Page 73 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

Nor should you want to,something in her whispered.

It was too bright, too bold. It grew too big, too fast.

And maybe she already knew that he would leave her in cinders.

Jolie pulled away and she felt a kind of triumph that she could. But it was a close call. And she only realized, then, that it hadn’t occurred to her to keep her eyes open in protest the way she had before.

Something that was obvious to her because now, she could see him.

She could see the look on his face, intent and too hot to look at directly, though she did.

And let it sear straight through her.

Jolie decided she had only one play here. Only one chance to win this battle despite losing herself—and clearly losing her head—with this kiss she should never have allowed.

She’d know better now. She’d be more careful.

He had weapons she hadn’t dared imagine, but now she would.

First, though, she had to win. Or more accurately—he had to lose.

So she sat forward and slid her hand over his jaw, the better to smile at him as if she meant it.

“Tell me, husband,” she said quietly. Almost sweetly, her gaze steady on his. “Does that feel like threat enough to you now?”

And it was worth it to watch his face shutter, instantly. To watch him straighten and move back as if she had kicked him in the gut.

It was worth it to smile in the face of the look of pure loathing he threw her way, and keep smiling as he wheeled around and strode from the room.

And only then, only when she was alone, did Jolie cover her face with her shaking hands and do the best she could to keep from falling apart.

CHAPTER FOUR

THATHEWASa cursed man living a cursed life became, over the next weeks, a foregone conclusion even if it was not a surprise. Apostolis had spent the bulk of his life sorting out his own personal tragedies and attempting to come to terms with them.

Why should his marriage be any different?

“The scandal of your wedding has saturated the culture to such an extent that it has even reached me,” his friend Alceu told him on one of their calls one day.

“I have always been a scandal,” Apostolis said idly. “Why shouldn’t I compound it now? Maybe I’ll keep going. At what point does a scandal become too much scandal?”

“When there is any hint of scandal at all,” Alceu said in his usual repressive tones. “I suspect, my friend, that there is no hope for the man who made his stepmother his wife.”

“But was there ever any hope for me?” Apostolis asked in the same musing sort of way.

He could hear his friend’s sigh. “I have never had any.”

And yet, somehow, the conversation left him in a more hopeful frame of mind than he’d been in before.

He moved to the window of the hotel’s executive offices, such as they were, that were located on the bottom floor of the carriage house that had sat beside the Andromeda for almost as long as the hotel itself. Longer, according to some accounts. The grounds of the hotel lounged about along the cliff top and in addition to the mansion itself, there were a number of outbuildings. Maintenance sheds, garages, stables, and so on. There was also the carriage house, which was not only the offices but also his own quarters since he’d been about ten. And the back house, as it was called even though it was technically to the side of the hotel, where he had lived as a small boy, his sister still lived, and his father had lived with Jolie.

Apostolis found that as time went on, he grew less and less sanguine about the fact that Jolie had been his father’s wife first.

He found it harder and harder to accept that reality.

Yet he could still taste her in his mouth. She had invaded his sleep.

This was a new development.

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