CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER FIVE

O N THE OFF chance that he had merely said that man and wife nonsense for the pleasure of alarming her—and how she hated to admit he’d succeeded—Jolie took the fifteen or so minutes she had left before evening drinks usually began to go and see for herself.

Surely even Apostolis would not be that peremptory.

But he’d been telling the truth. The back house where she’d lived and worked for seven years now looked like...any other part of the hotel. Quietly welcoming and richly appointed to best suit the island and the Andromeda’s reputation for elegance, but stripped of anything personal.

Her heart hit against her ribs so hard it was a wonder a bone didn’t crack from the impact.

With a sense of mounting horror—because surely that was what all the warring sensations inside her were, that weight in her belly and a tingle that was much too close to a kind of shiver radiating out from it—she left the back house and went over to the carriage house instead, walking in briskly the way she always did.

She had always thought of this house as a temple to all the things that were wrong with his family, and Apostolis specifically. There was the office that she now shared with Apostolis, that Apostolis had claimed with a huge, black desk years ago. It took up the lion’s share of the space in the office and was a particularly odd choice for a man who...had not worked here until his father had passed.

Then again, he seemed to think she was only there to play on the internet, as if she didn’t have a mobile.

Though she would have died before commenting on it.

But the house announced itself in the entry hall. It started with the row of black-and-white photographs that lined the walls, framed to better proclaim their self-importance, as each and every one had been taken by a world-famous photographer who had been a guest here. Spyros had liked to say that he’d traded the bill for their stays for the photographs, but Jolie didn’t have to be familiar with the hotel’s books to know that was untrue.

Spyros loved a good story, but he loved money more.

Her heart was performing cartwheels inside her chest now that she’d made her way inside. She told herself—rather sternly—not to react to the place as if it, too, was waging a battle against her.

“It’s just a house,” she told herself crossly.

That was true. It was a house. That worked well enough when she was here to deal with hotel business. But it was his house. And tonight she was here because he’d moved her into this house.

With him.

Instead of heading down the hall to the office, she turned the other direction instead, and hated it.

The ground floor was lovely, having long ago been opened up to let in the light, and was now a flowing, open space that included a kitchen, a dining area, and a living room with doors that led out to the carriage house’s private patio. She walked through all the white and blue and vivid accents, aware of the sea watching her from outside the windows and the excruciatingly modern art on the walls that always seemed to sit in judgment of her.

“Three splashes of paint on a canvas cannot judge anyone,” she muttered as she passed a particularly snobbish painting on her way to the open, winding stair that rose up from the ground floor to the open gallery that ran above it.

Jolie ran up the steps, her feet tapping out a staccato that was still too slow to match her pulse. Upstairs, there were low-slung leather couches and views of the ocean, and sculpture pieces in recessed alcoves.

But she was here to check the bedrooms for her things, so that was what she did. Jolie’s heart was still clattering about, but she was starting to feel almost...giggly. That was new and shocking enough to make her stop short.

Then she remembered the sort of silly games she and the other girls had got up to at school, sneaking about the place after curfew for the sheer joy of...not being where they were supposed to be.

It felt like breaking the rules to be up on this floor, and it must have always felt that way, because she’d never come up here before.

“Focus,” she ordered herself, marching down the hall that led off the gallery and opening up doors as she went.

One room was clearly a guest room, and given Apostolis’s lack of guests, Jolie doubted it had been used in years. The next room looked as if it could be converted into guest quarters if necessary, though it was currently doing duty as another sort of library, with books stacked neatly on every surface, which made her feel...odd.

Was Apostolis a reader? Or was this overflow from the Andromeda’s library? She didn’t know which answer she wanted more. She didn’t know which one would make her feel better. Or worse.

Maybe she didn’t know how she wanted to feel about any of this.

Take Dioni, who had gotten strange over the past few weeks. Jolie had wondered if it was a reaction to her friend marrying her brother. If Dioni hadn’t minded when Jolie was married to her father , but Apostolis, who Dioni had always looked up to, was something else no matter that she’d initially celebrated it. Because Dioni hadn’t felt that Jolie marrying Spyros was really anything but a bit of a personal tragedy for her friend, but great news for her, because she got to have her best friend around all the time.

But Dioni was not a liar, and she had nothing but positive things to say about Jolie’s marriage.

Maybe, she had whispered fiercely on the tarmac, my brother and you will find what you need in each other.

And she had sounded so hopeful. Jolie hadn’t had the heart to tell her that Apostolis had never been even remotely heroic—not to Jolie.

That was something he saved for his sister.

In the car ride back, she’d had to face the fact that Dioni, for the first time in as long as Jolie had known her, was keeping secrets. Like why she suddenly wanted to move halfway across the planet, alone, when she’d never indicated the slightest interest in such adventurousness before.

She should have been proud. She had always told her friend that she needed to go out there and claim her life.

Jolie should have specified that she hadn’t meant that Dioni should do that while leaving her behind, neck-deep in another round of her choices.

She was going to miss her best friend terribly.

She already did.

It made her tell the blasted man things she shouldn’t. He made her forget herself, and that was unforgivable.

She blew out a breath, there in the hall. Calm was what was needed, not more storming about lighting fires. After all, she’d already done seven years in this lovely prison. What were five more? There was no need for more fire, thank you.

Jolie chanted that to herself as she opened the larger door at the end of the hall and all her breath deserted her in a rush.

Because this was clearly the master bedroom. His bedroom.

She drifted in, feeling jumpy. As if she expected to trip an alarm, when that was silly. She knew where all the security measures were in this house and all the other buildings on hotel property.

But her gaze was drawn immediately to the bedside tables, where some member of staff had carefully stacked the things she’d had on a similar table in her room in the other house. Just so.

It made tears prick at the backs of her eyes, and a lump fill her throat.

It was not good, she told herself.

She whirled around, seeing a succession of spaces that were clearly meant to mimic the flow below. But she found her way into a massive dressing room, where she saw all of her clothes. Just hanging there, suggesting an intimacy with all of his clothes.

As if their clothes were more married than they were.

Jolie had to put her hand out to the nearest wall to steady herself. From the surge of fury that swept over her. Because this was clearly a moment of temper, she assured herself, as her body... reacted.

And then kept reacting.

She dashed a hand over her eyes. Did he truly believe that he could simply...move her things in and that would be that? That he could simply decide that it was time to commence a relationship that involved sharing a bed when they’d never agreed to anything of the kind?

When they’d never discussed it at all?

Jolie refused.

And she was certain that that rushing sensation in her body and the way it all pulled down low into her belly—almost uncomfortably hot, like fury or flu —was confirmation that he was out of his mind.

But she made herself take a long, steadying breath. She pushed away from the wall and went into the attached bathroom suite, so she could check her face and make sure she looked nothing but effortless.

Because he wasn’t the only one who could play mind games.

After a quick stop at the hotel’s front desk, she drifted out onto the terrace where the family that had been staying with them for weeks now was already gathered. The adults were enjoying their drinks and talking in low, happy voices as they looked out at the sea far below, waiting for another one of the predictably spectacular Mediterranean sunsets.

She found Apostolis at once, and all of that chaos and riot inside of her seem to spiral into a kind of sharp focus.

So sharp it almost hurt.

Jolie smiled, murmuring greetings to the guests as she passed, and then went directly to her husband to slip her arm through his and even hug it a little, as if they were close like that. She knew exactly how to make it seem as if they possessed a deeply physical connection, and so she did that, too. All it took was tilting her head up to look at him and smiling a bit dreamily as he looked down at her, his dark gaze burning hot.

And deeply wary.

Good, she thought.

“I’m so sorry I’m late,” she said in a voice calculated to accidentally reach everyone. Then she offered the guests a faintly sheepish smile, as if surprised they’d heard her. “My only excuse is that I am a newlywed again. I never expected such a thing to happen.”

It was like she’d changed the temperature with a flip of a switch, because suddenly everyone was all smiles. And open in a way they hadn’t been, not quite, since they’d arrived. There had been too much speculation, too many whispers, too many raised brows.

But this new spirit of openness went on all evening.

Perhaps because of this, the family invited their hosts to have dinner with them. They all sat around the great table beneath the pergola, basking in the soft evening breeze, with its hint of salt and flowers in the air.

“We did wonder,” said the matriarch, sitting next to Jolie and even pressing her shoulder against hers. “There has been a great deal of talk about the changes here, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

“It’s been a time of transition,” Jolie said with a nod. “It’s hard not to talk about that, I suppose, when it involves a place that means so much to all of us.”

“Spyros was a dear old man who everyone knows you loved well,” said the older woman, and Jolie knew that her everyone encompassed more people than simply the family members she gathered here each year to celebrate her birthday. “We all thought so. But you are a young woman with her whole life ahead of her. And what is it they say? The heart wants what it wants .” She smiled then, as if dispensing her good favor. “I think that a brand-new love story is exactly what the Andromeda needs.”

Jolie reached over and put her hand on the old woman’s hand. “I can’t tell you what it means to me that you understand,” she told her softly. “I know how it must look from the outside, but...”

She trailed off helplessly, and it was true that she meant to do that. To sound so helpless in the face of the Apostolis of it all. But it was also true that her heart had not calmed down at all. And she was beginning to suspect that neither fury nor flu had anything to do with the situation inside of her.

A situation that was not getting better the longer she sat here, playing a woman madly and recklessly in love.

“Anyone who looks at the two of you can see the chemistry between you,” said her guest, with a bit too much confidence for Jolie’s peace of mind—but she reminded herself that she wanted that. That it was a commentary on the act she was putting on and no more. No one knew what was happening inside of her. No one—including herself, if she was honest. “Just as anyone who saw you and Spyros could tell that what you had was real, not what they liked to hint in the papers. Don’t you worry, child. Real love always wins over the gossips.”

Jolie murmured her thanks. And when she lifted her hand from the woman’s and shifted her gaze across the table, Apostolis was gazing straight at her.

Very much as if he knew exactly what was happening inside her. All of that heat and weight and helpless wonder, God help her.

She found it hurt to tug her gaze away from his.

It was a long evening, filled with wine, conversation, laughter, and reminiscing. Sometimes she lost herself in moments like these and pretended she really was the mysterious and yet approachable hostess they thought she was, elegant and endearing in turn. Sometimes she forgot that these were roles that she played, not versions of her actual self . If she squinted, she could almost imagine that what the canny old woman had said about her was true. That she and Spyros had really had that kind of affection between them. Or that she and Apostolis had fallen head over heels in love.

That she’d really fallen into that kind of charmed life, here in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

And because there was an audience, because there was always an audience, she made sure that was exactly what it looked like.

At the end of the evening, when everything had been cleared away, she and Apostolis waved good-night to the guests. Then they walked back across the drive and she took the act one step further, threading her fingers through his and she turned back to wave over her shoulder once more.

His fingers closed over hers, tight. As if he had no intention of letting her go. And she could feel the tension in him. That humming awareness that she knew was in her, too, though she doubted it was for the same reason.

Hers involved the side of righteousness, after all.

She let herself droop almost languidly into him as they crossed the drive, enjoying the way he tensed the whole of his big, hard body at the contact. Then they went into the carriage house like they were exiting a stage.

Jolie went first. Apostolis followed. It was a perfect rendition of careful.

But once inside, she turned to him and laughed.

Right there in the hall, in front of all the artsy photographs of happy moments that she doubted had ever been as happy as they seemed, she made sure that her laugh was almost too brittle to bear.

“What do you think of that performance?” she asked him, in a completely different voice than the soft, cultured, dreamy one she’d been using all night. “Did you like it? Do you think that I’ll win an award now that the curtain’s gone down?”

And it felt like a blast of sheer triumph when all he could do was stare at her. Jolie took a deep breath that felt as if it was shuddering all the way through her, but she told herself that was just another part of this victory. That Apostolis actually looked stunned.

So stunned that he couldn’t even mask his reaction.

She laughed again. “Did you really think that you could just...move me into your bed? Without discussion? What planet do you live on?”

“I live on the planet where when I kiss you we both go up in flames,” he shot back. Clearly no longer quite so stunned. And his eyes were on fire. “And unlike you, I’m not afraid to play in that fire. Can you say the same?”

She shook her head slowly, feeling a great wash of rage move over her. What else could it be, so hot and flushed and furious?

“I’m not afraid of anything involving you,” she told him, very deliberately. “My worst nightmare involving you has already come true.”

“Prove it,” he invited her, something more than a simple flame in his gaze.

“I don’t have to prove it. All I have to do is pretend I’m sleeping with you and it achieves everything I need it to do. Why would I actually do it? What’s in it for me?”

“I think you know that it’s the last battlefield, Jolie.”

“And I suppose you think that you have all the weapons necessary for victory?” She made a new opera out of the roll of her eyes, and the bored shake of her head. “How na?ve you are. You forget, I think, that this is a marriage, not one of your tawdry affairs. We have no choice but to stay together for forty-four weeks of each and every one of the next five years. If you blow something up you might have to live in the rubble, Apostolis. You and I both know that you’re not built to handle that.”

It was his turn to laugh at something that wasn’t funny at all. “You speak with great authority for a person who doesn’t know anything of importance about me.”

Jolie lifted a languid shoulder and tracked the way his gaze followed the movement. “The only thing I need to know about you is that you’ve never stuck anything out. On the other hand, I was married to your father for years. And contrary to what our guests seem to think, it was not exactly a trip through the tulips. It was work.” But she didn’t want to get into that, so she kept going, especially when she saw the query in his gaze. “What do you know about that kind of work? I mean real work. The gritty intimacy involved in having not only to live with the decisions you make, but to marinate in the consequences of those decisions day after day, year after year.”

“Has it happened?” he asked, she realized somewhat dimly that he had moved closer, then, because her back was suddenly against the wall. And the only thing she could see was him. “Have we finally arrived at the moment where you admit that your reasons for marrying my father were mercenary, that he was a monster, and that you were miserable?”

“I envy you,” Jolie told him softly. “What a gift it is that you could reach your advanced age and still believe things could be so black and white. I’m afraid that privilege was taken from me quite early. And I have nothing to complain about in my life. I have been well provided for, with only a short period of anxiety about such things. On the other end of the next five years, I will be able to do as I please. I’m not sure that I would change any of it if I could.”

Jolie had never said that out loud before. She wasn’t sure she had even thought it. Because that was the trouble with regret, wasn’t it? With peering back through time, imagining that the things that haunted her could be taken away somehow... If they were, then it meant everything else would also change. She could have ignored Spyros when he’d turned his eye toward her, but where would she be now if she had?

She didn’t have to imagine what Mathilde’s fate would have been if she’d turned him down. The possibilities were etched on the inside of her eyelids.

“You’re such a liar,” Apostolis said then, in a voice that was nearly crooning. Nearly soft, like a lover’s. “Everything about you is a lie. What I can’t decide is if you believe the lies you tell or if you are entirely callous, spitting them out one after the next like every other falsehearted grifter who ever lived.”

That might have hurt, coming from someone else. And she felt a phantom pain in the vicinity of her chest anyway. She told herself she was imagining what that would feel like if he’d mattered to her at all.

“That sounds a lot like projecting,” she said, lightly. Easily. As if she had never been hurt by a thing in all her days here, and certainly not by him. “Once again, I think you’d be an excellent candidate for therapy. And no need to worry. It would only take... Oh, I don’t know. Twenty years or so to untangle all these things in you that have become so rotted and terrible.” She reached out and patted him on the arm, her smile fairly dripping with false sweetness. “Trust the process, Apostolis. You can do it.”

He laughed again, then, and there was something about it. The way it rolled through her, and him, too. She could see it. Or she could feel it, maybe, something shimmering and starkly dangerous, winding around the pair of them and filling up the hall.

Filling up the whole house.

That was when Jolie realized that, possibly for the first time, they were truly all alone.

Not in a moving vehicle. Not in a place where staff might appear at any moment, because they never came here without an invitation and an appointment.

Dioni was flying across the Atlantic even now.

That meant it was just the two of them and this wild, chaotic war of theirs. She could hear the beat of those war drums, a deep insistence within her. She could feel the march of booted feet, up and down her spine.

“There are only so many ways this can end.” And there was still that dangerous laughter all over his face. It made his eyes gleam in that way they did sometimes, that bittersweet gold. “We could kill each other. For obvious reasons, I would prefer to avoid that. One of us could kill the other. For legal reasons, I can’t support that either. But if we continue like this, constantly upping the ante, constantly trying to outwit the other, it’s going to be one of those two endings. I hope you know that.”

“Spoken as someone who, once again, can only imagine things in the short term.” Jolie leaned back against the wall and crossed her arms. Then tilted up her chin, hoping she looked as insouciant as she wished she felt. “And more than that, only thinks with one part of his anatomy. None of this is a surprise to me, you understand. But I think you’re going to have to learn that not everything can be solved in the way you think it ought to be, just because you lack imagination.”

“What amazes me is that you think that headlines are facts, Jolie, when I would think you’d know better, personally. And I suppose it would be easier for you if I really did only think with one part of my anatomy. But your tragedy is that, deep down, you know I’m right.”

He moved forward then, just a little. Just enough to make her brace herself—

But she shouldn’t have.

Because doing so gave away too much. She knew it instantly.

His smile confirmed it. “You might have had my father wrapped around your finger. You might have been the one who used sex as a weapon in that relationship. But in this one?”

This time he leaned even closer, bracing himself with one palm on the wall beside her head. She thought for a terrible, thrilling moment that he might actually put his mouth on hers once more—

But he didn’t. He put his mouth to her ear instead.

“This time the best you can hope for is mutually assured destruction,” he whispered, and she suspected he knew the way the sound and feel of those words curled through her like smoke and warning. “And I have to tell you, my darling stepmother and wife, I think that my destruction is highly unlikely.”

Words crowded into her mouth as if fighting to get out, but Jolie did not allow herself a retort. She angled herself back, only slightly. Partly because the wall was at her back, but more importantly, because he was right there , still bracing himself against the wall.

Still leaning over her.

She found his gaze, bittersweet and gleaming, and held it.

Then, so slowly it was almost like thinking about moving instead of moving, she reached out. She trailed her fingers over his face, noting that when he took a swift and surprised breath, it was as if she could feel it inside her, too.

And that wasn’t all she could feel. Touching him felt remarkably like touching herself. She could feel the trail of sensation. She could feel the way it moved in her, a slow, languorous heat.

Jolie moved her hand from his face to touch the side of his neck, and his collarbone, sneaking her fingers beneath the open collar of his shirt to test the rich warmth of his skin. There was a hint of the hair that she already knew dusted his chest and went all the way down to below his navel. A thing she wished she hadn’t known, if she was honest. But she had seen him once, years before, coming out of the sea with water cascading all over his toned body and making him gleam in the Greek sun.

Gleam even more than he usually did, that was.

In this moment, she could admit that she had held that image close all this time. But then, she felt about images of him the same way she felt about sugar. Of course she liked the taste of it. Who wouldn’t?

Maybe it was time she admitted that hatred was the thing she hid behind when it came to this man, because there was this underneath.

Maybe it had been there all along.

She had never felt anything like it before, and she had been marrying his father when she’d met him, so how could she have called it what it was?

But acknowledging that uncomfortable truth didn’t change anything. If she allowed herself to indulge, just like sugar, she paid for it for too long after to make the indulgence worthwhile.

Down and down she went, moving her hand outside of his shirt again so she could lazily trace the line of the buttons that held it together, all the way down to that hard-ridged abdomen that she’d just been remembering.

And then, her eyes still fixed to his, she moved lower still, and traced a pattern over that hard, proud ridge that already pushed against his trousers.

It grew even more when she settled her hand against it. He was hard. So very, very hard. And she could feel that hardness seemed to rebound through her, as if he was already deep inside of her body.

Jolie had never wanted him more than she did in this moment—but she wanted to win this battle more.

She angled herself closer, tipping her head up as if asking for a kiss. And she drank in the way his eyes went dark and greedy.

“Look at you,” she whispered, huskily, pressing her hand against the length of him. “You look a little bit...destroyed, Apostolis. There are worse things than death after all, are there not? Like losing.”

And then she ducked under his arm and headed for the stairs, moving across the flow of rooms and up the circular steps before she even dared look over her shoulder. Her heart was pounding too hard for her to hear anything. The heat of the hardest part of him was a brand across her palm.

And she was not sure if he was right there on her heels, or still down below.

But when she looked, he stood at the bottom of the stairs. He looked up at her, a tortured expression she had never seen before on his face. And she couldn’t enjoy it the way she should have, because she worried she wore the same expression herself.

More, his chest was moving as if he’d run a marathon to get from the wall to the first stair.

And she felt that, too, like a touch.

“If I were you,” he told her, his voice a dark ribbon through the dark of the house, with only the stars outside to bear witness to this, “I would run. While you can.”

To her shame, there was a part of her that wanted to do just that, and run—but straight to him, so she could see where this fire went. So she could see if they would truly turn each other to ash after all—

But that was too close to surrender.

So she ran to the room that she’d chosen for herself, the guest room she’d made sure the staff had come and arranged for her while she’d been playing hostess games—taking all of her things out of his bedroom as if she’d never been there in the first place—and locked the door behind her.

Though as she lay there on the bed she’d made, wide awake and staring at the ceiling for far too long, she had to ask herself—had she really been locking him out?

Or herself in?