Page 62 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

She stopped thinking aboutscentandheatandheight,for God’s sake.“The metaphors write themselves.”

When their gazes tangled together, she thought he seemed equally horrified that they had stumbled upon a moment of accord here. That was so profoundly...not them.

“I had my legal team doing an eleventh-hour rustle through all of those nasty little clauses,” Apostolis said, almost idly, looking back out toward the rain and the sea that looked so gray and uninviting today. “But it all seems iron tight, as ever.”

Jolie did not bother to ask him why it was that a man of such epic and widely annotated uselessness required a legal team, allowing herself only a careless shrug. “I admire your commitment to imagining, even now, that there’s some way out of this.”

“I don’t know what my father’s relationship was with you, Jolie,” Apostolis said with a certain silken, lethal note in his voice. He looked at her and it was somehow more silken. More lethal.Disastrous,something in her cried out, but there were too many disasters to count. And he was not finished. “I cannot account for the fact that he thought to leave me his leftovers. It will never make sense to me.”

He had called her far worse things thanleftoversin the weeks since Spyros had died. That was practically a compliment in comparison. Apostolis let his mouth curve, as if remembering with great fondness all of the names he’d come up with, and she could see that his eyes looked darker than before despite that gleam like gold in them. She knew that it was malice.

She could feel it all over her.

And she did not like the sensation. “I’m not sure why your father would think that you, who have showed no interest in anything aside from your own hedonistic pleasure in at least the past ten years, would somehow wake up the morning after his will was read with the burning desire to become a hotelier.” She let her smile widen. And sharpen. “Might as well take a match and set the entirety of the hotel on fire, if you ask me.”

“Yet he did not ask you.” Apostolis’s voice was lower than usual. Jolie was tempted to imagine that she was getting to him, but she doubted it. “Just as he did not ask me how I might feel about taking on the burden of his trophy wife. Alas, here we are anyway.”

With exaggerated courtesy, he turned and extended her his elbow. “The wedding party, such as it is, is waiting. The priest is in place. You are welcome to stay in here, wishing it all away, but that will not change a thing. It will only delay it and not, as I think you know, for long.”

“Oh, I’m ready,” Jolie assured him, with the sort of merry laugh she used at cocktail parties. “Between the two of us, I think I’m far more prepared to deal with this sentence. I mean marriage. What is five years, after all?I’llstill be young when we divorce.”

She could admit to herself that there was a certain level of exhilaration here. They’d spent so much time these last weeks shooting at each other, looking for the right weapons to use. And it felt like a victory when she happened upon one, like now.

His eyes narrowed, and she wished she knew what it was that had actually gotten to him. Was it the fact that she would be a mere thirty-two when this farce was done? Or was it their own age differential that got to him? She had only just turned twenty-seven. She wondered if that counted as the sort of outrageous age gap he’d been so concerned with when his father had married her.

Then again, she supposed they had years to find and name each and every one of these weapons, then learn how to aim them more effectively—and directly at each other.

Mutually assured destruction. All wrapped in a lovely marital bow.

She linked her arm with his because they were both out of options, and pretended she didn’t feel a single thing when she did. None of that prickling awareness. None of that unacceptable heat that made her not only too focused on him, but on herself.

On the way each breath she took made her breasts brush against the bodice of her dress. Making her feel as if she was wearing something daring when she was not.

She had learned long ago that there was no need to gild the lily, as it were. People made assumptions about her by simple dint of her presence at her husband’s side. The more understated she dressed and behaved, the more fevered their imagination about what must go on behind closed doors.

And she had profited from those fevers, hadn’t she? Or her aunt and uncle had. And did. And would continue to for the foreseeable future—

But she cut herself off there.

Was she disappointed that Spyros had not simply rewarded her for her part in their marriage outright? She was. More disappointed than she would ever let on, because there was no safe space for her to confide in. Though she doubted that Apostolis had any idea that she and Dioni, his sister, were close—Apostolis being the sort who made declarations and assumed that everyone leaped to obey him, without ever checking up to see if that was the case—Jolie knew better than to test that relationship.

She suspected that the other girl was able to maintain their friendship because they had tacitly agreed, long ago, not to discuss Jolie’s relationship with Spyros. At all.

It had been her little secret while he was alive. It would remain her secret.

And, apparently, he had decided she would have five more years to keep up the act.

Apostolis led her from the great room, taking her through the grand old house that would be theirs, now, to maintain and run together. An enterprise that she thought almost certainly doomed to failure. So, today, she tried not to think about it.

She took in the graceful accents of the lovely old place that she had loved at first sight. Legend had it that Spyros’s grandfather had built the place for the love of a young island girl he’d met and married here. Right here in this house that rose up on its cliff, an elegant presence on this end of the island. The only thing, or so the story went, that rivaled the beauty of the girl he took to wife—and made it possible for him to live apart from his beloved Crete.

It was Spyros’s father who had turned the Andromeda from a family home into a hotel. Despite claims that he did so out of a desire to share the house’s bounty with the public, it was well known—if rarely openly discussed—that it had far more to do with his debts than any interest in sharing the family house with outsiders.

Spyros was the one with real vision. He was the one who had spent the first part of his life turning the Andromeda into what it was today. A boutique luxury hotel that catered to exclusivity above all else. It was not advertised anywhere, save word of mouth.

What matters are not so much the words, but the mouths that form them,Spyros had liked to say.

And in his case, the mouths that spoke praise of this place were some of the most glamorous around, with lives wildly coveted and usually extensively covered in aspirational media. Too bad he had enjoyed appearances rather more than any admin work. The hotel had been in some difficulties when he’d married Jolie.

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