Page 68 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

CHAPTER THREE

THEFUNNYTHINGabout the world ending was that it kept right on going as if her pain didn’t matter at all. Her world had ended before, of course. Jolie should have been used to the fact that her pain didn’t matter to anyone but herself, and certainly couldn’t keep the sun from rising, the tides from turning, or the days from passing as they would.

Her grandparents’ deaths had been the first, hardest series of blows. They had raised her after she’d lost her parents when she was two. She often felt profoundly guilty that she couldn’t really remember that. She suspected that what she called her memories were actually stories her grandparents had told her about her parents and the pictures they had used to supplement the tales they’d told—of a couple so good it only made sense that they’d beentoogood for the world.

Her grandparents had been Jolie’s world. And then, in the course of a bewildering few years, everything had changed.

She had been thirteen when her grandmother died. She and her grandfather had mourned together until he had decided that regular school was not enough for his only grandchild, and so had sent her off to finishing school when she was barely seventeen. So that she, like her grandmother before her, could learn how to be a woman of consequence.

I thought finishing schools turned girls into women who married consequence rather than becoming it themselves,she had complained.

Her grandfather had laughed, his kind eyes crinkling in the corners.Perhaps. But married to whom, pray? One thing this particular school will do,mon rayon de soleil, is teach you how tothink.

He had maintained that the school would be the making of her until she had gone to take her place there. And within a few months he had succumbed to pneumonia and was gone, too.

That would have been quite enough change. But her grandfather had possessed what he liked to calla bit of a buffer against the world’s trials. What it was, in fact, was a small fortune. When he died he left the whole of it to Jolie.

But because she was only seventeen, there were strings attached.

And those strings were her aunt and uncle. The court had appointed them trustees. They had oozed sincerity and warmth, despite the fact that her aunt—her mother’s sister—had been estranged from the family for as long as Jolie could remember.

Jolie had believed they were who they said they were. Concerned relatives who wanted only to help their poor niece after a loss so devastating it must surely smooth over any past troubles.

She had not been so naïve since.

Jolie realized with a start that she’d been more or less sleepwalking through the hotel, thinking about all the variousends of the worldshe’d lived through thus far. She blinked, shaking her head as she looked around, hoping that none of the staff—or more importantly, Apostolis—had seen her in such a distracted state.

Today was a changeover day, a week since her doomed wedding. Their last famous guest had left the day before, and as the Hotel Andromeda did not enforce checkout times on the clientele they treated like family, the guest in question and his expansive selection of acolytes had not chosen to leave until so late last night it was actually this morning.

This was why they always did their best to put a day of padding in between. There was no telling when a guest would ignore their checkout day altogether and have to be gently and politely—but never directly—encouraged to move on before the next guest arrived.

They had the whole day today, which was less time than it seemed after a tornado of fame and money went through the place. Their handpicked, miracle-working staff was already deep into the process of turning the entire old house inside out and upside down so that when the next set of guests arrived it would be as if the hotel had been waiting for them since their last visit. This time it was a family that would stay for a month, and liked the Andromeda to feel as if it was their home.

With occasional effortlessly glamorous drinks with the owner, of course. Since Spyros’s death, the guests had liked to get together in the evenings and reminisce about the old man. Jolie only hoped that she could manage to keep her cool, as expected, now that she would not be reminiscing with the guests on her own.

This was not easy because Apostolis was not easy. A funny thing to say about a man who made such a point of acting lazy whenever possible, but it was true. She had imagined they might simply go about their business and ignore each other as much as possible, but he was always poking at her. Always seething in her direction, right there under the surface where, apparently, only she could see it.

He really is the most gloriously charming man alive, isn’t he?one of the former guest’s acolytes had sighed at Jolie only a few days ago, her eyes dancing with stars and focused on Apostolis.I don’t know how you canbearbeing around him all the time.

This after Apostolis had managed to quietly insult her in a variety of ways throughout the evening, but apparently at a frequency only she could hear.

It is a great trial,she had replied. Truthfully. Though she’d had to smile enigmatically while she said it to make it seem as if she meant the opposite.

There was something so unfair about it, she thought now. That despite their mutual loathing—or perhaps because of it—she and Apostolis were the only ones who could see each other clearly.

She had been doing a walk-through of all the floral arrangements before she’d been sidetracked into unpleasant memories, one of her managerial tasks that she liked best. She had built a relationship these past seven years with all the florists in the village and used each of them all in a rotation, depending on the guest in question. The Andromeda liked to present each guest with a floral theme, aflowerscape, as Jolie and Dioni liked to call it.

Spyros had praised her for her attention to such things, and his only compliments were always about the business. Like the scent profiles she curated, a comprehensive collection of scents that worked with each other, never against, and only completed the floral arrangements. It was not as simple as one might think.

Jolie carried on moving through the old mansion, in and out of the rooms that could all be locked up into separate suites but were left open and welcoming today, anticipating that the family group would wish to move freely. The rooms were large and graceful, and let in the light. Since that storm that had soaked her wedding right through, the best wedding gift she’d received, the island had returned to form. Everything was gold and blue, with bright flowers bursting into vibrant color everywhere. Inside the hotel, the palette was more understated, allowing the unmistakable beauty of the landscape and the sea to shine.

She loved this place. This grand and glorious old hotel. It had been one of the unexpected gifts of this path she’d been forced to take.

After checking out all the arrangements on this floor, she wandered into the library to assess the flowers that stood on the table directly beneath the vaulted skylight, one of Spyros’s additions to the house. The flowers were appropriately theatrical, but she found herself drifting over to the shelves stuffed with books, never artificially arranged.

It had been the first room she’d found herself gravitating to when Spyros had brought her here. She supposed that it reminded her of her grandfather’s study in the chateau outside Lausanne with its view of Lake Geneva and the Alps, filled with books, dear old rugs, and funny little items of art and interest that her grandparents had collected from all over the world.

The chateau, too, was gone now. What had been meant to be her birthright had been sold right out from under her.

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