Page 199 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
She turned back to Zeus. ‘No.’
‘Though they wish they were?’
She lifted a shoulder. ‘I can’t say.’
‘Why do I get the feeling I’m dealing with someone who’s left a trail of broken hearts behind her?’
‘Why do I get the feeling I’m dealing with someone who doesn’t believe in a heart’s function?’
He laughed again and she ignored the whisper of delight that breathed through her at that, at how much she liked hearing his spontaneous humour.
‘Touché,’ he said, reaching not for the empty champagne flute and topping it up, but rather lifting hers and taking a sip from it, whilst holding her gaze. Her pulse went into dangerous territory now. ‘What if you’re wrong?’
‘I don’t think I am.’
‘I thought you didn’t know who I am?’
‘I’ve known men like you before.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘Arrogant, handsome, successful,’ she enumerated, but with a slow smile to show that she was teasing. Flirting. Baiting… ‘Tell me I’m wrong.’
‘Why tell you, when showing you would be so much more fun?’
Her heart galloped along. ‘How do you suggest doing that?’
‘Well,’ he said, leaning closer, holding her champagne flute. ‘Let’s start with a drink and go from there.’
The promise in the latter part of that sentence was exactly what she both dreaded and needed. A promise for more, because that was how she was going to hook Lottie’s nemesis and keep him distracted, but also, now that she was face-to-face with Zeus Papandreo, she freely admitted that it was going to be harder to control this thing than she’d initially anticipated.
Jane had considered her heart—and libido—to have been iced over six years earlier, with that awful heartbreak in her final year of school, but in fact, she was learning, on this night of all nights, that there was at least one man who was capable of reviving the latter. For there was no denying the heat flooding her body was pooling between her legs, and that if he were to glance down, she suspected he’d notice the way her nipples had grown taut beneath the flimsy material of her bra.
‘A drink,’ she heard herself purr, glad that love and loyalty to Lottie had reasserted itself. ‘And after that, we’ll see…’
CHAPTER TWO
Atfirstglance,thebarhad appeared to be a rectangular room with timber walls and windows on one side that looked out onto a busy, restaurant precinct street. But with Jane’s acceptance of sharing a drink with him, Zeus had nodded swiftly, put a hand in the small of her back and guided her away from the bar and through the crowd, towards a wide set of doors she hadn’t initially noticed.
‘It’s more private in here,’ he said, leaning down closer to her ear when he spoke, because it was loud, and the warmth of his breath made her whole-body tingle. She forced herself to focus, to regain control of her wayward senses.
‘All the better to hear me with?’
‘Hear you, see you…’
‘Blow my house down?’ she couldn’t resist volleying back.
‘As you said, we’ll see,’ he promised, and the words were so unmistakably sensual that her whole body seemed to catch fire. The hand in the small of her back was warm and he moved it a little upwards. She glanced at him then, at the exact moment his eyes dropped to her lips, and she felt as though the world had stopped spinning.
They stood perfectly still, in the middle of the private area of the bar. Jane was dimly aware of a few other tables of guests, but she couldn’t properly register them, nor hear anything other than a general din of noise. In the centre of her mind, and in every peripheral space as well, there was only Zeus.
‘I—’ She sought to fill the silence, to blot out the awareness that was humming through her, because this was supposed to be a ruse, and she was meant to be playing the part of someone like her mother. Beautiful, sophisticated, wealthy and with a casual attitude to sex and relationships. Instead, she found herself slipping back into her real self, into Jane Fisher, virtually orphaned, unloved, bullied as a child, broken-hearted at seventeen and afterwards, terrified of and turned off by sex. Those wounds had cut deep, and now, opposite Zeus, she felt a bundle of insecurities.
‘Come and sit with me, Jane,’ he said, but there was almost a hint of resignation in his tone. Of something that didn’t, in fact, make sense. Until she remembered that if she were faux husband hunting, then he was doing the same: looking for a woman he could con into marriage.
Resignation, because he didn’t want to marry.
Resignation, because he needed to flirt with someone until they couldn’t say no to his charms and would agree to anything he proposed.
