Page 76 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

“I have never known Dioni to be so...” Jolie began.

“Independent?” he offered. “Secretive? Strange?”

“Solitary,” Jolie replied.

Perhaps a little repressively.

But he found that whatever else he might object to in this woman, her friendship with his sister was something that could only win his approval. Especially when Jolie possessed precisely that sort of effortless elegance that his sister lacked so profoundly.

Others had been cruel. He had realized in his time here that Jolie, no matter her many other faults, was never anything but kind to Dioni.

It was tempting to imagine there were whole other parts of her he could not see—

But he cast that worrying thought aside.

She was sitting in the passenger seat, so there was only so far away from him she could be based on the dimensions of the vehicle. Yet Jolie, somehow, managed to make it seem as if she’d put an extra ice floe or two between them.

He took satisfaction, tremendous satisfaction, in knowing that that was something she was not going to be able to do for much longer.

Not with any success.

“Change is good,” he said, thinking of the various ways he knew to melt ice. “There were whole years of my life where change was the only constant. It’s time Dioni discovered who she is and who she wants to be, away from the shadow of all this.”

“And do you think you managed to do it?” came Jolie’s silky, too serene tone, though her gaze was trained out the window. “Do you think you successfully removed yourself from any pesky shadows or do you worry that all you’ve done is run about to no avail, only to end up where you started?”

Normally he would have shot right back. But there were all those dreams in the night. Every night. There were all the ways he’d already had her when he had barely touched her. There was that kiss and the repercussions of that, and the way it echoed through him, even now. As if it was simply a part of him.

That wasn’t anything new. What was new was that he knew that everything between them was about to change.

And, perhaps, the fact that beneath her icy exterior, she cared for the sister he had always protected to the best of his ability.

It allowed him to answer with more candor than he might have otherwise. “I never considered myself to be in my father’s shadow. Quite the opposite. He would have had to be present in my life in some meaningful way for me to consider myself overshadowed by him.”

“Some would say that his legend alone does that work,” Jolie murmured.

“His legend has never meant much to me. I have read about it in magazines, like anyone else. In fawning articles that carry on about the secret lifestyles of famous men and the places they like to habit, like the Andromeda. I’m fully aware of the mystique. Of the hotelandthe man.” Apostolis shrugged. “But for me it was my childhood home. A mother who tried to please her husband, and then died. And a father who was always too busy chasing women—before and after he was widower—and courting the attention of celebrities to pay any attention at all to any of us. I like my family’s legacy. I want to continue it, as my mother would have wanted. The hotel and its legend is important to me. My father’s personal legend I could do without.”

He felt her turn to look at him then, and he congratulated himself, because surely allowing her to imagine him vulnerable was the greatest weapon he’d employed yet.

But he found himself glancing over just the same, to gauge the particular color of her Mediterranean blue eyes.

“I was orphaned when I was two,” she told him after a long curve in the road brought them past one of the villages, white-walled and blue-shuttered. “I never really knew my parents, so I can’t say that I mourned them, specifically. But I have to imagine that having parents and yet not having them must in some ways be harder than not having them at all. I never wondered if our relationship could improve. I never tortured myself with fantasies about the way that things could be different between us. And when I imagine them, it’s the fantasy versions of them my grandparents created for me, as bedtime stories. I never got to know their flaws and foibles. I never had to measure myself against them and see where they came up lacking, or I did.” She let out a long, low breath. “So I don’t envy you, Apostolis. Whether you call it a shadow or not, it must be a weight all the same.”

He had pulled up to the hotel and now he navigated the car to a stop in front of the carriage house. When he did, he looked over at her and could not tell if the weight he felt inside him was that shadow she’d spoke of, or if it was that unexpected mix of compassion and grief that she’d shared with him.

Apostolis was in knots, but Jolie wasn’t even looking at him. She looked almost supernaturally composed, her head angled away from him, her gaze out toward the sea.

But he had the strangest urge to reach over and trace the line of her jaw, because it looked sharper than usual, as if she’d set it against the same memories she’d just shared with him.

He stopped himself right there. Whatever game she was playing here, whatever battle tactic this was, he would be a fool to fall for it.

She turned to look at him then, and suddenly he could feel shadows everywhere, as if they were both soaked in them. Or maybe it was the ghosts of what could have been. Of what might have been.

If he had met her somewhere other than on his father’s arm, years ago.

He had never felt anything like it, that sudden pang of loss. And never so keenly, the ache of it so intense it made his bones hurt.

And though he couldn’t read anything on her face, he somehow thought that what he saw there was a thread of true vulnerability. Or something more akin to openness.

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