CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FOUR

T HAT HE WAS a cursed man living a cursed life became, over the next weeks, a foregone conclusion even if it was not a surprise. Apostolis had spent the bulk of his life sorting out his own personal tragedies and attempting to come to terms with them.

Why should his marriage be any different?

“The scandal of your wedding has saturated the culture to such an extent that it has even reached me,” his friend Alceu told him on one of their calls one day.

“I have always been a scandal,” Apostolis said idly. “Why shouldn’t I compound it now? Maybe I’ll keep going. At what point does a scandal become too much scandal?”

“When there is any hint of scandal at all,” Alceu said in his usual repressive tones. “I suspect, my friend, that there is no hope for the man who made his stepmother his wife.”

“But was there ever any hope for me?” Apostolis asked in the same musing sort of way.

He could hear his friend’s sigh. “I have never had any.”

And yet, somehow, the conversation left him in a more hopeful frame of mind than he’d been in before.

He moved to the window of the hotel’s executive offices, such as they were, that were located on the bottom floor of the carriage house that had sat beside the Andromeda for almost as long as the hotel itself. Longer, according to some accounts. The grounds of the hotel lounged about along the cliff top and in addition to the mansion itself, there were a number of outbuildings. Maintenance sheds, garages, stables, and so on. There was also the carriage house, which was not only the offices but also his own quarters since he’d been about ten. And the back house, as it was called even though it was technically to the side of the hotel, where he had lived as a small boy, his sister still lived, and his father had lived with Jolie.

Apostolis found that as time went on, he grew less and less sanguine about the fact that Jolie had been his father’s wife first.

He found it harder and harder to accept that reality.

Yet he could still taste her in his mouth. She had invaded his sleep.

This was a new development.

He loathed it.

In his dreams, that scene in the library did not end where it had that day. In his dreams he lifted her up into his arms and took her down onto the library floor. He stripped her of those clothes she wore—all that casual, offhanded elegance, no match for the real Jolie there beneath the things she wore.

In his dreams, he tasted every centimeter of her flesh and drank deep between her thighs until he had her moaning and writhing in his grip.

And his dreams never stopped there, either.

Every night, his dreams presented him with another way to slake this wildfire in him. Every night, he found that there was no balance to his imagination and no brakes besides. Not when it came to her.

As if, all along, he had not so much hated her for all the appropriate reasons, but desired her—

But no. He could not accept it.

And it made interacting with her in the light of day a challenge.

She would stand before him throwing all her usual barbs and all he would think about was how deep inside of her he’d been in last night’s deliriously hot dream. How she had arched her back and pressed her breast to his mouth. How she tossed back her head in abandon when she rode him hard and deep.

Are you listening to me? she had asked a bit sharply this morning.

But he’d studied the way her gaze widened as he looked at her.

And he’d wondered if she’d had an idea what he was thinking about without him having to say a word.

Of course I wasn’t listening, he had told her, after a fraught moment or two passed. I never listen when you’re insulting me. Which means, my darling wife, it’s as if we live in this lovely spot in perfect silence. Nothing but the waves and the wind.

He had been proud of that.

She had looked rather more incandescent, though she had walked away before he could see if she might truly lose her cool at last.

Apostolis was enjoying imagining how else that moment might have ended when he heard a knock at the office door. He turned, aware that something in him leaped a bit at the notion it might be his wife.

But he tempered that reaction almost as soon as he had it. Because, for one thing, Jolie rarely knocked on any door at the Andromeda, since she was half owner of the hotel. As she liked to remind him daily. And for another, that was not the reaction he should have been having where she was concerned.

And besides, it was Dioni. He smiled at his sister with genuine warmth. “You don’t have to knock, Dioni mou . This is your house as well as mine.”

Dioni inched into the room and he felt the same swell of affection and bafflement that he always did at the sight of his sister. Their mother had been exquisite. A woman of such impeccable taste and glorious style that, to this day, he had never met a person who’d known her who didn’t mention those things immediately.

And yet this was her daughter. His sister, the jewel of the house of Adrianakis, who scurried about like some kind of woodland animal.

“Well, that’s a lovely thing to say but it’s not really my house, is it?” If someone else had said something like that, it would have been a complaint. But this was Dioni. He had never heard her complain. Because a complaint was part and parcel of some kind of darkness, and as far as he was aware, she had never known even the faintest shadow. “It’s your house. And Jolie’s house. Father did not leave me anything.”

“He left you me,” he corrected her, surprised when perhaps he should not have been. “And I will see to it, as he did, that you will never want for a thing.”

His sister made her way further into the office and sat in the chair before his desk. And he looked at her, struck by the notion that he hadn’t really looked at her closely in some time. Not since the wedding, which was weeks ago now. She looked...

Different, he thought. It took him a moment to realize why. Her hair wasn’t falling down all around her. He could see no stains or tears in her clothing.

He frowned. “Are you all right?”

He could have sworn that she flinched then, though she hid it in the next moment. But then again, this was his sister who had never hidden anything from him. He was certain that he must have been mistaken.

She frowned at him. “Why would I be different? What do you mean?”

Apostolis had always thought that his role as her brother was not to mention her appearance, which he knew everyone else harped on. Or worse, tried to help her , which she always suffered with good grace only to turn up disheveled just the same.

He had always found it charming.

“Only you can tell you’re different or not, little mouse,” he said, and again, she did something out of the ordinary. It was as if she bristled, but then caught herself.

“I finally decided what I want to do with my life,” she said. And he thought she sounded unlike herself, but he was not going to tell her that. “I’ve decided that I’m going to pack up and move to America.”

“America?” He didn’t laugh. He could sense she wouldn’t like it. “America is a large place, Dioni. Have you picked a specific part of the country?”

“I will.” She frowned at him again, and more deeply this time. “What I need you to do is be okay with it when I go.”

And maybe he was a worse brother than he’d ever imagined, because he didn’t think about anything at all in that moment except having the privacy to handle Jolie the way he wanted. At last.

Because he thought he finally knew how. It came to him in a blinding flash the moment he understood that he’d been wanting this privacy all along. He and Jolie had settled into their marriage, such as it was, by playing their roles in public—but continuing to live in their separate quarters. This arrangement had not seemed to worry his sister at all, or cause her to question their marriage in any way. Seeming happiness could involve separate beds, as far as the innocent Dioni knew.

Yet happy was not how Apostolis would describe himself. Or his marriage.

He’d been dreaming this solution all along. It might be inconvenient to find he desired his stepmother in this way, and he chose not to question why it felt more like a long overdue recognition than some new bolt from the blue, but he could use it. He would use it. Because he finally had the weapon he needed to win this war decisively.

But here and now, he had to force himself to concentrate.

“First of all, you can go wherever you like, for as long as you like, and do whatever takes your fancy.” The Dioni he knew would have smiled brightly at that and started chattering on merrily about the great many projects that were already lighting up her mind. But today, his sister only looked back at him, but with that steady frown in place. He was tempted to think she was making him the slightest bit uneasy, but of course she wasn’t. This was Dioni . And he did not get uneasy. “If you wish to go to America, there is no need for mystery. I have properties in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. And, of course, Hawaii.”

That got a reaction from his sister. She blinked. “You do?”

“Don’t tell anyone,” he told her, with a grin. “It would ruin my image. The world prefers to consider me the grand waste of space our father did. And perhaps I am. But either way, I also have a robust real estate portfolio.”

He smiled blandly as his sister came close to gaping at him and wondered how she would react if she knew how he actually spent his time, or that Alceu was his partner in those far more low-profile activities. “Remember, Dioni. It’s a secret.”

“I think I’d like to go to New York City,” she said after a moment, then turned her frown toward the windows. “I don’t want any more beaches. I want concrete canyons and furious impatience wherever I turn.”

Somehow Apostolis thought that she would find the brownstone he owned in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood, complete with its own garden, a little less impatient than the rest of the city. But she could discover that for herself. “Are you sure?” he asked. When she nodded, he carried on. “Then only say the word, and we will have—”

“I am ready for a change,” his sister said, cutting him off. “Now.”

Her asserting anything so strongly was so unusual that he actually gazed back at her in something approximating shock.

“All right then. You can leave tonight if you like.”

“Wonderful,” Dioni replied, but even then she didn’t sound like her normally cheerful self. There was something brittle about her. He didn’t like it.

But if she didn’t want to tell him, he didn’t see how he could force her. And in any case, he knew from his own experience across many brooding years that while the geographic cure never quite lived up to its name, sometimes, a Band-Aid in place of an actual cure could do the trick just the same.

His sister deserved to find these things out for herself.

Everything happened swiftly, then. He called to have the plane readied. She went off to oversee the packing of her things—or perhaps, for all he knew, she was already packed.

And that evening, only a few hours after Dioni had come to speak to him in the office, Apostolis and Jolie stood out on the tarmac on the other side of the island—together—and said their goodbyes.

“I will miss you,” he told his sister fiercely when she hugged him.

“Really do miss me, then,” she replied, but she was smiling. “Don’t get weird and spy on me.”

“I would never dream of it,” he lied, and made a mental note to pare back the security detail he’d planned to keep in her vicinity.

He watched as Dioni hugged Jolie and thought it seemed longer and harder for someone merely taking off on a new adventure. Particularly when she was late to that game. Many people did such things when they were younger, with their gap years and their regrettable twenties.

But he was a terrible brother, clearly, because the only thing he could truly concentrate on was the fact there was the hotel and its guests waiting for them—but other than that, only and him and Jolie on the property. Staff quarters were further down from the cliff, giving them a bit of a break from the hotel when they weren’t on duty.

Members of the family had no breaks. And now his wife had nowhere to hide.

And maybe the anticipation of that was humming in him a little too brightly, because Jolie looked at him in askance when he started the sleek Range Rover and aimed it at the coastal road that hugged the coastline, then meandered along the length of the island to the Andromeda.

Especially when he drove a bit too fast.

“I have never known Dioni to be so...” Jolie began.

“Independent?” he offered. “Secretive? Strange?”

“Solitary,” Jolie replied.

Perhaps a little repressively.

But he found that whatever else he might object to in this woman, her friendship with his sister was something that could only win his approval. Especially when Jolie possessed precisely that sort of effortless elegance that his sister lacked so profoundly.

Others had been cruel. He had realized in his time here that Jolie, no matter her many other faults, was never anything but kind to Dioni.

It was tempting to imagine there were whole other parts of her he could not see—

But he cast that worrying thought aside.

She was sitting in the passenger seat, so there was only so far away from him she could be based on the dimensions of the vehicle. Yet Jolie, somehow, managed to make it seem as if she’d put an extra ice floe or two between them.

He took satisfaction, tremendous satisfaction, in knowing that that was something she was not going to be able to do for much longer.

Not with any success.

“Change is good,” he said, thinking of the various ways he knew to melt ice. “There were whole years of my life where change was the only constant. It’s time Dioni discovered who she is and who she wants to be, away from the shadow of all this.”

“And do you think you managed to do it?” came Jolie’s silky, too serene tone, though her gaze was trained out the window. “Do you think you successfully removed yourself from any pesky shadows or do you worry that all you’ve done is run about to no avail, only to end up where you started?”

Normally he would have shot right back. But there were all those dreams in the night. Every night. There were all the ways he’d already had her when he had barely touched her. There was that kiss and the repercussions of that, and the way it echoed through him, even now. As if it was simply a part of him.

That wasn’t anything new. What was new was that he knew that everything between them was about to change.

And, perhaps, the fact that beneath her icy exterior, she cared for the sister he had always protected to the best of his ability.

It allowed him to answer with more candor than he might have otherwise. “I never considered myself to be in my father’s shadow. Quite the opposite. He would have had to be present in my life in some meaningful way for me to consider myself overshadowed by him.”

“Some would say that his legend alone does that work,” Jolie murmured.

“His legend has never meant much to me. I have read about it in magazines, like anyone else. In fawning articles that carry on about the secret lifestyles of famous men and the places they like to habit, like the Andromeda. I’m fully aware of the mystique. Of the hotel and the man.” Apostolis shrugged. “But for me it was my childhood home. A mother who tried to please her husband, and then died. And a father who was always too busy chasing women—before and after he was widower—and courting the attention of celebrities to pay any attention at all to any of us. I like my family’s legacy. I want to continue it, as my mother would have wanted. The hotel and its legend is important to me. My father’s personal legend I could do without.”

He felt her turn to look at him then, and he congratulated himself, because surely allowing her to imagine him vulnerable was the greatest weapon he’d employed yet.

But he found himself glancing over just the same, to gauge the particular color of her Mediterranean blue eyes.

“I was orphaned when I was two,” she told him after a long curve in the road brought them past one of the villages, white-walled and blue-shuttered. “I never really knew my parents, so I can’t say that I mourned them, specifically. But I have to imagine that having parents and yet not having them must in some ways be harder than not having them at all. I never wondered if our relationship could improve. I never tortured myself with fantasies about the way that things could be different between us. And when I imagine them, it’s the fantasy versions of them my grandparents created for me, as bedtime stories. I never got to know their flaws and foibles. I never had to measure myself against them and see where they came up lacking, or I did.” She let out a long, low breath. “So I don’t envy you, Apostolis. Whether you call it a shadow or not, it must be a weight all the same.”

He had pulled up to the hotel and now he navigated the car to a stop in front of the carriage house. When he did, he looked over at her and could not tell if the weight he felt inside him was that shadow she’d spoke of, or if it was that unexpected mix of compassion and grief that she’d shared with him.

Apostolis was in knots, but Jolie wasn’t even looking at him. She looked almost supernaturally composed, her head angled away from him, her gaze out toward the sea.

But he had the strangest urge to reach over and trace the line of her jaw, because it looked sharper than usual, as if she’d set it against the same memories she’d just shared with him.

He stopped himself right there. Whatever game she was playing here, whatever battle tactic this was, he would be a fool to fall for it.

She turned to look at him then, and suddenly he could feel shadows everywhere, as if they were both soaked in them. Or maybe it was the ghosts of what could have been. Of what might have been.

If he had met her somewhere other than on his father’s arm, years ago.

He had never felt anything like it, that sudden pang of loss. And never so keenly, the ache of it so intense it made his bones hurt.

And though he couldn’t read anything on her face, he somehow thought that what he saw there was a thread of true vulnerability. Or something more akin to openness.

Whatever it was, it had no place between them.

This hurt had no place in this war.

And she must have told herself the same thing, he thought, because she was the one who spoke first. She was the one who broke this odd moment in half.

“We will have to hurry,” she said, in a brisk sort of voice, as if they hadn’t been talking about shadows only moments before.

“Hurry?” he repeated, feeling...off-kilter.

It was not a sensation he enjoyed. And he would consider it one more mark against her, he decided. One more offense she would need to answer for, in the most delectable way possible.

“It is almost time for cocktails on the terrace, which most guests demand,” she told him, that edge in her voice back as if it had never been gone. “This is the sort of thing that the proprietor of the Andromeda must never forget, Apostolis. It is one among many tiny little details that must be welded to your bones, as much a part of you as breath. Our last guest and his entourage preferred their own company, but that is unusual. Normally, not only must you follow the schedule every day in and day out, you must make certain that our guests feel as if there is no schedule at all. As if it is merely spontaneous, the joy we find in their presence, and so we celebrate it with a bottle of something lovely beneath the stars of an evening.”

He wasn’t sure what moved in him then. Was it a dark thread of laughter? Or was he more inclined to...shout?

“I don’t know why I am always so astonished that every last part of you is a work of theater,” he found himself saying, his voice low and urgent in a way that might have alarmed him, but it was better than shouting. And he was too busy trying to work out that look on her face. Why couldn’t he categorize it?

“I can tell that you mean that to be an insult.” Jolie rolled her eyes as if to say, and a weak one at that . “But I’m not insulted. On the contrary, you could not have complimented me more if you tried. Your father made it clear that he wanted me to inhabit the role of the iconic hostess here. Unknowable, yet everyone’s confidante, and so on. I’m glad to know I’ve done that.”

She didn’t wait to see his reaction to that, the way any other woman he’d ever known would have. And always had. Instead, she opened up her door and climbed out of the Range Rover as if she’d finished with this conversation.

Or perhaps with him altogether.

That wasn’t the reason he found himself following suit, and quickly, he assured himself. He was simply exiting the vehicle.

And he found her again in the middle of the drive, the sea at her back, the olive trees on the hill, and standing there above them, the Andromeda. Keeping a silent, watchful eye on everything, as always.

Only a fool would complicate the situation by touching her, but Apostolis did it anyway. He took her wrist in his hand and found himself staring down at that point of contact. It took him too long to lift his eyes to hers again, and when he did he found her regarding him.

Again with a look he could not name in her gaze.

“Careful,” she said, almost too quietly. “Just because you can’t see anyone doesn’t mean we’re not in public. That’s one of the first things your father taught me.”

“I suppose I’m delighted to hear that he was able to impart his version of wisdom to someone,” Apostolis gritted out.

Something not quite a smile moved over her face. “Says the man who claims there’s no shadow over his life, when he is little more than an eclipsed moon trying too hard to act the part of the sun.”

It felt like a knife to the gut.

He told himself it was comforting, somehow. A return to form.

“I thought I’d lost you somewhere on the coastal road,” he said, not breaking eye contact. “Unexpected vulnerability? A perfectly civil conversation, no less? I hardly knew you at all.”

She pulled her hand from his grasp, both of them aware that he could have held onto her if he’d wanted to. And he took an atavistic pleasure in the way her own hand went to cover the place he’d touched her, as if she needed to soothe the sensation.

Or hold it close.

“Dioni is a good friend of mine,” she told him with that quiet dignity that he knew was meant to make him feel small. He told himself it didn’t work. “I’m going to miss her. She has...always been here. As long as I’ve been here, anyway. It will feel empty without her.”

“It won’t for long,” he told her then, deciding in that instant that telling her now actually made it harder on her. He wasn’t pulling a punch, he was making sure it landed harder. That it reverberated more fully.

He certainly wasn’t attempting to make her feel better.

A faint frown sketched itself between her brows. “I can only imagine what that’s supposed to mean.”

“No need to imagine, my dear and darling wife,” he drawled, enjoying the thick weight of that satisfaction deep within him. “It’s not a secret. I’ve had all your things moved into the carriage house. Isn’t it wonderful? We will finally live together as man and wife.”

And then he left her there, sputtering on the drive, and went to play the role of iconic host himself.

Because she might have won some points, reminding him that his role here had more to do with the longevity of the hotel and less to do with his childhood here. And that much of that longevity relied upon the kind of legend he built in the wake of his father’s.

He hoped he was man enough to take good advice when he heard it, no matter the source, because he’d always prided himself on that before.

Because he was here to make sure that the legend his mother had given her life to could sustain itself despite Spyros. That it could carry on, long after Spyros was entirely forgotten—the most fitting end to the story of his narcissistic father he could imagine.

And later tonight, after committing himself to a role he’d once vowed he would never take— Because I want more than to run a hotel like a servant , he had sneered at his father, when he’d imagined such words could hurt Spyros’s feelings, back when he was young and assumed his father had any—he intended to win a decisive battle in this war with his wife.

Once and for all.