Page 81 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

And it felt like a blast of sheer triumph when all he could do was stare at her. Jolie took a deep breath that felt as if it was shuddering all the way through her, but she told herself that was just another part of this victory. That Apostolis actually looked stunned.

So stunned that he couldn’t even mask his reaction.

She laughed again. “Did you really think that you could just...move me into your bed? Without discussion? What planet do you live on?”

“I live on the planet where when I kiss you we both go up in flames,” he shot back. Clearly no longer quite so stunned. And his eyes were on fire. “And unlike you, I’m not afraid to play in that fire. Can you say the same?”

She shook her head slowly, feeling a great wash of rage move over her. What else could it be, so hot and flushed andfurious?

“I’m not afraid of anything involving you,” she told him, very deliberately. “My worst nightmare involving you has already come true.”

“Prove it,” he invited her, something more than a simple flame in his gaze.

“I don’t have to prove it. All I have to do is pretend I’m sleeping with you and it achieves everything I need it to do. Why would I actuallydoit? What’s in it for me?”

“I think you know that it’s the last battlefield, Jolie.”

“And I suppose you think that you have all the weapons necessary for victory?” She made a new opera out of the roll of her eyes, and the bored shake of her head. “How naïve you are. You forget, I think, that this is a marriage, not one of your tawdry affairs. We have no choice but to stay together for forty-four weeks of each and every one of the next five years. If you blow something up you might have to live in the rubble, Apostolis. You and I both know that you’re not built to handle that.”

It was his turn to laugh at something that wasn’t funny at all. “You speak with great authority for a person who doesn’t know anything of importance about me.”

Jolie lifted a languid shoulder and tracked the way his gaze followed the movement. “The only thing I need to know about you is that you’ve never stuck anything out. On the other hand, I was married to your father for years. And contrary to what our guests seem to think, it was not exactly a trip through the tulips. It was work.” But she didn’t want to get into that, so she kept going, especially when she saw the query in his gaze. “What do you know about that kind of work? I mean real work. The gritty intimacy involved in having not only to live with the decisions you make, but to marinate in the consequences of those decisions day after day, year after year.”

“Has it happened?” he asked, she realized somewhat dimly that he had moved closer, then, because her back was suddenly against the wall. And the only thing she could see was him. “Have we finally arrived at the moment where you admit that your reasons for marrying my father were mercenary, that he was a monster, and that you were miserable?”

“I envy you,” Jolie told him softly. “What a gift it is that you could reach your advanced age and still believe things could be so black and white. I’m afraid that privilege was taken from me quite early. And I have nothing to complain about in my life. I have been well provided for, with only a short period of anxiety about such things. On the other end of the next five years, I will be able to do as I please. I’m not sure that I would change any of it if I could.”

Jolie had never said that out loud before. She wasn’t sure she had even thought it. Because that was the trouble with regret, wasn’t it? With peering back through time, imagining that the things that haunted her could be taken away somehow... If they were, then it meant everything else would also change. She could have ignored Spyros when he’d turned his eye toward her, but where would she be now if she had?

She didn’t have to imagine what Mathilde’s fate would have been if she’d turned him down. The possibilities were etched on the inside of her eyelids.

“You’re such a liar,” Apostolis said then, in a voice that was nearly crooning. Nearly soft, like a lover’s. “Everything about you is a lie. What I can’t decide is if you believe the lies you tell or if you are entirely callous, spitting them out one after the next like every other falsehearted grifter who ever lived.”

That might have hurt, coming from someone else. And she felt a phantom pain in the vicinity of her chest anyway. She told herself she was imagining what that would feel like if he’d mattered to her at all.

“That sounds a lot like projecting,” she said, lightly. Easily. As if she had never been hurt by a thing in all her days here, and certainly not byhim.“Once again, I think you’d be an excellent candidate for therapy. And no need to worry. It would only take... Oh, I don’t know. Twenty years or so to untangle all these things in you that have become so rotted and terrible.” She reached out and patted him on the arm, her smile fairly dripping with false sweetness. “Trust the process, Apostolis. You can do it.”

He laughed again, then, and there was something about it. The way it rolled through her, and him, too. She could see it. Or she could feel it, maybe, something shimmering and starkly dangerous, winding around the pair of them and filling up the hall.

Filling up the whole house.

That was when Jolie realized that, possibly for the first time, they were truly all alone.

Not in a moving vehicle. Not in a place where staff might appear at any moment, because they never came here without an invitation and an appointment.

Dioni was flying across the Atlantic even now.

That meant it was just the two of them and this wild, chaotic war of theirs. She could hear the beat of those war drums, a deepinsistencewithin her. She could feel the march of booted feet, up and down her spine.

“There are only so many ways this can end.” And there was still that dangerous laughter all over his face. It made his eyes gleam in that way they did sometimes, that bittersweet gold. “We could kill each other. For obvious reasons, I would prefer to avoid that. One of us could kill the other. For legal reasons, I can’t support that either. But if we continue like this, constantly upping the ante, constantly trying to outwit the other, it’s going to be one of those two endings. I hope you know that.”

“Spoken as someone who, once again, can only imagine things in the short term.” Jolie leaned back against the wall and crossed her arms. Then tilted up her chin, hoping she looked as insouciant as she wished she felt. “And more than that, only thinks with one part of his anatomy. None of this is a surprise to me, you understand. But I think you’re going to have to learn that not everything can be solved in the way you think it ought to be, just becauseyoulack imagination.”

“What amazes me is that you think that headlines are facts, Jolie, when I would think you’d know better, personally. And I suppose it would be easier for you if I really did only think with one part of my anatomy. But your tragedy is that, deep down, you know I’m right.”

He moved forward then, just a little. Just enough to make her brace herself—

But she shouldn’t have.

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