Page 7 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

CHAPTER THREE

ATHENA’S FIRST JOURNEYin a plush, chauffeur-driven car in a month was spent fighting her thoughts and her senses. Her thoughts kept wanting to take her to a past she couldn’t forget although she’d spent over twenty years blurring the emotional impact. A therapist or psychiatrist would probably say the times she’d blurred had shaped her into the woman she was today, but they would be wrong—she’d forged herself into the Athena everyone loved to hate.

Being the Athena everyone loved to hate meant never apologising because apologising was a sign of weakness that showed you cared, and when people knew you cared they knew they could hurt you. Best not to care at all.

Being the Athena everyone loved to hate also meant holding your head high and brazening out the awkward moments that came after you’d said or done something your stony heart knew had crossed a line. While her stony heart didn’t care if people liked her or not, it did feel heavier in those times, lasting until whatever she’d said or done was forgotten and things returned to normal. It had happened many times with her stepsister Lucie. Athena’s feelings for Lucie were the most complicated of all her feelings for everyone. Or had been.

Enclosed in a luxurious but small space with Draco Manolis as she currently was, her stony heart was feeling heavier than it had in as long as she could remember.

She wished she could take back what she’d said about his mother. She’d never had any intention of mentioning her to him, but she’d been so frightened of the tension that had suddenly grown between them and all the sensations firing inside her that she’d snatched at the open goal to get herself fired he’d provided her with.

Cora Manolis was entwined with her blurred past and so was a door she’d never wanted to open, loving her as much as Athena had once done. Compartmentalising feelings was easy until it wasn’t, and Draco’s furious defence of his mother had been an unwelcome reminder of just how much Athena had loved her.

Funny how life turned out, she thought bleakly. For the first time in so long, she remembered being a little girl and asking Cora all about her son. Remembered, too, Cora showing her a photo of him, and deciding Draco was the most beautiful man—to five-year-old Athena, any boy over the age of fifteen was a man—in the world and that she would marry him when she was all grown up because if she married him, she’d be able to live with Cora.

And then Cora had been fired and Athena had never seen her again.

And now here she was, sitting beside the man her younger self had wanted to marry, and her senses had never felt so sharp. It wasn’t just Draco’s fresh, citrusy cologne she was breathing into her lungs with each inhalation, it was his shower gel and shampoo and the way it all interplayed with the underlying essence of his skin, coming together and combining into a scent she found as beautiful as she’d found his face all those decades ago. It wasn’t just his gruff voice diving into her ears as he conducted a long business call, it was the staccato of each consonant and the short breaths he took in the pauses, a voice that was contrarily exciting and soothing.

The car stopped outside the Tsaliki Shipping headquarters. Draco carried on talking into his phone. He fixed his piercing eyes on her and indicated with a sharp turn of his head for her to follow him.

The Athena everyone loved to hate produced her widest smile and did as commanded.

If Draco had to admire anything about Athena, it was her chutzpah, and when they reached the top floor and she strode beside him as if she’d been promoted to Chief Executive Officer and said, ‘So which office is mine? I assume I get one with its own shower-room,’ he came close to cracking a smile.

‘The office you’ll be contained in certainly comes with a shower-room, but you’re banned from using it—you’re sharing my office.’

‘Ooh, I get to be the keeper of your secrets. Exciting!’

Only her restraint from making a quip about sharing a shower with him convinced him that she really was experiencing a modicum of contrition for weaponising his mother the way she had. Which was just as well as after that journey together the last thing he wanted was to imagine himself sharing a shower with her.

Twenty minutes alone in a car with Athena Tsaliki, her presence filling the space as much as her perfume filled his nostrils, had been much harder than he’d envisaged, even with business calls to distract him. Even with his loathing for her still thick in his blood. It was those damned sheer black tights. He kept catching glimpses of them. They were the most modest item of clothing he’d known her to wear and it was all he could do to stop himself from imagining ripping them off and running his hands over the golden skin beneath. He’d been half-tempted to tell his driver to take them back to her apartment, and make her change back into those ridiculous socks and shorts. And so he’d tried to train his glances to her feet, but she was wearing a pair of sexy black stilettoes and damn if he ever normally noticed or gave a damn what shoes his staff wore.

Athena wasn’t staff. Not under any rules of what staff meant. She was his burden to bear until their contracted time was up, angel face and viperous tongue and all.

Her contrition did not extend to Grace. She whisked past her on those sexy stilettoes with an airy smile and a, ‘Nice suit. Brings out the colour of your eyes.’

Gritting his teeth, Draco closed the office door and tightly said, ‘Did you have to be rude to her?’

‘I paid her a compliment!’ she refuted indignantly.

‘She’s wearing red.’

‘Exactly! See,’ she added, ‘I’m already working on my attitude.’

‘You need to work a million times harder than that.’ Grabbing at his hair, he reminded himself that this was the reason he’d decided to install Athena in his office, to stop her spreading her poison anywhere else. Although she did have a point about Grace’s eyes. The whites were definitely more red than white. ‘There’s your desk. Turn your computer on.’

‘Yes, boss.’ She sashayed to the desk he’d had put in the corner of the room by the entrance door, as far from his own desk as it was possible to get. The office rivalled the boardroom for size and he’d have to raise his voice to be heard when he spoke to her, but already her presence made it feel perceptibly smaller.

‘Phone away,’ he said when he watched her swipe it on.

‘Yes, boss.’ She put it on the desk.

‘Face down and to the right of the desk where I can see it.’

‘Yes, boss.’ Obeying, she then clasped her hands together and looked at him with such fake avid expectation that he couldn’t stop himself from envisaging clasping that beguiling face and kissing those poisonous lips so thoroughly that when she next looked at him she wouldn’t have the sense left to fake or mask anything.

Breathing away the frisson racing through his veins, he folded his arms across his chest and perched on the edge of her desk. He would not allow his unwanted attraction for her distract him or allow himself to recall the way her green eyes had darkened in her bedroom in that split second when the chemistry he preferred to pretend didn’t exist between them had flickered to undeniable life. Before she’d turned her tongue on his mother.