Page 65 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

“Seven years ago, we sat around a similar table, grasping for felicitations and platitudes, while congratulating my darling wife on her first marriage. Is it a May/December romance when it encompasses four decades? Or is that more of a January/December?” He smiled as if he was enjoying himself. And discovered that, in fact, he was. “I should be flattered that my erstwhile stepmother even considered lowering her standards, and her minimum age gap requirements, to a meresingledecade.”

“I didn’t lower my standards at all,” Jolie said with a limpid sort of serenity that seemed to scratch all over his body, like fingernails. “It has nothing at all to do with my standards. It has to do with honoring my late husband’s will.”

“I think it has to do with greed,” Apostolis corrected her with a lazy smile that he doubted reached his eyes. “I suppose that it is possible that you fell head over heels in love with a man who just happens to be so many years your senior and also, coincidentally I am sure, unimaginably wealthy to boot. I am told that lightning strikes where it will, though I confess I have been thus far unenlightened. But I will confess, Jolie, that I have always imagined that your motives are far more...prosaic.”

His sister was staring at him with wide and distressed eyes. “So far, Apostolis, this is not a very good toast.”

But he was only warming to the topic, and there was a kick to it, like particularly good spirits. “I must salute you, my lovely stepmother and wife, for managing to fall in love sopractically.”

If he expected this to shame her, and he could admit that he did, he was destined for disappointment. Jolie reached for her own glass and sipped from it as if she needed a bit of the bubbly stuff to ward off the press of ennui. “Perhaps your sister never told you that our headmistress used to tell us, with great sincerity—and especially when we were all pining away for the grubby sort of boyfriends we imagined we wanted at the time—that an elegant woman always keeps in mind that it is just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one, and only one of those choices leads to a life of grace and comfort.”

“It’s true,” Dioni agreed, with a nod. “She did say that. Quite a lot, actually. Though I always wondered why she hadn’t gone off and married herself a wealthy man, then, if it was all the same and by her telling, such men were just littering the earth like overripe fruit.”

Beside her, Alceu aimed an incredulous and frigid look at Dioni.“Overripe fruit?”he repeated in tones of censorious amazement.

But Dioni was not even remotely cowed. She didn’t look as if she recognized that she should be.

“Like rotting stone fruit,” she said merrily, in a conversational aside to Alceu as if she truly believed he wanted to continue that tangent. “Strewn about the dirt of Europe, by her telling.”

Apostolis carried on before his oldest and best friend stroked out. He aimed his glass and his smile at Jolie once again. “When I first heard the terms of the will I wanted to burn the entire hotel to the ground.” That got the murmurs of shock he wanted, though only from his sister. But at least she was no longer ranting on about fermenting fruit. He continued. “To save it, somehow, from the unsavory claws of a woman whose ambition must clearly outreach my own in every possible way, since she managed to end up with half of my inheritance.”

Jolie, the picture of angelic serenity, let out a tinkling laugh that sounded more like bells than any human should. “In fairness, my dear stepson and husband, if you’re speaking of your ambition that is a very low bar.”

Apostolis laughed. Dioni stared at her plate as if it had just occurred to her that forcing them all together like this was not the best idea she’d ever had. Alceu, meanwhile, looked as if he was seriously contemplating hurling himself out the window and off the side of the cliff, for which Apostolis would certainly not blame him.

But none of that made him want to stop. He was enjoying this too much. He was finally saying all the things he’d wanted to say for weeks. For years. Forever. He’d always held back, beyond the odd, inevitable comment here and there. Even at the reading of the will he’d kept himself from a deep dive intoallof the things he’d kept to himself over the years, because he’d still had hope that he could contest the damned thing. He was not about to squander this opportunity. They couldseem happytomorrow. “I have to ask myself what exactly I did that he should force the two of us to marry. That he should make the ownership of this hotel, and therefore the bulk of his estate, contingent on you and I making it through five miserable years together. Acting the part, of course, as the myth demands. I cannot imagine it, but I assume that I will soon be the recipient of the sort of tricks that lead a man to make such rash decisions. I’m expecting nothing short of Cirque du Soleil.”

His sister, bless her, looked confused. His friend politely averted his gaze.

His wife smiled in that way she had that looked polite enough if a person didn’t know her, but felt like razors. And if a person did know her even a little bit, well then. It was easy to see the shine of the blade.

“What is the saying?” she asked in a musing sort of tone. “Ah, yes, it goes something like,not my circus, not my monkeys,I think.”

“But do you not see?” Apostolis made a grand gesture with his wineglass, encompassing the two of them. “Thisisthe circus, Jolie. And you and I are nothing but monkeys who must dance, for five long years, as my father has a revenge I did not know he wished to take upon me from beyond the grave.”

“I think he thought he was being kind,” Dioni offered.

But neither Apostolis nor Jolie looked over at her.

Because Jolie, Apostolis was perhaps too delighted to see, was not holding on to her calm, angelic demeanor quite so tightly as before. “What astonishes me is that you imagine this is somethingIlobbied for,” Jolie said with a different sort of laugh. Less bells, more mayhem. “After seven years of marriage, I expected a settlement commensurate with the time and effort I put in. I did not expect there to be further hoops to jump through. I certainly did not expect that I would be forced to indulge in a charity case, with a man of low character, far lower morals, and a reputation so dire that it would make the average howling alley cat seem like a cloistered monk.”

“Are we discussing morals?” Apostolis asked, with true delight moving through him, like that lightning striking him after all. “Do you dare?”

“As I believe I made clear to you seven years ago and every year since in one way or another, it’s not your business. It wasn’t then, it wasn’t at any point along the way, it isn’t now.” Jolie, he discovered in that moment, got colder when she was angry. Her temper was like a blast of ice but, perversely, he felt warm. And warmer by the second. “And it will never be your business, because it has nothing to do with you.”

“Except behold.” Another grand, sweeping gesture between them, because he could see it annoyed her. “His will made it my business and now you are also my business as well as my stepmotherandwife, for my sins.”

Jolie made a disdainful noise. “I categorically reject the idea that your sins, voluminous and colorful as they undoubtedly are, should be rewarded. Not even your father, who had an alarming soft spot for your antics, would consider those antics worthy of anything but a sigh and a trip through his own memories of sordid seasons past.” She eyed him as if he had woken up this morning something less than his usually resplendent and tempting self when he knew very well he had not. “Upon reflection, all I can think is that your father was so certain that you were not up to the job of handling his estate and the Andromeda that he realized you needed training wheels, if you will. A guiding hand. And since he knew that no one in their right mind would take on such a job, he made certain that I had no other choice but to guide you as best I can.”

Apostolis laughed at that, and kept laughing, though it was more a flash of that fury that had been a fire inside him since the will was read than anything approaching amusement. That she dared to harp on and on as ifhewas a failure of a man. As ifhissins were so terrible when she could not possibly know the truth about himorSpyros andherhands were not exactly clean either.

Though the fact his own father had chosen to believe the stories about him was, he was forced to acknowledge, something he had never done enough to combat.

The truth was never as salacious as it appeared. But he had always assumed his father knew that.

That he had not, that it was possible he really had thought Apostolis requiredtraining wheels,as she did so revoltingly put it, was like a knife in his rib cage.

He blamed her for that, too.

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