Page 110 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

What would she do then?

She hardly recognized herself as she raced across the drive, heedless for once of how it might look to anyone who might be watching. She was practically transfigured with desperation and something too sharp to truly be hope as she wrenched open the door and all but fell into the hall.

Into all those black-and-white photographs, all those frozen moments. All those possibilities of joy and life and light that she’d always felt was out of her reach.

As if she was stuck on the other side of a glass frame forever, always looking in, never a part of it.

That was not the story she wanted any longer. Not from Apostolis.

Not now that she’d started listening to her heart again, for the first time in a decade.

Jolie walked deeper into the house, already fairly certain that she knew the answer, because he wasn’t there to greet her. He wasn’t there at all, and her stomach twisted. Everything inside her urged her to turn and run. To hide somewhere, so she could still pretend that this might go the way she wanted it to go.

But she didn’t.

And she was halfway across the grand, flowing space when she heard a noise and looked up—

To see him coming down the winding stair.

“Apostolis,” she began, because she couldn’t seem to keep his name inside of her, and there were so many other things that she wanted to say before he started in—

“We will talk, you and I,” he told her in a low voice. “But there is something that I think you must do first.”

“I don’t want to do anything else, I just want to say—”

But he didn’t come toward her. He stopped at the bottom of the stair and he didn’t even cut her off with an impatient slash of his hand, or even his mouth on hers. All he did was lift a finger and point toward the gallery.

Jolie felt frozen solid, but she followed the line his finger suggested, looking up.

And then she stopped breathing, because there against the wall of art and sculpture stood a slim blonde figure.

“Mathilde,” she whispered.

“Is it true?” her cousin asked her, her voice barely above a whisper, though it seemed to reverberate within Jolie like a shout. “Is it really true that I can simply come to you now, and live with you, and be free of them forever? He says that I can do this. That he has made it happen.” Mathilde’s face crumpled. “Oh, Jolie, tell me it’s true.”

And all Jolie could do was throw a shocked and overjoyed look Apostolis’s way—because she was already moving, racing up those stairs, winding herself around and around until she burst out at the gallery level and took her cousin in her arms.

In a hug that she hoped would go on forever.

They made a good start.

And it was a long while later that she left Mathilde in the guest room that she had once tried to claim as her own, surrounded by the things that Apostolis had brought here with her.

Mathilde had told her an impossible story of Apostolis appearing at her door and ordering her to pack her things, which she had done with alacrity, because she’d recognized him. She’d seen the photographs and the commentary in the papers.

None of which I believed, of course,she assured Jolie, who did not know how to tell her younger cousin that she had not given a single thought to the gossips in ages.They only make money on scandalous innuendo. I know you better than that.

You do,she had agreed, beckoning her to continue.

She did. Even more improbably, Apostolis had stood between Mathilde and her parents when they’d returned and had made it abundantly clear to them that they were not only cut off from Jolie’s money, but that it would be in their best interest to disappear entirely. Because, according to Apostolis, fleets of attorneys were already preparing to make sure that the rest of their lives were even more of a misery than they could expect if left to their own devices.

And more, that Jolie was off-limits. Mathilde’s eyes had been so wide that they almost took over her face as she related each and every word that had been spoken.

And then he told them that I was off-limits, too,she had said. With reverence.He said, ‘If I were you, I would go away and stay gone.’

Neither Mathilde nor Jolie could imagine that they would follow this advice, but one thing was certain—that particular reign of terror was over. At least for them.

Because Mathilde’s parents would have to go through Apostolis now.

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