Page 64 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

For a long, electric moment, it was almost as if they were united in this bizarre enterprise after all, and her heart leaped inside her chest—

“Stepmother?” he said, with a soft ferocity. “If you would be so kind?”

No,she told herself harshly.There is no unity here. There is only and ever war. You will do well to remember that.

And then, with remarkable swiftness and no interruption, Jolie relinquished her role as Apostolis’s hated stepmother, and became his much-loathed wife instead.

CHAPTER TWO

THENIGHTBEFOREhis travesty of a wedding took place, Apostolis Adrianakis dreamed that he dug up his own father’s grave, when he knew full well—while awake—that his father had been cremated and his urn placed in the family crypt. Still, he found himself out on an unfamiliar cliff beneath a strange moon, digging in the dirt with his hands. Once he reached the coffin, the old man had been hale and hardy.

And laughing.

Why are you doing this to me?Apostolis had demanded, with the temper he had deliberately never showed his father when he’d been alive.This is how a father treats his only son?

You are welcome, my boy,Spyros had replied.

And kept on laughing.

Now it was done, and if the old man was still laughing from the Great Beyond, the good news was that Apostolis could not hear him.

The terms of his father’s will had been a stunning blow, to put it mildly, and he could not say that he had covered himself in anything approaching glory.

In order to lay claim to the Hotel Andromeda and the estate,the lawyer had droned out, as if he was parceling out the tchotchkes instead of ruining lives,my only son, Apostolis, and my widow, Jolie, must act as follows: marry within three weeks of this reading, run the hotel together as a seemingly happily married couple for five complete calendar years, which will entail cohabitation with no gaps of more than two weeks at a time, with no more than one such gap every quarter.

He had been certain both he and that woman, his father’s hateful wife, wouldimplodewith the same fury when the lawyer stopped and looked at them, as if expecting the same. But they had not. It had not been pleasant, and he could not look back upon those first few moments without mortification, but it had also not escalated to anything but a few words he supposed they’d both kept to themselves for good reason during her marriage to his father.

He despised himself for counting that as a victory.

But then again, he had never met a woman, or any other person alive, who gnawed through his carefully erected barriers and boundaries to stick her claws in deep the way his stepmother did. And always had. Without even seeming to try.

Yet despite all that, they had cleared the first objectionable hurdle. Now what remained was the grim march through the next five years, chained together in infamy. The heir to one of the great Greek fortunes...and one of the most notorious women in Europe, a subject of furious speculation and gossip since she’d married his father, a man at least forty years her senior.

And more, they were toseem happy.

Oh, joyous day,Apostolis thought darkly.

Neither he nor Jolie had indicated the slightest interest in any kind of reception, given how little there was to celebrate in this disaster. But his sister, forever too sunny and hopeful for her own good, ignored their rather loudly stated wishes in that respect. The moment the wedding was done, she clapped her hands together and announced that she had a surprise for them all. And sure enough, out came a wedding breakfast that Dioni clearly expected them all to partake in as if this was a regular wedding between lovebirds.

He had thought his friend Alceu, more of a brother, really, might explode.

But no one saidnoto Dioni. Not even the usually unmovable and eternally brusque Alceu, and so here they sat.Breakfasting.Together.

Dioni chattered on about nothing and everything, though it was difficult to tell if she was nervous or just Dioni. Alceu stared stonily back at her in aggrieved silence. And Apostolis and his brand-newwifefairly hummed with indignation and malice.

Or perhaps that was just him.

“You must make a toast,” Dioni told his friend when the meal that no one had really touched seem to be drawing to its inevitable and painful finish. In that the food was finally going cold. “I have it on great authority that sometimes the best man, or thekoumbarossince we are Greek—”

“I will pass on that honor,” said Alceu at once.

Icily.

“But as it turns out, I would love to make a speech,” Apostolis found himself saying. Beside him, he didn’t so muchseeJolie stiffen. But he felt it. And truly, nothing could have pleased him more. “I can’t tell you how it felt to discover that my birthright is not only no longer mine, but is to be shared with a woman whose notoriety exceeds my own to such an extreme degree.”

He didn’t stand. Instead he lounged back in his chair, lifting his glass in the direction of his blushing forced bride, who was not actually blushing. She looked the way she always did, to his endless frustration. Angelic and untouched, when she was obviously neither. As if she floated high above all the messes she’d helped make and could not possibly be called to account for any of them.

Maddening woman.

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