CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

T HE NIGHT BEFORE his travesty of a wedding took place, Apostolis Adrianakis dreamed that he dug up his own father’s grave, when he knew full well—while awake—that his father had been cremated and his urn placed in the family crypt. Still, he found himself out on an unfamiliar cliff beneath a strange moon, digging in the dirt with his hands. Once he reached the coffin, the old man had been hale and hardy.

And laughing.

Why are you doing this to me? Apostolis had demanded, with the temper he had deliberately never showed his father when he’d been alive. This is how a father treats his only son?

You are welcome, my boy, Spyros had replied.

And kept on laughing.

Now it was done, and if the old man was still laughing from the Great Beyond, the good news was that Apostolis could not hear him.

The terms of his father’s will had been a stunning blow, to put it mildly, and he could not say that he had covered himself in anything approaching glory.

In order to lay claim to the Hotel Andromeda and the estate, the lawyer had droned out, as if he was parceling out the tchotchkes instead of ruining lives, my only son, Apostolis, and my widow, Jolie, must act as follows: marry within three weeks of this reading, run the hotel together as a seemingly happily married couple for five complete calendar years, which will entail cohabitation with no gaps of more than two weeks at a time, with no more than one such gap every quarter.

He had been certain both he and that woman, his father’s hateful wife, would implode with the same fury when the lawyer stopped and looked at them, as if expecting the same. But they had not. It had not been pleasant, and he could not look back upon those first few moments without mortification, but it had also not escalated to anything but a few words he supposed they’d both kept to themselves for good reason during her marriage to his father.

He despised himself for counting that as a victory.

But then again, he had never met a woman, or any other person alive, who gnawed through his carefully erected barriers and boundaries to stick her claws in deep the way his stepmother did. And always had. Without even seeming to try.

Yet despite all that, they had cleared the first objectionable hurdle. Now what remained was the grim march through the next five years, chained together in infamy. The heir to one of the great Greek fortunes...and one of the most notorious women in Europe, a subject of furious speculation and gossip since she’d married his father, a man at least forty years her senior.

And more, they were to seem happy.

Oh, joyous day, Apostolis thought darkly.

Neither he nor Jolie had indicated the slightest interest in any kind of reception, given how little there was to celebrate in this disaster. But his sister, forever too sunny and hopeful for her own good, ignored their rather loudly stated wishes in that respect. The moment the wedding was done, she clapped her hands together and announced that she had a surprise for them all. And sure enough, out came a wedding breakfast that Dioni clearly expected them all to partake in as if this was a regular wedding between lovebirds.

He had thought his friend Alceu, more of a brother, really, might explode.

But no one said no to Dioni. Not even the usually unmovable and eternally brusque Alceu, and so here they sat. Breakfasting. Together.

Dioni chattered on about nothing and everything, though it was difficult to tell if she was nervous or just Dioni. Alceu stared stonily back at her in aggrieved silence. And Apostolis and his brand-new wife fairly hummed with indignation and malice.

Or perhaps that was just him.

“You must make a toast,” Dioni told his friend when the meal that no one had really touched seem to be drawing to its inevitable and painful finish. In that the food was finally going cold. “I have it on great authority that sometimes the best man, or the koumbaros since we are Greek—”

“I will pass on that honor,” said Alceu at once.

Icily.

“But as it turns out, I would love to make a speech,” Apostolis found himself saying. Beside him, he didn’t so much see Jolie stiffen. But he felt it. And truly, nothing could have pleased him more. “I can’t tell you how it felt to discover that my birthright is not only no longer mine, but is to be shared with a woman whose notoriety exceeds my own to such an extreme degree.”

He didn’t stand. Instead he lounged back in his chair, lifting his glass in the direction of his blushing forced bride, who was not actually blushing. She looked the way she always did, to his endless frustration. Angelic and untouched, when she was obviously neither. As if she floated high above all the messes she’d helped make and could not possibly be called to account for any of them.

Maddening woman.

“Seven years ago, we sat around a similar table, grasping for felicitations and platitudes, while congratulating my darling wife on her first marriage. Is it a May/December romance when it encompasses four decades? Or is that more of a January/December?” He smiled as if he was enjoying himself. And discovered that, in fact, he was. “I should be flattered that my erstwhile stepmother even considered lowering her standards, and her minimum age gap requirements, to a mere single decade.”

“I didn’t lower my standards at all,” Jolie said with a limpid sort of serenity that seemed to scratch all over his body, like fingernails. “It has nothing at all to do with my standards. It has to do with honoring my late husband’s will.”

“I think it has to do with greed,” Apostolis corrected her with a lazy smile that he doubted reached his eyes. “I suppose that it is possible that you fell head over heels in love with a man who just happens to be so many years your senior and also, coincidentally I am sure, unimaginably wealthy to boot. I am told that lightning strikes where it will, though I confess I have been thus far unenlightened. But I will confess, Jolie, that I have always imagined that your motives are far more...prosaic.”

His sister was staring at him with wide and distressed eyes. “So far, Apostolis, this is not a very good toast.”

But he was only warming to the topic, and there was a kick to it, like particularly good spirits. “I must salute you, my lovely stepmother and wife, for managing to fall in love so practically.”

If he expected this to shame her, and he could admit that he did, he was destined for disappointment. Jolie reached for her own glass and sipped from it as if she needed a bit of the bubbly stuff to ward off the press of ennui. “Perhaps your sister never told you that our headmistress used to tell us, with great sincerity—and especially when we were all pining away for the grubby sort of boyfriends we imagined we wanted at the time—that an elegant woman always keeps in mind that it is just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one, and only one of those choices leads to a life of grace and comfort.”

“It’s true,” Dioni agreed, with a nod. “She did say that. Quite a lot, actually. Though I always wondered why she hadn’t gone off and married herself a wealthy man, then, if it was all the same and by her telling, such men were just littering the earth like overripe fruit.”

Beside her, Alceu aimed an incredulous and frigid look at Dioni. “Overripe fruit?” he repeated in tones of censorious amazement.

But Dioni was not even remotely cowed. She didn’t look as if she recognized that she should be.

“Like rotting stone fruit,” she said merrily, in a conversational aside to Alceu as if she truly believed he wanted to continue that tangent. “Strewn about the dirt of Europe, by her telling.”

Apostolis carried on before his oldest and best friend stroked out. He aimed his glass and his smile at Jolie once again. “When I first heard the terms of the will I wanted to burn the entire hotel to the ground.” That got the murmurs of shock he wanted, though only from his sister. But at least she was no longer ranting on about fermenting fruit. He continued. “To save it, somehow, from the unsavory claws of a woman whose ambition must clearly outreach my own in every possible way, since she managed to end up with half of my inheritance.”

Jolie, the picture of angelic serenity, let out a tinkling laugh that sounded more like bells than any human should. “In fairness, my dear stepson and husband, if you’re speaking of your ambition that is a very low bar.”

Apostolis laughed. Dioni stared at her plate as if it had just occurred to her that forcing them all together like this was not the best idea she’d ever had. Alceu, meanwhile, looked as if he was seriously contemplating hurling himself out the window and off the side of the cliff, for which Apostolis would certainly not blame him.

But none of that made him want to stop. He was enjoying this too much. He was finally saying all the things he’d wanted to say for weeks. For years. Forever. He’d always held back, beyond the odd, inevitable comment here and there. Even at the reading of the will he’d kept himself from a deep dive into all of the things he’d kept to himself over the years, because he’d still had hope that he could contest the damned thing. He was not about to squander this opportunity. They could seem happy tomorrow. “I have to ask myself what exactly I did that he should force the two of us to marry. That he should make the ownership of this hotel, and therefore the bulk of his estate, contingent on you and I making it through five miserable years together. Acting the part, of course, as the myth demands. I cannot imagine it, but I assume that I will soon be the recipient of the sort of tricks that lead a man to make such rash decisions. I’m expecting nothing short of Cirque du Soleil.”

His sister, bless her, looked confused. His friend politely averted his gaze.

His wife smiled in that way she had that looked polite enough if a person didn’t know her, but felt like razors. And if a person did know her even a little bit, well then. It was easy to see the shine of the blade.

“What is the saying?” she asked in a musing sort of tone. “Ah, yes, it goes something like, not my circus, not my monkeys, I think.”

“But do you not see?” Apostolis made a grand gesture with his wineglass, encompassing the two of them. “This is the circus, Jolie. And you and I are nothing but monkeys who must dance, for five long years, as my father has a revenge I did not know he wished to take upon me from beyond the grave.”

“I think he thought he was being kind,” Dioni offered.

But neither Apostolis nor Jolie looked over at her.

Because Jolie, Apostolis was perhaps too delighted to see, was not holding on to her calm, angelic demeanor quite so tightly as before. “What astonishes me is that you imagine this is something I lobbied for,” Jolie said with a different sort of laugh. Less bells, more mayhem. “After seven years of marriage, I expected a settlement commensurate with the time and effort I put in. I did not expect there to be further hoops to jump through. I certainly did not expect that I would be forced to indulge in a charity case, with a man of low character, far lower morals, and a reputation so dire that it would make the average howling alley cat seem like a cloistered monk.”

“Are we discussing morals?” Apostolis asked, with true delight moving through him, like that lightning striking him after all. “Do you dare?”

“As I believe I made clear to you seven years ago and every year since in one way or another, it’s not your business. It wasn’t then, it wasn’t at any point along the way, it isn’t now.” Jolie, he discovered in that moment, got colder when she was angry. Her temper was like a blast of ice but, perversely, he felt warm. And warmer by the second. “And it will never be your business, because it has nothing to do with you.”

“Except behold.” Another grand, sweeping gesture between them, because he could see it annoyed her. “His will made it my business and now you are also my business as well as my stepmother and wife, for my sins.”

Jolie made a disdainful noise. “I categorically reject the idea that your sins, voluminous and colorful as they undoubtedly are, should be rewarded. Not even your father, who had an alarming soft spot for your antics, would consider those antics worthy of anything but a sigh and a trip through his own memories of sordid seasons past.” She eyed him as if he had woken up this morning something less than his usually resplendent and tempting self when he knew very well he had not. “Upon reflection, all I can think is that your father was so certain that you were not up to the job of handling his estate and the Andromeda that he realized you needed training wheels, if you will. A guiding hand. And since he knew that no one in their right mind would take on such a job, he made certain that I had no other choice but to guide you as best I can.”

Apostolis laughed at that, and kept laughing, though it was more a flash of that fury that had been a fire inside him since the will was read than anything approaching amusement. That she dared to harp on and on as if he was a failure of a man. As if his sins were so terrible when she could not possibly know the truth about him or Spyros and her hands were not exactly clean either.

Though the fact his own father had chosen to believe the stories about him was, he was forced to acknowledge, something he had never done enough to combat.

The truth was never as salacious as it appeared. But he had always assumed his father knew that.

That he had not, that it was possible he really had thought Apostolis required training wheels, as she did so revoltingly put it, was like a knife in his rib cage.

He blamed her for that, too.

It was turning into a rather long and epic list.

“Everyone knows what is happening here,” Apostolis told her, letting his laughter trail off and his eyes blaze right at her, like his fire could melt all her ice. “It’s a tale as old as time. A young, avaricious girl seeks an older man to give her a life of comfort and ease. There is only one payment for that, as I think you know. Beauty will always be traded in whatever market that can afford it. No doubt you’ve spent the last seven years convincing my poor, deluded father that he somehow owed you more than what he’d already given. His name. This life you do not deserve.” He made a meal out of a sigh. “Though I do not know why you bothered. No one will ever forget who you really are. No one ever does. A greedy, social climbing trollop who fancies herself a trophy when she is nothing but a sordid little gold digger.”

“Do you know what I’ve noticed?” his bride and nemesis asked, in a deceptively light tone. Apostolis was dimly aware that she was leaning closer to him and that he was leaning closer to her, too. He didn’t know when she’d moved, or when he had, only that they were now nearly as close as they had been at that makeshift altar. He could see every furious icicle in her gaze. “Truly wealthy and powerful men take great pleasure in the things that wealth and influence bring them. One of those things being the attention of beautiful women of any social strata.”

One of her perfectly shaped brows rose in challenge. “Truly confident men of real authority are never worried about gold digging. Why would they be? They like lavishing the women in their lives with the fruits of their labors. And the joy it brings them. For she is the prettiest diamond he could find and oh, does he love polishing her while she gets the chance to truly shine. And do you know who is worried about the apparent scourge of gold diggers traipsing about the planet, looking for unsuspecting marks?”

She nodded sagely, as if he had answered her. “That’s right. Tiny little men. With precious little power or authority, who know, deep down, that they’ll never measure up.”

That she considered him a member of the latter category was obvious.

And for a moment, it was as if Apostolis... whited out.

It was as if everything simply...flatlined.

Except not, because he was fully and totally aware of Jolie.

Jolie, that impossible woman, who he had expected would grow brittle to match the void within as the years passed, but she hadn’t. He’d expected that gaunt, bird of prey look that so many women in her position adopted as they fought the ravages of time that would eventually get them replaced, but not Jolie.

If anything, she was more beautiful than she’d been on that first wedding day, seven years ago. When she’d stood in a white dress right here in the Andromeda, but that day the sun had been shining and the sea had been so blue it hurt.

And there Jolie had been with her hair the color of the sun, and her eyes a match for the Mediterranean all around her, and only Apostolis seemed to see the truth of who she was.

The sheer avarice in her smile. The calculation in her gaze. The way that she had treated his father as if she was his nurse, not his wife.

I don’t expect you to be friends with her, his father had told him with a laugh. In fact I would prefer you keep your distance, dog that you are. But I do expect you to be polite.

Apostolis had been certain that she could not manage to stay polite. Women like that never could. He had expected her to do what women in her position always did, having secured the older man—as his father had suggested. No doubt they both assumed that the flirtations would start with any younger man who happened by. The coded invitations. The clear and obvious signs that she would be more than willing for some extracurricular with him behind his father’s back.

He had spent his father’s wedding reception coldly laying out how it would go in his head. How he would expose her and be rid of her.

But those invitations had never come.

To his astonishment, this conceited, manipulative woman had treated him as if he was beneath her . A charity case she engaged in purely for his father’s benefit.

A trial, at best.

For seven years. Without even the slightest deviation.

In fact, it had seemed as if her opinion of him—low to begin with—had only gone lower as time went on.

Even today she was under the impression that she was the one doing him a favor.

It was an outrage of epic proportions.

Sheer indignation thundered in his veins—and not only because of her temerity.

When he thought about the way he had worked, all of his life, to maintain a relationship with his father, he wanted to...break something. And he knew that while Jolie was an ignominy at best, she was not to blame for the fact that the old man had always loved his work and his women far more than his family.

That he had preferred to bask in the reflected glory of the guests who came and stayed in this hotel, because it gave him some kind of mystique. There were the articles about him, the tycoon who was on a first-name basis with the most powerful and beloved people alive.

The Andromeda is the glittering scene, such articles would claim, and in the charming epicenter of all that glamour and elegance stands one man. Spyros Adrianakis, the curator of it all.

Curating that scene had always been more interesting to Spyros than his son. Or his long-suffering wife. Or the baby girl that had not saved his parents’ marriage but had instead taken his mother’s life and relegated Dioni to her older brother’s care. Because he could not trust his sister with the nannies who Spyros had treated like a pool of lovers. All of them auditioning for time in his bed, not the care and maintenance of poor Dioni.

All of this, Apostolis had done his best to forgive. Forgiveness that he was well aware he had never quite achieved.

So he had gotten his father’s attention any way he could.

But he was not about to tell this woman, his stepmother and wife and enemy, such things. He couldn’t think of anyone he would trust less with such delicate truths about who he was or what he was about or what this family really was when there was no one about but them.

He studied the enemy in question.

Jolie looked delicate, but she wasn’t. He had made a study of her all these years and he knew that the way she presented herself was a lie. The effortlessly willowy form, to easily inhabit this glittering world his father had created, made her look more like one of the grand film stars who flocked to this place, or the high society darlings, than they did themselves.

The greatest lie of all was that she never looked as icy as she truly was. She looked like a pure, long shot of a perfect Mediterranean day. All of that golden hair. Those impossible blue eyes. That perfect, symmetrical face, classical cheekbones and the kind of sensual mouth that set pulses to skyrocketing all around.

He knew exactly why his father had chosen her. Aside from the obvious, she was precisely the sort of hostess the Andromeda’s extraordinarily particular clientele expected. Demanded, even.

And one thing Apostolis had always known about his father was that as much as Spyros indulged his baser impulses, he never left a mess when it came to the myth of his business. Jolie really was the perfect Lady of the Andromeda, as he had heard her called.

It only made him dislike his wife all the more.

Then again, the fact that she’d been forced to marry him could work in his favor. Aside from everything else, it meant that he had ample opportunity to plot and enact the perfect revenge.

His father might not be able to pay for what he’d done, but she could.

And would, Apostolis vowed then, with something like iron in his gut.

Again and again.

“Cat got your tongue?” asked the maddening woman in question, with a certain glee in her voice and all over her lovely face, likely not just because she’d insulted him, but because he’d let her see the insult had found its target.

It was more expression than he’d seen on her face in some time, and he took a dark sort of pleasure in that. Even as he realized with some surprise that while he’d been sorting through the fury and the rage and the fire in him, Alceu and his sister had slipped away, leaving only Apostolis and Jolie in the breakfast room.

How had he failed to notice that?

“It is lucky for you that I am such a small man,” he told her then, and stood. Cataloging, as he did, the way her expression changed, and surely not only because he was, in fact, a large man no matter what she thought of him. It told him all manner of interesting things that he filed away for another time. “Or I might be tempted to return the favor.”

Jolie’s mouth curved in that way it did, that made him think only of sharp blades, polished to shine. And slice. “I wish you would. I can’t wait to hear what a rich fantasy life you’ve been entertaining yourself with all these years.”

But revenge was a long game. If the aim was to win.

And he intended to do just that.

Apostolis shook his head. “There will be time enough for that. Five long years.”

She stayed where she was, seated with a certain insouciance at the table yet turned in her chair with one arm thrown almost languidly across its back. Yet he found he did not believe her attempt to appear bored by this.

Or him.

“One thousand, eight hundred, and twenty-five days, give or take,” she agreed in a quiet voice that was in no way soft . “But who’s counting?”

And it was a more solemn moment, then, between them. They were looking at each other, for a start. Usually, Apostolis knew, he avoided direct eye contact with this woman like the plague. It was too dangerous—

He wasn’t sure he cared to think about why that was.

Apostolis extended his hand, slowly, and did very little to curb the glittering, sharp dislike—that was the only word for it, he was sure—curling through him and no doubt visible on his face.

She wore a very similar expression, ice to his fire.

But she rose.

“Come, my darling wife,” Apostolis said in his darkest and most sardonic voice. “And let’s start counting the days until we are free of each other.”

Jolie smiled again, sharper still. But still she put her hand in his. And hers was smooth, but warm, and he did not wish to acknowledge how he could feel the contact inside him—everywhere—like another thread of that same... dislike.

“Until we see, you and I,” she said, the blade of that smile honed to a deadly gleam, “who is the most damned.”