Page 71 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

Because in the past, she would have asserted with total confidence that Apostolis did not know a single thing about his father. His visits, spaced out as they were, were always all about him. There was no possible way he could know the first thing about Spyros as a man. Or the challenges the old man had faced in his waning years.

And she wondered if she would have felt this surge of something like loyalty to his father if she had been married to anyone but him. If it was actual loyalty to Spyros she felt—when she had never felt any such thing before—or a simple, possibly childish desire not to give Apostolisanything.

Not even the things she knew about his father that he didn’t.

“I am sure that you are a great talent and know many, many fascinating things,” Apostolis said then, his meaning clear as he swept a gaze over the length of her body. “None of them, I think, useful in the running of a hotel.”

“Because you are the expert, is that it?”

Jolie regarded him steadily, because she’d found that it made him uncomfortable when she did so and today was no different. She could see the way he lowered his chin. The way his jaw tightened even further, almost certainly risking his famous smile.

And then, a far more telltale sign, he crossed his arms.

That felt like a win, so she smiled. “I think you’ll find, Apostolis, that spending many a debaucherous evening in whatever hotel crosses your drunken path is notquitethe same thing as running one. And even if it was, the kind of hotels that cater to your sort of character are very different from the Andromeda.”

“I’ll thank you to remember that the Andromeda is my birthright, not yours.”

“Birthrights are funny things,” she said, and there was, regrettably, more emotion in her voice than she might have wished in his presence. She hoped he would think it was temper. “They seem like rocks, do they not? Slabs of immovable granite that one can stand upon. Until they’re gone.”

His gaze was a wildfire. “Is that a threat?”

It hadn’t been. It had been a bit of foolishness and wistfulness, nothing more—but then her breath caught because he moved forward. And before she could do anything at all, he was leaning over, bracing himself with a hand on each arm of her chair.

Caging her in.

He wasn’t touching her. She knew he wasn’t touching her—

And yet her body exploded into a riot of sensation, as if he was.

She felt hemmed in on all sides, as if she was trapped in his closed fist, but there was something far worse than that—and it was that she feltpreciousthere.

As if that fist closed around her was protecting her, not confining her at all.

And it didn’t help that the way he was leaning over her meant he’d put his face entirely too close to hers.

So that she was forced, entirely against her will, to remember in excruciating detail that final moment of their wedding ceremony.

You may kiss the bride,the priest had intoned.

She and Apostolis had stared each other down, with varying looks of horror and distaste.

But she was no coward, so she had stepped forward and tipped her head back, daring him. And he had accepted that dare at once, moving in and sliding a hand around to the small of her back, which had been...unpleasant.

Wildly, riotously unpleasant, she had assured herself.

And then—never closing his eyes, which she knew because she never closed hers—they had glared at each other while their lips brushed.

Jolie had instantly repressed that moment, until now.

Because now he was much too close,again.With that archangel’s face of his and that look of burning distaste—for that was surely what it was—in his too-hot gaze.

She remembered the glare, the brush of their lips.

And the immediate, almost terrifying brush fire that had soared through her in its wake.

Here, in this chair in the library where she doubted she would find peace again, she could feel the lick of those same flames.

“Why are you worried about threats?” she had the presence of mind to ask him. “Do you feel threatened, husband?”

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