Page 231 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
His eyes closed on a wave of acceptance. So, it was different, for both of them.
‘I get that you find it hard to open up to people, but you just lost your mother, Zeus. That’s got to bring up some issues. I’m just saying I’m here.’
For the next week, anyway. ‘I know,’ he said with a single nod. ‘And thank you.’
Jane wasn’t sure he should be thanking her. Not after she’d lost her temper, all because of his perfectly reasonable desire to maintain some personal distance between them. She’d felt lost, though, confused, worried that she was yet again feeling more for someone than she should. And wasn’t she?
I don’t trust easily, and yet I find myself wanting to trust you, Jane.
In the middle of the night, with Zeus fast asleep beside her, she slipped out of bed and moved from their room, out onto the deck. It was an inky-black night with low cloud cover, meaning the stars were covered and those that weren’t were dimmed by the light pollution of Crete. Nonetheless, she settled back onto the large pool lounger they’d shared that first night and stared upwards, as though answers would come to her if only she looked long enough. Except they didn’t, perhaps because there was no satisfying answer.
Instead, she lifted her phone and tapped out a message to Lottie.
How’s it going?
‘Couldn’t sleep?’ Zeus’s voice was a deep rumble and Jane jumped, guilty at having been sending a message to Lottie—the woman who single-handedly wanted to bring about Zeus’s removal from his family business.
‘Nope.’
‘Funny, I thought you’d have been worn out,’ he teased, coming to sit beside her, sliding an arm around her and drawing her to his chest. She nuzzled in there, sighing at how right it felt to be this close to him, how much she loved it here.
‘Oh, you’re doing an excellent job in that department. Don’t worry, Mr Papandreo.’
‘Are you still upset?’ he asked after a slight pause.
She glanced up at his face, her heart turning over in her chest. She shook her head.
‘What did you mean earlier, when you said this is your problem, not mine?’
Jane’s stomach clenched. ‘Oh. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Now who’s avoiding the difficult questions?’ he asked, squeezing her shoulder lightly.
Her smile was half-hearted but then she sighed, resting in closer to his side, her hand absent-mindedly drawing spirals around his hip area. ‘I’m not close to my parents,’ she said, and if he thought it was a strange comment, he didn’t say anything. ‘Not like it sounds as though you were with your mother and are with your father.’
She felt him shift a little, and sympathy tightened in her gut. Did he know about his father’s affair? Or was it multiple affairs? There was so much Jane didn’t know, and yet the small amount of information she had about the other man made her angry. On behalf of Lottie, yes, but now also on behalf of Zeus.
‘Areyou close with your father?’ she asked, tilting her face to his.
‘It’s complicated.’ He’d said that earlier today, too, when she’d asked about his relationship with Aristotle.
‘In what way?’
But he stiffened perceptibly. ‘We were talking about your parents,’ he reminded her, and a familiar sense of irritation sparked inside her chest. She didn’t push it, though. She’d told him how she felt, and now it was up to Zeus to change, or not. She knew that this was new for him, though, that he was grappling with the new experience of how much he wanted to confide in her, and that had to be enough.
‘When I say we’re not close, I mean… I barely have a relationship with them.’
He was very quiet, but his eyes were intensely focused on her face.
‘I was sent away to boarding school when I was very young, and I spent most of my time there. In the holidays, I would go home, and sometimes my parents were there, sometimes they weren’t. Usually, it was a nanny who had the most to do with me.’
He spoke soft and low, ‘I see.’
‘My father’s job required him to travel a lot. My mother went with him. They never planned to have children. I was a mistake.’
‘An accident,’ he corrected, as though the semantics of that might save her from the pain of knowing how unwanted she’d been.
‘I think my mother did her best for a few years, but she grew tired of it all. Hence, boarding school.’
