the Range Rover parked there in front.

He was home. He really washere.

And now she would have to decide which part of her poor heart was right, after all.

Jolie couldn’t seem to stop her feet from moving and that was terrible, because right then, she thought she would give anything to stop time. To keepnot knowing,because what if he gave her an answer that she couldn’t live with?

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