Page 40 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

She gazed into his eyes. ‘It would have been very easy for you to destroy my entire family in vengeance for what my father and Rebecca did.’

‘Very easy,’ he agreed. ‘But then I’d have had to deal with the guilt of all the innocent victims on my conscience.’

‘How can you stand to employ any of us or even be in a room with us?’

‘I didn’t think I could, but you’re not your father or Rebecca and neither are your brothers, and I’ve come to see in our time together that you and your brothers have suffered at their hands more than anyone.’

‘My brothers would disagree with that assessment.’

‘I don’t care about your brothers. Only you.’ He pressed a kiss to her mouth then pulled away to tap at the door for his driver to open it.

Athena lay in Draco’s bed, waiting for him to finish a conference call with his senior staff in Athens. Her thoughts were racing at a million kilometres an hour. She’d searched for her name and Thanasis Antoniadis but there was nothing online linking them, other than through his marriage to her stepsister. The guilt that was racking her allowed only a morsel of relief. She didn’t care for her own sake if the news leaked to the wider world, but she cared deeply for Lucie’s sake. Of all her family, Lucie was the one she loved the most. She was also the one she’d hated the most. That love and hate had lived side by side for over two decades, but now it was as if the hate had never existed and all that was left was the love, and a deep guilt and sorrow for the terrible way she’d treated her, not just with regard to Thanasis but all her horrible behaviour to her over the years. Of everyone she needed to make amends with, Lucie was at the top of the list.

She cared deeply, too, about the news not leaking for Draco’s sake, because another search, this time of her name alongside his, had brought up rumours of them ‘enjoying an affair’.

Enjoying an affair. Words that used to make her cackle with glee now sounded seedy and demeaning.

But itwasjust an affair. That had been established before it had started. There could be no future for them. That had been established too. Except…

Except she’d fallen in love with him and Draco had told her only an hour ago that he cared about her and, as foolish as she tried to tell herself that it was to hope, those words had opened her heart into hoping that maybe, just maybe, his feelings ran as deep as hers did.

Whether they did or they didn’t, he had feelings for her. He cared about her. He’d turned his back on a potential multi-million—even billion—deal out of anger over the way she’d been spoken of. And he’d listened to her darkest confession. He’d listened. And he’d understood. Understood her. Understood who she’d been then and who she was now…well, who she was trying to be. Who she wanted to be. He seemed to have more faith than she did that the woman she was morphing into was the woman she was supposed to be.

The bedroom door opened.

A drumming set off in her chest.

He gave a weary smile. The lines on his rugged face seemed deeper than usual, exhaustion settling into the grooves.

His tie and jacket already discarded, he stripped off his shirt and headed into the bathroom. A few moments later, the shower started up.

It felt like for ever before he came back in the room, time enough for Athena’s thoughts to go into overdrive as to why he hadn’t invited her to join him in the shower or even kissed her before going into the bathroom.

Naked and smelling divine, he crossed the floor towards her. With no playful smile on his lips or gleam in his eye, anxiety gnawed at her, only ebbing when he slipped under the duvet, turned out the light and drew her to him.

Locked in his arms and cradled into his strength, she tried not to think that their time in California was speeding by. Soon, they would go home to Greece and all they were sharing here would be gone. She couldn’t bring herself to ask if he wanted her to stay with him in his Athens home until her contract ended. Couldn’t bring herself to ask anything about their future.

All the certainties she’d had, that the end of her contract meant the end of them, that the end of her contract meant her return to her old world… Neither had to be true. Draco had thrown away a multi-million dealfor her. Was it possible that his feelings for her had developed enough that he might want her to stay inhisworld?

His arms tightened around her, a deep sigh coming from his throat. Her heart swelled so large that it threatened to lodge inherthroat.

She didn’t know how she was going to bear saying goodbye to him.

Wriggling to loosen his hold around her, she lifted her head and gazed down at him. With only silvery moonlight to see by, the rugged features she loved appeared even stronger, and she pressed a kiss to his mouth before gently kissing every line and plane of his face, nuzzling her nose into the bristles of his beard and filling her lungs with as much of his scent as she could manage, as if breathing him in so deeply meant a physical part of him would lodge into a physical part of her, and as she trailed kisses down the throat she so loved, her heart caught to imagine Draco’s child growing inside her. Caught and then tightened with unbearable sharpness to admit to herself that she would never be the one to carry his child, that all her foolish hopes for the future could never come true.

When his fingers speared her hair the way that always made her stomach feel squishy, all she could think was how much she wanted…needed…to show him everything that he meant to her.

Bringing her face back to his, she kissed his mouth in a languid, sensual fusion and, as it slowly deepened and their tongues meshed, she trailed her fingers over and across his muscular chest and down the hard abdomen before trailing her tongue down his throat.

Touching and tasting him as if for the very first time, she used her body to pour out her heart to the man who’d poured sunshine into her life and taken away the pain and loneliness she’d spent a lifetime hiding from.

She couldn’t tell him that she loved him but she could show him, and she drove her fingers through the dark wiry mesh of his pubic hair and took his velvet hardness into her hand. It throbbed at her grip and somehow grew even harder and bigger, and when she put it into her mouth his groan drove straight into the hot spot between her legs.

Draco would go to his grave with the memory of the first time Athena had taken him into her mouth, would never forget the shyness in her eyes when she’d asked him what he liked.

That early, untouched tentativeness had gone but there was something about the way she was making love to him now that felt like that first time. Where that first time he’d been too concerned with her enjoying it to allow his brain to fully switch off, this time she was so fully engrossed in pleasuring him, her movements so tender and passionate, that all he could do was close his eyes and savour the sensations she was evoking, let them drive out the poison that had lodged in his veins, not at Athena’s confession of deliberately hurting her stepsister but her confession that she’d wanted to marry Thanasis.

That had been jealousy he’d felt. There was no other explanation for the red-hot rush of blood to his head and the vice-like grip in his guts. That it came hot on the heels of the red-hot rush of blood to his head at Diego’s inflammatory words about her had left Draco feeling as far from himself as he’d ever felt, as if there was something alien burrowed beneath his skin.