Page 111 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

‘Good morning,’ she said, trying to hide her ambivalence about whether or not the morning was, in fact, good or not.

Ambivalence? She wished she felt ambivalent.

The truth was she knew this was going to be one of the hardest days of her life.

The only thing getting her through was the certainty that she was leaving Zeus to fly to Lottie, whom she would sit down and make see sense about this whole situation.

Just imagining the truce she could bring about between the two of them was almost enough to ease her pain. Almost, but not quite.

And maybe, just maybe, when it was all out in the open, and things had calmed down, Zeus might even understand…

‘Are you packed?’

His voice was strange. Dark and heavy. His eyes met hers, but they were ice-cold, utterly different to how he’d looked at her the night before, with something that had felt almost like love to her silly wishful heart.

Perhaps he was just finding the emotion of the day too much, like she was? He was standing across the room, hips pressed to the kitchen counter, mug of coffee in hand, and he looked good enough to eat.

‘I— Not yet.’ She’d been putting it off, naturally. She wanted to eke out as much of this day together as she possibly could.

‘I’ve organised for my helicopter to take you to Athens from the island. It will be ready in ten minutes.’

She gaped. ‘Ten…minutes?’

He nodded once. ‘Which should be just long enough for you to explain to me exactly how you know Charlotte Shaw, and exactly what the plan was in coming to Athens?’

Jane gasped, her eyes filling with stars, the world growing black, so for a fearsome moment she thought she might pass out. He was staring at her as though she were something disgusting on his shoe, as though he could barely stand to breathe the same air as her. ‘How did you—?’

How he’d found out was hardly the most important thing to ask, but it was a reasonable question.

Nonetheless, his eyes flashed with fury that she’d immediately asked that, rather than something else.

‘That’s irrelevant. And I’ll be the one posing the questions.’

She shuddered. He wasn’t angry, she realised. She’d been wrong to perceive fury in his eyes. Disgust, yes, and coldness, which was somehow so, so much worse.

‘You knew about the marriage clause of my family’s business all along.’

She closed her eyes on a wave of panic. ‘Zeus, let me explain—’

‘Did you know about it?’ he interrupted, staring her down, so when she blinked her eyes open, she was lanced by the intensity of his gaze.

‘Yes.’ A whispered admission; a death knell. His own eyes closed then, briefly, on a wave of acceptance, so she realised that up until that moment, he’d been holding out some form of hope that maybe she hadn’t known. That maybe the marriage clause wasn’t why she’d come to Athens.

‘And you were supposed to, what? Tempt me into marriage then stand me up at the altar?’

‘No.’ She spat the word like a curse.

‘I find that hard to believe.’

‘It wasn’t a particularly well-thought-out plan,’ she whispered. ‘Lottie—’

At the mention of Charlotte’s abbreviated name, he cursed softly so she grimaced.

‘She was upset. After your father told her about the arrangement, she…’

‘Wanted the company, yes, that much I deduced for myself.’

‘You see it as your birthright,’ Jane murmured.

‘It is my birthright. I was raised to do this.’

‘But she is also a Papandreo.’

His nostrils flared.

Jane’s loyalties were so incredibly torn. She had to make him see Lottie’s side, even when she knew that would cost her everything with Zeus. Her throat hurt from the weight of unshed tears, but she continued.

‘You don’t know what it was like for her, Zeus.’

He made a gruff sound of disgust, but Jane continued regardless, her voice shaking a little. She felt tears splash down her cheeks, warm and fat, but she didn’t bother to check them.

‘All her life, Lottie has felt like someone people were ashamed of. Her mother—’

He swore again. ‘Do not speak to me of that whore.’

‘Zeus…’ Jane was appalled. ‘Mariah Shaw is not a whore, and I’ll have you know she was head over heels in love with your father. She’s loved him all this time, has never been with another man since. How can you possibly judge someone you’ve never met?’

A muscle jerked in his jaw as he continued to lance her with his dark stare.

‘She didn’t want to make things harder for him—’

‘How generous of her.’

‘Or your mother,’ Jane added softly.

‘And I’m sure the ten million pounds my father paid her, not to mention ongoing child support, had nothing to do with that.’

Jane flinched on behalf of Lottie and her mother. ‘You don’t think Lottie was entitled to be raised in a lifestyle akin to yours? Would you have preferred it if your father had left Mariah to struggle, as a poor single mother?’

Zeus’s face paled beneath his tan. At least on that front she was sure she’d gotten through to him.

‘Five minutes,’ he said, voice cold, so even if she had felt like she’d made some headway, she realised very quickly that it wasn’t enough.

Jane closed her eyes, her heart hurting more than it had ever hurt in her life. ‘What else do you want to know?’

‘The plan. All of it.’

‘There was no plan,’ she said, but he made a scoffing noise to dispute that. ‘Not a very good one, anyway.’

He stared at her, waiting for her to continue.

‘Lottie wanted me to distract you,’ she said, biting into her lip.

‘To make me want you,’ he murmured. ‘So that I wouldn’t propose to anyone else?’

Jane squeezed her eyes shut and nodded once, a tiny shift of her head.

‘And in the meantime, she’d be looking for someone to get married to, so that she could take the business away from me?’

It all sounded so incredibly awful said like that. But what could she do? There was no sense denying it.

‘Is that correct, Jane?’

She bit into her lip. ‘You need to understand—’

His nostrils flared. ‘I understand perfectly,’ he cut her off.

‘All this time, when you were imploring me to bare my soul to you, you already knew so much about me. You have lied to me, every step of the way, haven’t you?

From that first night in the bar, until this morning, you have hidden your true self from me. ’

She shook her head, her stomach churning. ‘No, Zeus, that’s not true.’ She strode across the room then, curling her hand around his arm, shaking him. She needed him to understand. ‘Everything between us has been real. This is real.’

His only response was to angle his head and stare at her hand as though it were something vile and disgusting. ‘Do not touch me, Jane.’

She dropped her hand like she’d been burned, quickly wiping away her tears, only for more to take their place.

‘Zeus,’ her voice trembled.

‘You did so well,’ he drawled. ‘What excellent bait you proved to be. Though you didn’t need to go so far as making up sob stories about your romantic past. I wouldn’t have cared if you’d slept with every man in Britain—I still would have wanted you with the force of a thousand suns.’

‘I didn’t make that up,’ she whispered, her chest cleaving apart at the very idea of lying about something so intimate. It had been such a huge deal for Jane to disclose the truth to him. She swallowed, but her throat was constricted. Her head ached.

‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you. You have no credibility with me, and with good reason, wouldn’t you say?’

She was shaking like a leaf. She reached behind her for a chair, sitting down with a dull sense of aching bones.

‘Unfortunately for you and your friend, your plan failed.’

Jane blinked up at him, eyes wide.

‘I’m getting married, you see,’ he said, and her heart stammered as her legs began to tremble.

‘What?’

‘Mmm-hmm. I proposed to a friend of mine the night I met you. You’ll remember I had a dinner?’

Jane’s lips parted.

‘It was one of the reasons I had to bring you onto the boat. I could hardly risk the press getting wind of the fact I was sleeping with you, when my fiancée was off buying wedding clothes.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Jane whispered, shaking her head.

‘Only one of us is a liar here, Jane.’ The indictment was like a slap; she flinched at the depth of hatred in his voice. The ice. The rejection.

Every part of her hurt. Every cell, every drop of blood, every atom of her being.

‘You think I haven’t hated lying to you, Zeus?’

‘You haven’t exactly seemed conflicted.’

‘Yeah, well, I have been,’ she shouted, then sobbed, because it was all so awful, so devastatingly bad. ‘Do you want to know what I was planning to do today?’

He stared back at her without asking the question.

‘I was going to go to Lottie, to tell her about how wonderful you are, how much she’d love you if she got to know you.

I was going to beg her to put off whatever plan she’d concocted and focus on meeting her half-brother, on meeting the man that I love.

’ Her voice stammered over the last word and her cheeks flushed with pink at what she was admitting to him.

But he needed to know how real this was for her; how incredibly special it had all been.

‘You don’t love me,’ he responded, rejecting her admission.

‘How can you say that?’

‘Because you have been lying to me this whole week,’ he reminded her, voice deathly quiet.

She sobbed once more.

‘I wanted to tell you the truth, but it’s not my truth to tell. I needed Lottie…’

‘You listened to me describe what that business means to me, all the while knowing that every moment we spent on this boat was a moment closer to your best friend triumphing over me, taking it all away.’

‘I would have done everything in my power to stop that, I promise.’

‘Your promises aren’t worth a damned thing,’ he snapped. ‘Time’s up.’ He straightened, crossing his arms over his chest. ‘I have a wedding to prepare for.’

She flinched, standing, moving to him, reaching out but he stepped away.

‘Don’t,’ he insisted, firmly.

She could hardly speak for how hard she was crying. Her soul was shattered. Every part of her life had been distilled to this moment; she was falling apart.

‘Please don’t marry her,’ she whispered.

He glared through her. ‘You’re trying to succeed in your plan, even now?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t care about anything but this.’ She pushed her hand into her chest then gestured to him. ‘You and I—’

‘Have been having sex,’ he muttered.

‘Don’t do that.’

‘Do what? Be honest? I’m sorry if that offends you.’

‘Don’t say we’re just sex. You know this is so much more.’

‘It’s all a lie,’ he spat. ‘All of it.’

She wanted to scream at him, to make him understand how wrong he was, but what would the point be? He was clearly determined to think the worst. She sobbed and nodded, unable to think of a single thing she could say that might get through to him.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered, because she was.

From the very depths of her heart, she regretted having agreed to go along with this.

And yet, if she hadn’t, she never would have met Zeus, and she couldn’t countenance that.

‘And I do love you, Zeus. Whatever else you believe, I hope one day you’ll at least accept that. ’

And she turned and ran back to the room they’d been sharing, to throw her clothes into a bag so she could get off his boat before she collapsed into a heap.