CHAPTER THREE
T HE FUNNY THING about the world ending was that it kept right on going as if her pain didn’t matter at all. Her world had ended before, of course. Jolie should have been used to the fact that her pain didn’t matter to anyone but herself, and certainly couldn’t keep the sun from rising, the tides from turning, or the days from passing as they would.
Her grandparents’ deaths had been the first, hardest series of blows. They had raised her after she’d lost her parents when she was two. She often felt profoundly guilty that she couldn’t really remember that. She suspected that what she called her memories were actually stories her grandparents had told her about her parents and the pictures they had used to supplement the tales they’d told—of a couple so good it only made sense that they’d been too good for the world.
Her grandparents had been Jolie’s world. And then, in the course of a bewildering few years, everything had changed.
She had been thirteen when her grandmother died. She and her grandfather had mourned together until he had decided that regular school was not enough for his only grandchild, and so had sent her off to finishing school when she was barely seventeen. So that she, like her grandmother before her, could learn how to be a woman of consequence.
I thought finishing schools turned girls into women who married consequence rather than becoming it themselves, she had complained.
Her grandfather had laughed, his kind eyes crinkling in the corners. Perhaps. But married to whom, pray? One thing this particular school will do, mon rayon de soleil , is teach you how to think .
He had maintained that the school would be the making of her until she had gone to take her place there. And within a few months he had succumbed to pneumonia and was gone, too.
That would have been quite enough change. But her grandfather had possessed what he liked to call a bit of a buffer against the world’s trials . What it was, in fact, was a small fortune. When he died he left the whole of it to Jolie.
But because she was only seventeen, there were strings attached.
And those strings were her aunt and uncle. The court had appointed them trustees. They had oozed sincerity and warmth, despite the fact that her aunt—her mother’s sister—had been estranged from the family for as long as Jolie could remember.
Jolie had believed they were who they said they were. Concerned relatives who wanted only to help their poor niece after a loss so devastating it must surely smooth over any past troubles.
She had not been so na?ve since.
Jolie realized with a start that she’d been more or less sleepwalking through the hotel, thinking about all the various ends of the world she’d lived through thus far. She blinked, shaking her head as she looked around, hoping that none of the staff—or more importantly, Apostolis—had seen her in such a distracted state.
Today was a changeover day, a week since her doomed wedding. Their last famous guest had left the day before, and as the Hotel Andromeda did not enforce checkout times on the clientele they treated like family, the guest in question and his expansive selection of acolytes had not chosen to leave until so late last night it was actually this morning.
This was why they always did their best to put a day of padding in between. There was no telling when a guest would ignore their checkout day altogether and have to be gently and politely—but never directly—encouraged to move on before the next guest arrived.
They had the whole day today, which was less time than it seemed after a tornado of fame and money went through the place. Their handpicked, miracle-working staff was already deep into the process of turning the entire old house inside out and upside down so that when the next set of guests arrived it would be as if the hotel had been waiting for them since their last visit. This time it was a family that would stay for a month, and liked the Andromeda to feel as if it was their home.
With occasional effortlessly glamorous drinks with the owner, of course. Since Spyros’s death, the guests had liked to get together in the evenings and reminisce about the old man. Jolie only hoped that she could manage to keep her cool, as expected, now that she would not be reminiscing with the guests on her own.
This was not easy because Apostolis was not easy. A funny thing to say about a man who made such a point of acting lazy whenever possible, but it was true. She had imagined they might simply go about their business and ignore each other as much as possible, but he was always poking at her. Always seething in her direction, right there under the surface where, apparently, only she could see it.
He really is the most gloriously charming man alive, isn’t he? one of the former guest’s acolytes had sighed at Jolie only a few days ago, her eyes dancing with stars and focused on Apostolis. I don’t know how you can bear being around him all the time.
This after Apostolis had managed to quietly insult her in a variety of ways throughout the evening, but apparently at a frequency only she could hear.
It is a great trial, she had replied. Truthfully. Though she’d had to smile enigmatically while she said it to make it seem as if she meant the opposite.
There was something so unfair about it, she thought now. That despite their mutual loathing—or perhaps because of it—she and Apostolis were the only ones who could see each other clearly.
She had been doing a walk-through of all the floral arrangements before she’d been sidetracked into unpleasant memories, one of her managerial tasks that she liked best. She had built a relationship these past seven years with all the florists in the village and used each of them all in a rotation, depending on the guest in question. The Andromeda liked to present each guest with a floral theme, a flowerscape , as Jolie and Dioni liked to call it.
Spyros had praised her for her attention to such things, and his only compliments were always about the business. Like the scent profiles she curated, a comprehensive collection of scents that worked with each other, never against, and only completed the floral arrangements. It was not as simple as one might think.
Jolie carried on moving through the old mansion, in and out of the rooms that could all be locked up into separate suites but were left open and welcoming today, anticipating that the family group would wish to move freely. The rooms were large and graceful, and let in the light. Since that storm that had soaked her wedding right through, the best wedding gift she’d received, the island had returned to form. Everything was gold and blue, with bright flowers bursting into vibrant color everywhere. Inside the hotel, the palette was more understated, allowing the unmistakable beauty of the landscape and the sea to shine.
She loved this place. This grand and glorious old hotel. It had been one of the unexpected gifts of this path she’d been forced to take.
After checking out all the arrangements on this floor, she wandered into the library to assess the flowers that stood on the table directly beneath the vaulted skylight, one of Spyros’s additions to the house. The flowers were appropriately theatrical, but she found herself drifting over to the shelves stuffed with books, never artificially arranged.
It had been the first room she’d found herself gravitating to when Spyros had brought her here. She supposed that it reminded her of her grandfather’s study in the chateau outside Lausanne with its view of Lake Geneva and the Alps, filled with books, dear old rugs, and funny little items of art and interest that her grandparents had collected from all over the world.
The chateau, too, was gone now. What had been meant to be her birthright had been sold right out from under her.
Jolie had been almost done with finishing school before she understood what was happening. She had never cared much about her grandfather’s will, or the fortune she had hardly been able to comprehend was to be hers. Because she hadn’t had to worry about it, she understood now. And by the time she realized that she was no longer protected, it was too late.
The pain of that never quite left her.
She sank down in one of the comfortable seats in the Hotel Andromeda library and blew out a breath, remembering that terrible day when she’d finally fully understood the truth of things. She’d been nineteen and she’d thought that she was misunderstanding something, that was all. She had tried to use one of the cards her grandfather had always designated for her use, only to have it declined. That had sent her on what should not have been an arduous journey to locate her aunt and uncle, who were not living where they’d told her they were.
Jolie had tracked them down at the chateau. The chateau that did not resemble the home she had left that fall because they’d stripped it clean. And were in the process of selling it off, piece by piece.
I... I don’t understand, Jolie had managed to say, close to tears as she stood in the entry hall, looking around at bare walls and empty rooms beyond in shock.
I deserve it, after the way they treated me, her aunt had said, an ugly triumph making her face twist. And I’ve taken it.
And you’re welcome to do something about it, if you like, her uncle had chimed in with an unpleasant laugh. But by the time you do, it will all be gone .
Their daughter Mathilde had been sitting on the steps behind them, her eyes wide. And Jolie had seen that same frightened awareness in her cousin that she knew must be written all over her. It had made her heart lurch inside her chest.
But... But that’s not right, Jolie had sputtered.
Because back then, she’d still imagined that something like honor, or truth, or what was right mattered to anyone.
The truth was, her aunt and uncle had taught her a series of very valuable lessons.
At first, Jolie had felt helpless. They had sacked her home, pillaged her future, and taken everything that had meant anything to her. Oh, she knew that they thought she was upset about the money. But she’d never had any comprehension of that. Of what it meant.
What they had thrown away were her memories.
All those pictures. All those objects, softened by all the fingers she’d loved that had touched them. Paintings that were not just art to her, but windows into the marvelous stories of their travels.
All of it, gone.
But what is to become of me? she had asked them.
Her aunt had laughed and laughed.
Her uncle had snarled. That school of yours should set you up just fine to marry one of the rich men always hovering about. That’s what Mathilde will do when it’s her time, and she won’t be breathing in your rarefied air, will she?
Again, the cousins had gazed at each other, each entirely too clear about what he must mean. Though, looking back, Jolie knew that she—at the least—had truly had no idea.
Some of us have to make do, her aunt had said with another unpleasant laugh. You will find out, little mademoiselle. Soon enough, I should think.
Sitting in an armchair in the library of the very rich man she’d gone ahead and married, Jolie found herself feeling something like rueful.
Because, of course, she had not wanted to marry anyone. She had vowed that she would do no such thing.
But over the course of her last year at school, her stark financial situation had been made clear to her. Her grandfather had paid her tuition in advance, but she was otherwise penniless. She had confessed everything to the headmistress one cold winter’s day, and the older woman had listened with sympathy.
And then had fixed Jolie with a gimlet eye. I am not saying that your horrid relatives are right, in any regard, she had said. But the fact remains that while this institution has been happily responsible for the education of many strong and powerful women in their own right, from politicians to activists to philanthropists of all kinds, its original purpose was to do all of those things but in the form—
Of a wife, Jolie had said hollowly.
Not just any wife, the headmistress had replied, a stern sort of glint in her gaze. This institution does not create trophies. It assures triumphs.
What she did not ask, but what had hung there between them anyway, was, Do you have any better ideas?
And so, when her classmate’s very old father had paid her close attention that spring, she’d accepted it. She had returned it, cautiously. And had gotten far more than financial security out of the bargain.
She had become instantly famous, everywhere, the moment her name was linked to the Spyros Adrianakis. Having not heard from her aunt and uncle in a couple of years by then, they had found a way to get in touch with her again once they heard the news. Perhaps unsurprisingly—though it made Jolie sad and bitter in turn—they had already run through the fortune they’d stolen.
Yet by that time, married to Spyros and living at the hotel in the company of so many different kinds of powerful people, Jolie was a far cry from the na?ve girl they had taken advantage of years before.
The only reason she hadn’t cut them off without a second thought was Mathilde. Who was, by that point, all of thirteen. And deserved her parents as little as Jolie had.
She was afraid she knew exactly what kind of things they might do with a pretty girl like Mathilde.
How could she live with herself if she let them? When she could do something to stop them? She couldn’t. She just couldn’t.
So she’d done the only thing she could. She’d struck a bargain.
And she’d been paying for it ever since.
Still, it was good to remind herself that she hadn’t simply ended up here, she told herself now, gazing at the bookshelves before her that fairly ached with all the books they held. Even this marriage she found herself in now was a choice she’d made. Because, after all, a lack of good choices wasn’t the same thing as a lack of choices.
You survived this far, she reminded herself. You’ll survive a little longer.
Maybe then, when all the surviving was done, maybe she would give living a try.
But first there were flower arrangements and incoming guests. Bookkeeping and bills. Myths to embody and legends to keep afloat. Yet just as she was preparing to get back to her to-do list, something changed.
There was a disturbance in the air. And it seemed to be connected directly to her nervous system, or perhaps it was simply in her bones.
It was a winnowing. A tightening. A sudden shift.
Jolie was completely unsurprised to look up and find Apostolis there in the door to the library.
“Working hard I see,” he said with his usual censure. When they were alone, he didn’t bother to dress it up in a charming, playboyish smile. And she could have disabused him of the notion that she was lazy. That all she did here was lounge about, avoiding work. But that might indicate that she cared what he thought of her.
She couldn’t have that.
Jolie went even more languid in the chair. She made her hand wave a work of artful ennui. “I am the trophy wife, remember? Why should I work?”
She had the distinct pleasure of watching those distractingly sensual lips of his firm, then press into a tight line. Maybe one day she would find herself adult enough—mature enough—to keep from feeling joy when she jabbed at this man. One day she would find her way to blessed indifference.
But that was not today.
“I am not my father,” he told her, with that seething note in his dark voice.
He drew closer and everything in her urged her to stand up, to face off with him. To do what she could to at least stand tall before him—which was not tall enough, but certainly put her more the level of his face than she was now.
But she didn’t.
Jolie lounged in that chair, giving every impression that she was exactly the sort of spoiled little party girl he thought she was.
“Is this an identity crisis?” she asked as he stalked closer. “If so, my suggestion for you is to seek therapy. Daddy issues can be so pernicious.”
He didn’t respond to that directly, but she did enjoy the slight flare of his nostrils, and the way the muscles in his jaw clenched tight. It was the little things.
“I understand that you might think that nothing will be expected of you. I imagine that’s how your life has gone up to this point. But I have no intention of carrying you along like dead weight. You will work—”
“Or what?” she asked mildly. “For one thing, we’re stuck with each other and no one put you in charge. For another, what exactly do you know about the business of running the Hotel Andromeda, Apostolis?”
“Anything my father could do, I’m quite certain I can do better.”
She made herself laugh, though that hard look he had trained on her made it more difficult than it should have been. “And again I say...daddy issues.”
“It is nothing to do with daddy issues .” And the way he said those words made her think that the very taste of them in his mouth was sour. She liked that, too. “It is a simple fact that he was an old man. His attention to detail has slipped, to put it mildly.” He shook his head at her, doing nothing at all to hide his distaste. “As his wife, I would expect you to have noticed that.”
This time she laughed to cover her own surprise. “You’d be surprised the sorts of things I know about the men I’ve married.”
She made that sound airy, as if she was just talking rubbish to annoy him. Inside, however, she was more than a little shaken.
Because in the past, she would have asserted with total confidence that Apostolis did not know a single thing about his father. His visits, spaced out as they were, were always all about him. There was no possible way he could know the first thing about Spyros as a man. Or the challenges the old man had faced in his waning years.
And she wondered if she would have felt this surge of something like loyalty to his father if she had been married to anyone but him. If it was actual loyalty to Spyros she felt—when she had never felt any such thing before—or a simple, possibly childish desire not to give Apostolis anything .
Not even the things she knew about his father that he didn’t.
“I am sure that you are a great talent and know many, many fascinating things,” Apostolis said then, his meaning clear as he swept a gaze over the length of her body. “None of them, I think, useful in the running of a hotel.”
“Because you are the expert, is that it?”
Jolie regarded him steadily, because she’d found that it made him uncomfortable when she did so and today was no different. She could see the way he lowered his chin. The way his jaw tightened even further, almost certainly risking his famous smile.
And then, a far more telltale sign, he crossed his arms.
That felt like a win, so she smiled. “I think you’ll find, Apostolis, that spending many a debaucherous evening in whatever hotel crosses your drunken path is not quite the same thing as running one. And even if it was, the kind of hotels that cater to your sort of character are very different from the Andromeda.”
“I’ll thank you to remember that the Andromeda is my birthright, not yours.”
“Birthrights are funny things,” she said, and there was, regrettably, more emotion in her voice than she might have wished in his presence. She hoped he would think it was temper. “They seem like rocks, do they not? Slabs of immovable granite that one can stand upon. Until they’re gone.”
His gaze was a wildfire. “Is that a threat?”
It hadn’t been. It had been a bit of foolishness and wistfulness, nothing more—but then her breath caught because he moved forward. And before she could do anything at all, he was leaning over, bracing himself with a hand on each arm of her chair.
Caging her in.
He wasn’t touching her. She knew he wasn’t touching her—
And yet her body exploded into a riot of sensation, as if he was.
She felt hemmed in on all sides, as if she was trapped in his closed fist, but there was something far worse than that—and it was that she felt precious there.
As if that fist closed around her was protecting her, not confining her at all.
And it didn’t help that the way he was leaning over her meant he’d put his face entirely too close to hers.
So that she was forced, entirely against her will, to remember in excruciating detail that final moment of their wedding ceremony.
You may kiss the bride, the priest had intoned.
She and Apostolis had stared each other down, with varying looks of horror and distaste.
But she was no coward, so she had stepped forward and tipped her head back, daring him. And he had accepted that dare at once, moving in and sliding a hand around to the small of her back, which had been...unpleasant.
Wildly, riotously unpleasant, she had assured herself.
And then—never closing his eyes, which she knew because she never closed hers—they had glared at each other while their lips brushed.
Jolie had instantly repressed that moment, until now.
Because now he was much too close, again. With that archangel’s face of his and that look of burning distaste—for that was surely what it was—in his too-hot gaze.
She remembered the glare, the brush of their lips.
And the immediate, almost terrifying brush fire that had soared through her in its wake.
Here, in this chair in the library where she doubted she would find peace again, she could feel the lick of those same flames.
“Why are you worried about threats?” she had the presence of mind to ask him. “Do you feel threatened, husband?”
“The nature of a threat is mutable. Is it a promise? A suggestion?”
She lifted her chin, feeling defiant and not entirely understanding why. “I did not realize you were such a philosopher.”
“And I thought you were an expert on your many husbands,” he retorted in that sardonic tone of his. Almost chiding her. “But then again, you clearly enjoyed a certain...intimacy with my father that you and I do not share.”
Something about that prickled in her, some mix of indignation and shame and not a little bit of temper, besides.
“Are you talking about sex?” She laughed into the breath of space between them. “And here I was beginning to think that the modern-day whore of Babylon himself had come over all missish. What would all your favorite tabloids say if they knew?”
“I suppose it would take one whore to know another,” he replied, too easily. Too smoothly.
Because it took her one whole breath and half of another to understand that what he had really done was slide a knife in deep between her ribs.
The pain of it was so intense and so surprising, because it was so unfair, that she felt her eyes go bright.
“Don’t think that I don’t understand where all of this animosity is coming from,” she told him, using whatever blades she had to hand, and hurling them as hard as she could. “It must be so confusing for you to finally meet a woman immune to what I think I’ve heard called your charm .”
“Immunity would look like indifference, my darling wife,” he said, so softly. Too softly. “And you are many things in my presence, but indifferent? I think not.”
“By that metric, I suspect you must be half in love with me,” she said, lightly enough, yet sharp enough, to leave scars.
But before scars, there was blood, and they both knew she’d drawn his.
It seemed to shimmer there, in the air between them.
“Should we test that?” he asked, a scant breath that took the shape of words.
Even if she’d understood what he was asking, she would not have backed down from the challenge. Any challenge.
But she didn’t understand.
When he leaned in even closer, then set his mouth to hers, she was wholly unprepared. And there was nothing for it but to burn.
She had never confused Apostolis with his father. For a host of reasons, none of which she intended to share with him, now or ever.
But if she had, this would have scorched any stray wisp of a memory of Spyros from her brain.
His hands stayed on the arms of the chair. The only place they touched at all was at the mouth. The lips. The tongues.
But that was more than enough.
Because he did not simply brush his lips over hers and call it a kiss.
That there was any resemblance between that first kiss and this incineration , that they should both share the same name, was almost laughable.
Because what he did was lick his way into her mouth, flooding her with the most intense sensation she had ever felt. Then, as if that would not have knocked her on her bottom had she not already been sitting, he angled his jaw.
He made it all...hotter. Deeper. And decidedly worse.
So much worse.
Distractingly, outrageously, irresistibly worse.
And this kiss that was so much more than a kiss went on and on.
It was a feast—a banquet of sensation—and she found herself responding against her will. There was nothing she could do but follow that fire, chasing that sensation any way she could.
Until it was as if their tongues were engaged in the same sweet, slick dance. As if they were both trying to burn each other alive, but this was not a flame that either one of them could control.
Nor should you want to, something in her whispered.
It was too bright, too bold. It grew too big, too fast.
And maybe she already knew that he would leave her in cinders.
Jolie pulled away and she felt a kind of triumph that she could. But it was a close call. And she only realized, then, that it hadn’t occurred to her to keep her eyes open in protest the way she had before.
Something that was obvious to her because now, she could see him.
She could see the look on his face, intent and too hot to look at directly, though she did.
And let it sear straight through her.
Jolie decided she had only one play here. Only one chance to win this battle despite losing herself—and clearly losing her head—with this kiss she should never have allowed.
She’d know better now. She’d be more careful.
He had weapons she hadn’t dared imagine, but now she would.
First, though, she had to win. Or more accurately—he had to lose.
So she sat forward and slid her hand over his jaw, the better to smile at him as if she meant it.
“Tell me, husband,” she said quietly. Almost sweetly, her gaze steady on his. “Does that feel like threat enough to you now?”
And it was worth it to watch his face shutter, instantly. To watch him straighten and move back as if she had kicked him in the gut.
It was worth it to smile in the face of the look of pure loathing he threw her way, and keep smiling as he wheeled around and strode from the room.
And only then, only when she was alone, did Jolie cover her face with her shaking hands and do the best she could to keep from falling apart.