CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

J OLIE WAS MAKING her way back up from one of the villages, her arms full of flowers, when she saw Apostolis’s plane fly in overhead.

She told herself—sternly—that there was absolutely no call for the leap of hope in her chest. He had made himself abundantly clear when he’d left. He hadn’t even told her where he’d gone.

It was the height of foolishness to think that whatever he’d done when he was away—for two interminable nights, during which she’d slept a combined five minutes, so impossible was it to sleep without him—might have changed his thinking in any way.

But she didn’t feel the least bit tired now. And she couldn’t deny that there was a spring in her step as she made her way back up the winding steps, cut into the hillside, that the locals took from the nearest village to the Andromeda.

She ordered herself to slow down. To take care with the flowers she was carrying to make an extra arrangement that she’d decided to put in the bedroom of one of their guests, a young girl who reminded her of Mathilde.

And herself, she supposed.

Both of them, maybe, if none of the things that had happened to them had been permitted to occur.

Maybe she wanted to celebrate that in another wide-eyed girl before her own life gave her reasons to stop smiling.

She got back to the hotel where there were questions to answer, small fires to extinguish, and then the flowers to arrange in the kitchen and send up to the girl’s room.

Jolie wished that she could have lost herself in all of those things, instead of listening for that Range Rover on the drive. Or looking around every time a door opened, thinking it would be him.

She supposed that this was only to be expected. Some kind of Stockholm syndrome—or maybe it was the sex that was addictive. Never in her life had she felt more like a junkie than the last two nights without.

Or maybe she was simply used to him by now. She’d had time to think about that, these last couple of nights, lying all alone in that bed that seemed entirely too large and empty without him.

She couldn’t sleep when he was gone, and that had shocked her. She kept waking up, reaching for him, and he wasn’t there.

And there were two ways that she could think about that. One, that she was deeply pathetic to allow herself to have these kinds of feelings for someone who was more often cruel to her than not.

But the other way of looking at it was that they had been fighting their way toward each other all this time. And maybe, just maybe, she just needed to fight a little longer.

For how could she know how delusional she was until he returned?

When she was finished with her tasks, she let herself out the side door of the hotel and started for the carriage house, her pulse skyrocketing because she saw the Range Rover parked there in front.

He was home. He really was here.

And now she would have to decide which part of her poor heart was right, after all.

Jolie couldn’t seem to stop her feet from moving and that was terrible, because right then, she thought she would give anything to stop time. To keep not knowing, because what if he gave her an answer that she couldn’t live with?

What would she do then?

She hardly recognized herself as she raced across the drive, heedless for once of how it might look to anyone who might be watching. She was practically transfigured with desperation and something too sharp to truly be hope as she wrenched open the door and all but fell into the hall.

Into all those black-and-white photographs, all those frozen moments. All those possibilities of joy and life and light that she’d always felt was out of her reach.

As if she was stuck on the other side of a glass frame forever, always looking in, never a part of it.

That was not the story she wanted any longer. Not from Apostolis.

Not now that she’d started listening to her heart again, for the first time in a decade.

Jolie walked deeper into the house, already fairly certain that she knew the answer, because he wasn’t there to greet her. He wasn’t there at all, and her stomach twisted. Everything inside her urged her to turn and run. To hide somewhere, so she could still pretend that this might go the way she wanted it to go.

But she didn’t.

And she was halfway across the grand, flowing space when she heard a noise and looked up—

To see him coming down the winding stair.

“Apostolis,” she began, because she couldn’t seem to keep his name inside of her, and there were so many other things that she wanted to say before he started in—

“We will talk, you and I,” he told her in a low voice. “But there is something that I think you must do first.”

“I don’t want to do anything else, I just want to say—”

But he didn’t come toward her. He stopped at the bottom of the stair and he didn’t even cut her off with an impatient slash of his hand, or even his mouth on hers. All he did was lift a finger and point toward the gallery.

Jolie felt frozen solid, but she followed the line his finger suggested, looking up.

And then she stopped breathing, because there against the wall of art and sculpture stood a slim blonde figure.

“Mathilde,” she whispered.

“Is it true?” her cousin asked her, her voice barely above a whisper, though it seemed to reverberate within Jolie like a shout. “Is it really true that I can simply come to you now, and live with you, and be free of them forever? He says that I can do this. That he has made it happen.” Mathilde’s face crumpled. “Oh, Jolie, tell me it’s true.”

And all Jolie could do was throw a shocked and overjoyed look Apostolis’s way—because she was already moving, racing up those stairs, winding herself around and around until she burst out at the gallery level and took her cousin in her arms.

In a hug that she hoped would go on forever.

They made a good start.

And it was a long while later that she left Mathilde in the guest room that she had once tried to claim as her own, surrounded by the things that Apostolis had brought here with her.

Mathilde had told her an impossible story of Apostolis appearing at her door and ordering her to pack her things, which she had done with alacrity, because she’d recognized him. She’d seen the photographs and the commentary in the papers.

None of which I believed, of course, she assured Jolie, who did not know how to tell her younger cousin that she had not given a single thought to the gossips in ages. They only make money on scandalous innuendo. I know you better than that .

You do, she had agreed, beckoning her to continue.

She did. Even more improbably, Apostolis had stood between Mathilde and her parents when they’d returned and had made it abundantly clear to them that they were not only cut off from Jolie’s money, but that it would be in their best interest to disappear entirely. Because, according to Apostolis, fleets of attorneys were already preparing to make sure that the rest of their lives were even more of a misery than they could expect if left to their own devices.

And more, that Jolie was off-limits. Mathilde’s eyes had been so wide that they almost took over her face as she related each and every word that had been spoken.

And then he told them that I was off-limits, too, she had said. With reverence. He said, ‘If I were you, I would go away and stay gone.’

Neither Mathilde nor Jolie could imagine that they would follow this advice, but one thing was certain—that particular reign of terror was over. At least for them.

Because Mathilde’s parents would have to go through Apostolis now.

And that changed everything.

A long while later, Jolie left her cousin to settle in—and, she hoped, sleep off all the excitement and the travel and dream about the possibility that this long nightmare was truly over now. She went out into the hall, her pulse kicking into high gear.

It was time to find him.

It’s finally time, she thought as she let herself into the master bedroom, but he wasn’t there. She had to stop and breathe a little before she started hyperventilating.

Or sobbing.

When she thought she could keep herself together, she picked her way downstairs again, expecting that she would find him in the office. But he wasn’t there either.

There was a kind of panic growing within her as she made her way outside and across the drive to the hotel. But when she checked into the kitchens and offices where the staff congregated, there were the usual tasks and issues to handle, but no one mentioned Apostolis—which meant that he wasn’t already there, handling things.

Had he left again? Jolie couldn’t believe that.

When she went outside again, she stopped in the yard. The ocean breeze picked up the length of her hair and played with it. There were guests down by the pool, so she smiled and waved.

But she didn’t see Apostolis there with them, so she went the other way. She walked up to the edge of the cliff, where there were benches placed for taking in the sea. And that was where she saw him at last.

He was down below, standing alone in the rocky cove down at sea level where that picture of him and Dioni had been taken a lifetime ago.

Jolie started toward the stairs that had been carved into the side of the cliff to lead the family and now the guests down to the water, but by the time she reached them she was running. She hurtled her way down them as if every moment apart from him was torture—

Because it is, she thought, feeling almost feverish.

And then she was on the beach herself, running toward him.

It was reckless. She knew that.

But the truth was that she didn’t care how they’d left things. She wasn’t sure it would have mattered before she’d seen who he’d come home with. Now it couldn’t.

All that mattered was that he’d brought her Mathilde.

Jolie didn’t care why or how he’d done it, only that he had.

So when he turned, looking back over his shoulder just before she reached him, she didn’t think.

She launched herself toward him with every confidence that he would catch her.

With faith.

With trust, because sometimes thinking about things made it more complicated than it was.

Jumping in the air wasn’t complicated. It was a yes or no question.

And he answered it.

He caught her. And he held her tight in his arms for a moment, there against his chest.

And he looked as if it hurt him when he set her back down on the ground.

“ Apostolis.” She breathed his name like a prayer. A prayer he had also answered. “How can I thank you enough? Thank you. Thank you. Thank—”

“Stop,” he urged her, though it was in a different sort of voice than the one he’d used that last night, so bitter and dark, when she’d knelt before him and believed that all was lost.

Herself most of all.

“Apostolis,” she tried again. “Please, you must—”

“I flew across Europe to prove you’re a liar,” he told her in that low, bittersweet voice. His gaze was so dark it made a lump grow in her throat. “Yet all I found was the truth, exactly as you’d told it to me. And the whole way back, while your cousin backed up all you told me and shared a good deal you did not, all I could think of was what you’ve been through. What you had gone to such trouble to save her from.” He shook his head. “What my father must have done to you, all of these years. I have no doubt that he was imaginative. And vile. He always is.”

She held on to him as if the sea might sneak in if she wasn’t careful and steal him away.

“Your father is dead,” she told him, her gaze on his. “There’s no need to keep digging up his grave.”

He made as if to put space between them at that, but she held on. And she could see that familiar light of battle in his gaze, but for the first time, it occurred to her that his first fight, always, was with himself.

As hers was with herself, too.

Because neither one of them had wanted this, and yet here they were, drawn together yet again.

“I don’t want to dig up any graves, but I don’t know how to begin to apologize to you,” Apostolis told her, his voice almost too low to hear over the surf. But then, she thought she would be able to hear him anywhere. He was already etched into her skin. Her bones. Maybe it had always been a kind of arrogant foolishness to pretend otherwise. “I don’t even know where to start. I can think of nothing else—but it has finally occurred to me what has to be done.”

She frowned at him, still gripping the inside of his arms. “You can’t divorce me. You can’t even leave me effectively. It’s right there, in the will.”

His mouth curved, just slightly. And her treacherous heart, which should have been left in tiny little pieces too small to ever come together again, blossomed into a brand-new kind of hope.

“I owe you a reckoning,” he said quietly. “Because I am the liar here, not you.”

She found herself whispering his name.

“Seven years ago I did not give you marital advice, such as it was, out of the goodness of my heart,” he told her as if he was making a confession before a court. “I took one look at you and told myself that I disliked you on sight. But I didn’t.”

“I was there, Apostolis. You did.”

He shook his head, and there was gold in his gaze again. “My darling wife. My favorite stepmother.” He ran a hand over her hair as if he marveled at the feel of it, just as she gloried in his touch. “I felt something at first sight, but it was not dislike . And it was not allowed. I believe that in that moment I decided that you must be evil if I could fall like that, and therefore a liar by definition. I excused myself, of course.”

She thought of running down the steps to the beach. Of tossing herself so heedlessly into his arms. There were a thousand things she could have said, but all of them were ways to fight—because she thought she had to fight to protect the soft parts of her she kept inside.

But she’d already told him what she wished for. What did she have to keep safe now that she’d already exposed herself?

“I excuse you now,” she said softly.

“You shouldn’t,” he returned, sounding almost outraged at the idea. “There are so many more lies. I told myself I hated you when, in fact, you are the only woman I have ever wanted enough to make me weak. To make me behave like this. This monster who has more in common with his father than I ever imagined possible. If I am honest, Jolie, I am disgusted with myself.”

“This is why we have to stop these wars,” she said, her eyes stinging with the effort of keeping her tears at bay. “Because all they do is tear us apart. Just imagine—”

“I have imagined very little else,” he told her, hoarsely. “But I will tell you now, I don’t deserve it. I will never deserve it. When I think of the things that you deserve, none of them involve me. The son of the man who treated you this way. The man who, all on his own, in some ways treated you worse.”

But Jolie shook her head, moving even closer to him.

“Arguing with you has always been like a dance. I don’t want to lose the spark of it.” She shook her head, not sure she believed that she’d said that out loud...but then she realized that it was true. There were years that she had lived for his few visits and the opportunity to fence a few words and fake smiles with this man. After the will was read, after their wedding, she would be lying if she claimed there wasn’t a part of her that was thrilled they got to poke at each other the way they did. And she could have moved herself right back to the back house. She hadn’t. Because she’d wanted the excitement of waiting to see what he’d say next. Or what she’d say back. “All I want is for it to be different. To be about us, not about him. Do you think that’s possible?”

He was shaking his head, as if she was causing him pain. “What I don’t know is why you would want it to be possible. Why you would want any of this at all.”

“Because,” Jolie said quietly, as if it was a secret between her and him and the sea, “whenever I think of love, I think of you. Not because we found that, you and me. But because I want it from you. Because I want the what ifs, and the maybes, and all those nights we pretended to be real. I want to see where that goes. I want all those possibilities, Apostolis. I know you think that’s losing the war, but I think—”

He whispered her name, like some kind of incantation.

“Nothing is worse than losing you,” he told her. “Not even death. I would lose a thousand wars, every day, as long as I had this. As long as I have you.”

He leaned in and kissed her. And it was sweet and light—until she kissed him deeper. More urgently.

Because sweet and light was not who they were.

She wanted him. All of him.

“I’m so sorry,” he said against her mouth, between tasting her and teasing her, and making her feel like she was home at last. “I don’t know the first thing about loving anyone, but I promise you, whatever I have in me, it’s yours.”

“I know even less,” she told him, wrapping herself around him. “So we will have to do it together, you and me.”

“My darling wife,” he said, “my only stepmother, asteri mou , I am yours.”

“And I am only and ever yours,” she replied.

The next time they kissed, right there on that beach, was the beginning.

The end of the war.

And the beginning of forever.