Page 99 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

He expected her to say something. Anything. Instead, she waited. And did not pull the sheet up over herself, but simply sat there, the glory of her lovely body on display.

He suspected she knew that very well.

Perhaps he was not the only one who woke determined to find new weapons.

“I was up all night castigating myself,” he told her.

“Were you?” She tilted her head slightly to one side as she considered him. “You seem to have come through it well enough.”

“I could not imagine how it was that I could have thought you so wicked when all this time, you were as pure as the driven snow in every respect.”

Perhaps wisely, she did not respond.

“But then,” he said softly and with intent, “after I sifted through what I know to be true and all the many stories you’ve told me over time, I remembered.”

“That your father was a monster and he made everyone in his orbit miserable?” she asked lightly. “Isn’t that what you said to me once?”

“That is a foregone conclusion.” He moved closer to the bed so he could stand above her. Or maybe he just liked it when she had to tip her head back like that to look at him. Maybe there was something in him that took entirely too much joy in how defiantly she looked at him, even now. “But that does not explain themoney,does it.”

He had the satisfaction of watching a kind of electric shock go through her at that.

At last, he thought with great satisfaction, they were back on familiar ground.

“Nothing to say?” he taunted her in a low voice. “No explanation?” He shook his head as if her response made him sad, when it was the opposite. “I suppose I will have to hunt these answers down myself.”

Jolie surged up, coming onto her knees, and she was flushed once again. With temper, he supposed, though he liked that much better than the unbearable notion that he hadhurther.

She pointed a finger directly into his face and she did not waver as she made an entirely anatomically impossible suggestion of what he could do with his anatomy.

In her clearest, coldest, most outrageouslyserenevoice.

“Tempting,” Apostolis murmured, and then he hauled her up and into his arms. “When this is so much easier. No yoga positions required.”

And then he bore her back down onto the bed and threw them right back into the heat of their battle.

CHAPTER NINE

EVERYTHINGCHANGED.

Again.

This time, the world ending and yet beginning again felt to Jolie as if she was trapped inside some kind of dream. Long, golden days, impossibly blue skies, and these hot, impossible nights that seemed to last whole lifetimes.

She had thought she understood sex. What it was, anyway. And she’d imagined how it would feel.

What she discovered was that while she understood theperformanceof it, thesuggestionof it, she knew nothing about therealityof sex. Because real sexual intimacy was almost shocking in its intensity. It created vulnerability. Impossible need. It was raw, unpredictable, and had far-reaching ramifications that she wasn’t certain she’d even fully discovered yet.

She felt as if she could feel them, rumbling along beneath her like new fault lines she’d never understood were there before, lurking. Waiting for the opportunity to shake apart everything she thought she was. Everything shewantedto be.

On the one hand, life at the Andromeda went on the way it always had.

Jolie performed her typical duties. She was the same smiling, endlessly accommodating hostess, going out of her way to appear to do very little while making certain that everything was in its place. That all the details werejust so. Out of sight of the guests, she and Apostolis would sit down together in the office and talk about numbers, accounts both payable and receivable, staff and vendor issues, and all the rest of the things that fell to both of them to handle now.

Whenever they were in public—or anywhere that they could not be completely certain of their privacy—they would play their happy, newlywed games for the benefit of their guests and the hotel’s enduring legacy.

Only now, when they went back to the carriage house, they imploded.

It was like fireworks.

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