CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

I T WAS A resoundingly foul day for a wedding.

Not even the splendor of the internationally acclaimed, widely beloved wonder that was the historic Andromeda Hotel, standing proud on one of the loveliest cliffs in the Cyclades, could maintain its trademark resplendence in such a relentless downpour. It was as if the heavens above were as appalled by these particular nuptials as the participants.

Standing beside the great windows overlooking the churning sea in her wedding dress, an understated affair that she had sourced from her closet in an elegant, pearlescent dove gray—because black was too obvious—Jolie Girard felt quietly and personally vindicated.

It looked the way she felt.

But pointed gale sent from the gods as a metaphor or no, this wedding was happening. There was no doubt about that. There was no escaping it, and they’d both tried. They had more than tried.

They had both exhausted every possible legal angle. They had insulted each other in every possible way, then started all over again, and then moved on to insults that had likely left scars that only time would show. The intense arguments after the will had been read had gone on for so long that it was a shock it hadn’t been noted by the ever-hovering paparazzi who had been clustered outside the hotel after the funeral.

There was nothing for it, sadly.

Jolie Girard, widow of the infamous and ancient tycoon Spyros Adrianakis—who had taken his Cretan grandfather’s stately mansion on a less-traveled-to Greek island that his father had made it into a hotel and turned it into a destination that, these days, attracted only the most exclusive and glamorous clientele—was marrying the devil himself.

That being her arrogant and unpleasant stepson, Apostolis Adrianakis, who was also individually famous the world over—mostly for his excesses and colorful romantic entanglements.

Colorful was a euphemism. It was more of a swamp, in Jolie’s opinion.

I will take care of you, Spyros had promised her in his last days. Never fear, Jolie mou, I will see to it you are taken care of for the rest of your life.

She should have known better than to believe him. She did know better.

If men could be trusted, after all, the span of her whole life would be different.

It was so dark and gloomy outside that she could see her reflection in the glass, though it was fully morning by now. She adjusted the expression on her face, because the battle was already lost. There was no point giving the irritating Apostolis, her groom, the satisfaction of imagining that she was coming to this wedding diminished in some way.

She would do the diminishing if there was any about, thank you. Just as she would do the allotted time—five eternal years of matrimonial prison—and on the other end of this nightmare, she would be free.

Jolie would finally be free. Her cousin Mathilde would also be free, because that was the bargain she’d made. And she could go off and do...whatever it was she wanted.

Maybe she would know what that was by then.

She felt a prickling down the length of her spine and then, a moment later, saw a shadow pull itself into the form of a man in the doorway behind her, like some kind of fairy-tale monster.

He was not a monster, she told herself stoutly. He only wished he was.

The truth about Apostolis Adrianakis was that he was no more and no less than a man.

Jolie intended to remind him of that, should he be tempted to believe his own press and consider himself something more akin to a deity. Or anything supernatural at all.

She turned to face him because he might not be a monster, but that didn’t mean she fancied having him at her back. Might as well bare her neck and belly while she was at it—

But the visual that accompanied that thought landed...wrong.

Because she was looking directly at him as she envisioned baring any part of herself and looking at him had always been deeply problematic.

Much as she might wish otherwise, another unfortunate truth about Apostolis Adrianakis was that he was darkly gorgeous, impossibly beguiling despite his many obvious personality flaws, and almost hypnotically magnetic. Even to someone like her, who was no fan of his. It was no wonder that the better part of the earth’s population followed him around with stars in their eyes.

Jolie did not believe in gods, Greek or otherwise, but it was impossible not to look at Apostolis and wonder if maybe, just maybe, they were still wandering the earth. If they had taken to islands like this one and now lurked in villages rife with celebrities and holidaymakers in the summer, whispering their own legends and myths from every charming alley. If they were made of flashing dark eyes in a shockingly beautiful face crafted to wedge itself between the ribs of anyone who dared glance his way.

Perhaps, she thought sharply, she ought to have been grateful that he came by his arrogance naturally. It was better than the alternative. She could not imagine what a chore it would be to deal with a man who imagined himself as indisputably magnificent—visually, anyway—as Apostolis, yet wasn’t.

This version was trying enough.

Her erstwhile groom had decided to express himself in his choice of apparel as well, she saw. He wore the expected suit, but it looked almost as if he’d slept in it—or, knowing Apostolis, had slept with someone else on top of it. Or several someone elses.

Jolie told herself she would not care in the least if he had.

“Kaliméra,” Apostolis murmured in that rough-edged drawl of his that made a meal of both his accent and the simple good morning. “What a perfectly hideous day to marry my wicked stepmother. A luckier man has never walked this earth, I am certain.”

“The joy is all mine,” she replied with a polite smile that she knew he would take as a thrown gauntlet. The flash in his dark eyes assured her he did. “Nothing could bring me more happiness than forced proximity with a man who is the human equivalent of landfill. Felicitations all around.”

Apostolis laughed at that as he slouched into the room, every step liquid and low, as if he did not so much walk as glide. The rumpled effect was not helpful. It made her think about how his thick, dark hair had come to look like that, as if greedy fingers had tugged at it and run their way through it. It made her wonder if he had misbuttoned his shirt deliberately or in a hurry, or if someone else had done it for him.

Obviously she would die before she asked him. Before she gave him the slightest reason to imagine she cared when she did not.

They had come to a resigned détente after it was clear that no victories could be won in their situation, not even Pyrrhic ones. It was an uneasy truce at best, no good faith treaties in sight, because neither one of them wanted any part of this. Left to their own devices, they would have maintained the chilly, exquisitely precise courtesy that had characterized their relationship since Jolie had married Spyros through the old man’s funeral and the reading of his will, then never spoken to each other or interacted again.

Apostolis had not been able to forgive his father for marrying her, a girl the same age as his sister, Dioni. A girl who his father had, in fact, met at the finishing school where Dioni and Jolie had been classmates graduating together.

And he had not been able to excuse Jolie for not accepting his unsolicited advice on the topic of the forty-year age gap between her and his father. His arguments had been, boringly, that the only reasons a girl would accept an old goat like Spyros were either because she was a victim...or a gold digger.

It had been obvious what he thought she was.

Or maybe, she’d told her newly minted stepson the night before her wedding back then, who was ten years older than her himself, I just like a power dynamic.

That was the one and only personal conversation they’d had in the seven years she’d been married to Spyros.

She had not even tried to forgive him. Jolie preferred not to think of Apostolis Adrianakis and his much-lauded cheekbones at all.

And now she was marrying him.

Jolie had no idea what she could possibly have done to deserve this fate. First her aunt and uncle’s behavior, which had led to all of this, but now this . She suspected it involved whole previous lifetimes of wickedness, at the very least, and she only wished she could remember them. That sounded like a lot more fun.

Apostolis came to a stop beside her, looking at her only briefly before he turned his attention to the gale outside. And she turned with him, instinctually, and regretted it immediately. It seemed too pat, somehow. Too coordinated, as if she was trying to mirror him.

Or maybe it was simply that she had gone out of her way to never, ever stand this close to him before.

She wished she hadn’t broken that unstated boundary that had always been between them now. Or perhaps he had broken it, but either way, it did her no favors. This close to him, she was regretfully aware of him in ways she would have liked to never, ever have comprehended. Jolie knew he was tall, of course. And that he could look lean and elegant or broodingly fit, depending on his mood or the photograph in question or even what he chose to wear. And even that he, regretfully, radiated a certain kind of charisma that she liked to tell herself was repellent.

But it was easier to convince herself of that when he was across a room, aiming nothing but freezing, pointed courtesy in her direction.

Next to him, she found that her head barely cleared his shoulder and she was not a tiny woman. Today she was wearing only moderate heels, but she was instantly aware in the way taller women were that even if she been wearing her highest stilettos he would still tower over her.

She told herself that made her feel angry.

But it didn’t.

What Jolie felt was fragile. And deeply, deeply feminine in a way that probably would have shocked her if she’d allowed herself to think more about it.

But she couldn’t, because he also smelled good.

Jolie could have gone the whole rest of her life without the unfortunate knowledge that Apostolis Adrianakis smelled good . Not too much. It was nothing overbearing. Just a hint of something not cloying enough to be cologne. A whisper of scent, something that made her think of cloves stuck in oranges, the kind of Christmas decorations she pretended she couldn’t remember, from a childhood that she worked hard to forget.

Because softness had never been an option. It had been a mirage like everything else, and thinking about it did her more harm than good.

Meanwhile, she was discovering that Apostolis was also warm. It was like he was a radiator, emanating heat from where he stood—

Or maybe he is simply standing there, she lectured herself. And here you are reacting like this.

“Appropriate weather,” he drawled from beside her. “At least we have that going for us.”

She stopped thinking about scent and heat and height, for God’s sake . “The metaphors write themselves.”

When their gazes tangled together, she thought he seemed equally horrified that they had stumbled upon a moment of accord here. That was so profoundly...not them.

“I had my legal team doing an eleventh-hour rustle through all of those nasty little clauses,” Apostolis said, almost idly, looking back out toward the rain and the sea that looked so gray and uninviting today. “But it all seems iron tight, as ever.”

Jolie did not bother to ask him why it was that a man of such epic and widely annotated uselessness required a legal team, allowing herself only a careless shrug. “I admire your commitment to imagining, even now, that there’s some way out of this.”

“I don’t know what my father’s relationship was with you, Jolie,” Apostolis said with a certain silken, lethal note in his voice. He looked at her and it was somehow more silken. More lethal. Disastrous, something in her cried out, but there were too many disasters to count. And he was not finished. “I cannot account for the fact that he thought to leave me his leftovers. It will never make sense to me.”

He had called her far worse things than leftovers in the weeks since Spyros had died. That was practically a compliment in comparison. Apostolis let his mouth curve, as if remembering with great fondness all of the names he’d come up with, and she could see that his eyes looked darker than before despite that gleam like gold in them. She knew that it was malice.

She could feel it all over her.

And she did not like the sensation. “I’m not sure why your father would think that you, who have showed no interest in anything aside from your own hedonistic pleasure in at least the past ten years, would somehow wake up the morning after his will was read with the burning desire to become a hotelier.” She let her smile widen. And sharpen. “Might as well take a match and set the entirety of the hotel on fire, if you ask me.”

“Yet he did not ask you.” Apostolis’s voice was lower than usual. Jolie was tempted to imagine that she was getting to him, but she doubted it. “Just as he did not ask me how I might feel about taking on the burden of his trophy wife. Alas, here we are anyway.”

With exaggerated courtesy, he turned and extended her his elbow. “The wedding party, such as it is, is waiting. The priest is in place. You are welcome to stay in here, wishing it all away, but that will not change a thing. It will only delay it and not, as I think you know, for long.”

“Oh, I’m ready,” Jolie assured him, with the sort of merry laugh she used at cocktail parties. “Between the two of us, I think I’m far more prepared to deal with this sentence. I mean marriage. What is five years, after all? I’ll still be young when we divorce.”

She could admit to herself that there was a certain level of exhilaration here. They’d spent so much time these last weeks shooting at each other, looking for the right weapons to use. And it felt like a victory when she happened upon one, like now.

His eyes narrowed, and she wished she knew what it was that had actually gotten to him. Was it the fact that she would be a mere thirty-two when this farce was done? Or was it their own age differential that got to him? She had only just turned twenty-seven. She wondered if that counted as the sort of outrageous age gap he’d been so concerned with when his father had married her.

Then again, she supposed they had years to find and name each and every one of these weapons, then learn how to aim them more effectively—and directly at each other.

Mutually assured destruction. All wrapped in a lovely marital bow.

She linked her arm with his because they were both out of options, and pretended she didn’t feel a single thing when she did. None of that prickling awareness. None of that unacceptable heat that made her not only too focused on him, but on herself.

On the way each breath she took made her breasts brush against the bodice of her dress. Making her feel as if she was wearing something daring when she was not.

She had learned long ago that there was no need to gild the lily, as it were. People made assumptions about her by simple dint of her presence at her husband’s side. The more understated she dressed and behaved, the more fevered their imagination about what must go on behind closed doors.

And she had profited from those fevers, hadn’t she? Or her aunt and uncle had. And did. And would continue to for the foreseeable future—

But she cut herself off there.

Was she disappointed that Spyros had not simply rewarded her for her part in their marriage outright? She was. More disappointed than she would ever let on, because there was no safe space for her to confide in. Though she doubted that Apostolis had any idea that she and Dioni, his sister, were close—Apostolis being the sort who made declarations and assumed that everyone leaped to obey him, without ever checking up to see if that was the case—Jolie knew better than to test that relationship.

She suspected that the other girl was able to maintain their friendship because they had tacitly agreed, long ago, not to discuss Jolie’s relationship with Spyros. At all.

It had been her little secret while he was alive. It would remain her secret.

And, apparently, he had decided she would have five more years to keep up the act.

Apostolis led her from the great room, taking her through the grand old house that would be theirs, now, to maintain and run together. An enterprise that she thought almost certainly doomed to failure. So, today, she tried not to think about it.

She took in the graceful accents of the lovely old place that she had loved at first sight. Legend had it that Spyros’s grandfather had built the place for the love of a young island girl he’d met and married here. Right here in this house that rose up on its cliff, an elegant presence on this end of the island. The only thing, or so the story went, that rivaled the beauty of the girl he took to wife—and made it possible for him to live apart from his beloved Crete.

It was Spyros’s father who had turned the Andromeda from a family home into a hotel. Despite claims that he did so out of a desire to share the house’s bounty with the public, it was well known—if rarely openly discussed—that it had far more to do with his debts than any interest in sharing the family house with outsiders.

Spyros was the one with real vision. He was the one who had spent the first part of his life turning the Andromeda into what it was today. A boutique luxury hotel that catered to exclusivity above all else. It was not advertised anywhere, save word of mouth.

What matters are not so much the words, but the mouths that form them, Spyros had liked to say.

And in his case, the mouths that spoke praise of this place were some of the most glamorous around, with lives wildly coveted and usually extensively covered in aspirational media. Too bad he had enjoyed appearances rather more than any admin work. The hotel had been in some difficulties when he’d married Jolie.

But it had been booked solid two years running now, and almost at full capacity the year before that. With repeat customers and a waiting list that grew by the day.

Spyros claimed that the hotel ran on the myth of itself. He therefore insisted that Jolie act as if all she did was waft about, catching the perfect light and making other men jealous of what they could never touch. Her grubby little figures, as he called her bookkeeping and actual administration of managerial duties, were always to be kept a secret.

Far better the guests should think the hotel ran itself.

Jolie agreed. Myths and legends were far more appealing than ledgers and vendors and besides, managing the hotel was the one thing Spyros let her do without supervision or much commentary.

It had been her escape. She should have known that Spyros would exact a price for that, too.

Today, their wedding was being squeezed into a morning when their current high-profile celebrity guest and his entourage had gotten stuck on another island, thanks to the storm. They had been waiting for a window just like this.

And by waiting Jolie meant hoping fervently for a windowless season.

Because here at the Hotel Andromeda, the goal was the near invisibility of not just Jolie’s true role, but of all the staff. Their guests preferred to operate under the impression that it was magic at work. Intuitive, effortless magic.

A wedding between non-guests would ruin that illusion.

Jolie fixed her face into something smooth and impenetrable as Apostolis walked with her into the little room they used to serve breakfast over the sea, sometimes the odd high tea, and so on.

Waiting there, looking equal parts concerned and anxious, were their witnesses. The sum total of their wedding party and guests. Dioni, who looked as scattered as ever, her dark hair falling down from the twist she’d attempted to secure it in, and, as ever, her dress not quite in place. It had used to drive their headmistress batty. She could oversee Dioni’s wardrobe and dressing herself, and yet within two breaths, Dioni would somehow have the perfect ensemble looking...unkempt. Hems frayed at the merest contact with her. Straps never stayed put. She always looked ever so slightly bedraggled, as if elegance was a gene and it had passed her by entirely.

It was the first moment all morning that Jolie felt emotional, and she had to fight to keep that to herself. There was no place for emotion here, not even for her only friend.

But the cure for stray feelings was to look to the other side of the room, where the man who was somehow Apostolis’s dearest friend in all the world stood. There were a number of things Jolie found impossible about Alceu Vaccaro. The most glaring was the fact that he had any friends at all, but especially Apostolis. Alceu was a stern, brooding, unforgiving sort of man from Sicily, with a grim mouth and an iron gaze that she was fairly certain would make every tropical flower in Greece wilt at once if he wished it.

It was hard for her to imagine a man like that giving an international playboy and professional wastrel like Apostolis the time of day.

Much less showing up for him at this tragic mockery of a wedding.

But here they all were.

Jolie felt a bit as if she was retreating to some higher plane, where she could look down on these proceedings from afar, as Apostolis shook hands with his supposed friend . And had to allow that it seemed more than possible that they really were friends then, because the grim Sicilian actually smiled. Slightly.

Then Apostolis was taking her arm again and they were standing in front of the priest, who looked unduly jolly, given the circumstances.

Beside her, Dioni held a bouquet of flowers, because of course she did. She offered them to Jolie.

“Keep them,” Jolie murmured. “The ceremony feels flowerless to me.”

Dioni sighed. “I can’t imagine a flowerless wedding,” she said softly. “What’s the point?”

That was another thing Jolie had always adored about her friend. She was the product of all of this wealth and outrageous consequence, rubbing elbows with some of the most extravagant people to grace the planet, and yet somehow the core of her was still so innocent. Her father had called her matia mou, his eyes. And he’d meant it, as far as that went for a man like Spyros.

Jolie had understood that Dioni would not have the sort of life she’d had. Dioni would be allowed to choose the life she would live. Dioni could even marry for love, if she wished.

Dioni did not have the family Jolie did, Jolie reminded herself. She was mercifully free of the kinds of pressures that Jolie had been navigating for years now. If she had to, she thought then with a certain ferocity, she would do whatever she could to keep it that way.

The same way she kept her cousin safe, she would do it for Dioni, too. If she needed to.

Though she supposed that would not be necessary. Apostolis could be a monster, it was true, but not where his little sister was concerned.

The priest cleared his throat.

Jolie took one last look at Apostolis, soaking in this last moment of blessed widowhood before he became her husband.

He looked back, that gleaming gold thing in his gaze, but his expression unusually serious.

For a moment, it was as if she could read his mind.

For a long, electric moment, it was almost as if they were united in this bizarre enterprise after all, and her heart leaped inside her chest—

“Stepmother?” he said, with a soft ferocity. “If you would be so kind?”

No, she told herself harshly. There is no unity here. There is only and ever war. You will do well to remember that.

And then, with remarkable swiftness and no interruption, Jolie relinquished her role as Apostolis’s hated stepmother, and became his much-loathed wife instead.