Page 195 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

‘She’s twenty-three.’

‘Yes, true. But who knows what she’ll think when presented with the chance of stepping into a multibillion-dollar business…’

Zeus felt as though the wind had been knocked from his sails. Wasn’t it highly likely that she’d jump through whatever damned hoops were necessary to secure the company? Who wouldn’t? It was like winning the lottery a million times over. He closed his eyes on a wave of disgust.

‘You should have told me this sooner.’

‘I couldn’t. Not until—’

‘My mother died,’ Zeus said, crossing his arms over his chest, refusing to feel sympathy for his father. A man he had, until ten minutes ago, loved with every fibre of his being. A man Zeus would have said and done anything for, even laid down his own life. ‘You disgust me,’ he said, shaking his head, and with that, he stormed from the room, slamming the door behind him for good measure.

But he could not so easily box away the tangle of thoughts his father’s pronouncement had given him, nor the sense of vulnerability that was tugging at his previously unassailable world view.

He was Zeus Papandreo, born to step into his father’s shoes. His father, who had been almost godlike to Zeus until this night, when he learned he was mortal, after all.

He’d cheated.

Had another child with the woman he’d bedded.

You’re one to talk.

After all, it wasn’t as though Zeus lived like a monk. Far from it. If he’d bothered keeping the phone numbers of all the women he’d slept with, his phone would have run out of memory long ago. Which made the whole idea of marriage even less palatable. It was absurd.

Even when it was absolutely, utterly necessary. And suddenly, it wasn’t just about stepping into his birthright; it was about keeping it from his father’s love child; it was about hurting his father. It was about being king of the world, king of this empire and calling the shots.

He was Zeus Papandreo and in this, he would be unstoppable.

‘Lottie, you can’t do it,’ Jane groaned, shaking her head from side to side so her long blond hair fluffed around her pretty, heart-shaped face. ‘You can’t marry someone you don’t know.’

‘Why not?’ Lottie whirled around, hands on slender hips. ‘Do you have any idea what that company’s worth?’

‘I know it’s worth alot,’ Jane admitted. ‘But so what? You have money.’

‘I have some money,’ Lottie muttered. ‘But notthatkind of money.’

Jane looked at her childhood best friend with a sinking feeling, because the expression on Lottie’s face was nothing short of determined. And she knew from experience that when Lottie looked like that, there was simply no talking her down. Only, something about this wasn’t adding up.

‘What’s going on? You’veneverwanted anything from him. You livehere, in my tiny second bedroom, borrow my clothes, freeload off my streaming services, rather than digging into that ample trust fund and buying your own place or paying for any of that stuff yourself.’

Lottie’s green eyes glittered with something more familiar to Jane, a look of impishness that reminded her of the time they’d crept out of their dormitories and into the kitchen of their prestigious boarding school, to steal all the ice cream for their dorm. They’d been fourteen years old, and it had earned them the adoration of every girl in that wing for the rest of their school careers.

‘Maybe it’s not about the money,’ Lottie said with a lift of her shoulders and a crease of her brow.

‘So, what is it, then?’

Lottie pursed her wide red lips, before reaching for her coffee and taking a sip. Though she’d been raised by her English mother, and was the quintessential English rose with her pale skin, wide-set green eyes and chestnut-red hair, there was no escaping the fact that certain traits in Lottie were pure Greek. Like her predilection for strong, tar-like coffee at all hours of the day.

‘All my life, they’ve ignored me,’ she said, the words blanked of emotion, but Jane heard it, regardless. Or perhaps it was echoes of the past. Of the way she knew that rejection had shaped Lottie, had wounded her. It was something they shared. Though Jane had two parents who acknowledged her in their lives, they had barely any time to give her, other than a few perfunctory holidays each year. They had paid for a nanny to watch her graduate high school and send them photographs. Though outwardly, both Charlotte and Jane had always projected an image of untouchable contentment to the world, to one another, they were honest. Each knew the truth. Rejection was awful, and they’d both suffered through more than enough of it.

‘I know,’ Jane murmured, sympathetically.

‘And now he’s telling me I can have the family business, if I want it. That I’m just as entitled to it as Zeus.’ She layered the word with contempt, and Jane could well understand it. Where Lottie had been forced to live her life in hiding, never telling anyone who her father was—courtesy of the nondisclosure agreement Aristotle Papandreo had forced Lottie’s mother to sign, in exchange for a huge payoff—Zeus had been in the spotlight as the much-adored sole son and heir to the Papandreo fortune.

‘I never wanted it,’ she said with a twist of her lips and a flash of those sea-green eyes. ‘I would have said I hated the thought of it, until I realised I could reach out and take it, after all.’

‘But why do you want it?’ Jane pushed.

‘Think of what we could do with that thing,’ Lottie murmured, crossing the room and crouching in front of her oldest, closest friend. Lottie’s hands closed over Jane’s, who sighed softly. ‘Think of thegoodwe could do with it.’