Page 99 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

She groaned, placing the sandwich back on the cardboard tray and gingerly wiping her fingertips together.

There was no way to extricate herself from this situation without hurting someone.

Lottie or Zeus. Lottie, her best friend of more than a decade, a woman who was more like a sister to her than anything else, clearly should have the biggest stake on her heart.

And on her heart, she did. But her obligations? Her conscience?

She picked up her takeaway coffee cup and began to walk, frowning deeply, so she missed the hue of peach and pink that lit the sky as the sun grew higher, missed the purples, too, that reached out like long, magical fingers, directly across the horizon.

She walked a long way, down a wide, straight street lined with large, verdant trees.

She walked until her body was sheened in perspiration and then pulled her phone out to check the time, only to see several text messages on the front screen.

Lottie’s required her attention first. I miss you! X

Guilt brightened the flush in her cheeks. The next message was from her mother.

Are you coming to the races next weekend? We have a box.

Jane rolled her eyes. For a long time, Jane had held little value to her parents, but now, an intelligent graduate who had morphed into a doppelg?nger of the elegant Mrs Fisher, Jane was suddenly a worthwhile accessory for certain society events.

She clicked out of that message and then, with a fluttering in her chest, tapped into Zeus’s.

Can I see you tonight?

Her heart went from fluttering to exploding and she stepped sideways so she could lean against a building for support. Never mind that it was covered in years of dust and grime and Jane was wearing pale clothes. In that moment, she needed help just to stay standing.

She thought about what to respond with. Could he see her? There was nothing she wanted more.

And that was the problem.

It was all happening too fast, getting too intense, starting to mean too much. They needed to put the brakes on, slow it all right down, make it more casual, more fun. Maybe then she’d be able to live with herself for intentionally plotting his professional downfall.

She groaned and shook her head, hating what she’d agreed to suddenly.

She clicked out of his text and into Lottie’s.

We need to talk. Call me when you’re free.

She began to walk once more, her stride long and intent.

Coffee finished, she discarded the cup in a nearby wastebin, then turned and looked around, realising that she’d wandered without paying attention and had no idea how to get back to the hotel.

She lifted her phone from her pocket and saw another text from Zeus.

No pressure.

Her heart rolled over in her chest.

If only he knew how untrue that was! Jane was under the kind of pressure that could fell a person.

She needed to speak to Lottie. She loaded a map up and began to walk towards her hotel, willing her phone to ring, and for it to be her best friend on the other end.

Wishing, more than anything, that in speaking to Lottie, she’d somehow know exactly how to proceed.

Zeus was getting used to ‘firsts’ with Jane, and that afternoon he recognised another one.

It was the first time he’d messaged a woman and not heard back almost instantly. The first time he’d sent multiple messages and had them be ignored.

He vacillated between irritation and concern for the better part of the day. Irritation with himself, and with her. Irritation that he felt completely unlike normal and desperately didn’t like it. Irritation with her for the power she somehow wielded over him.

Concern, because last night had been intense.

True, they hadn’t slept together, but he’d enjoyed stirring her to a fever pitch.

He’d revelled in the power he held in that moment over her, to make her whimper and thrash, to make her body explode, and he’d driven her wild again, and again and again, until she was so exhausted she could hardly keep her eyes open.

Then, he’d lifted her higher into the bed, covered her with the blankets and kissed her forehead before letting himself, and his rock-hard arousal, out.

Only a promise to himself that he’d see her again soon had allowed him to leave at all. He’d sized up the sofa and considered sleeping there, just so he’d be able to pick up where they’d left off in the morning.

Maybe it was because he was on the brink of making a commitment to someone else.

It was possible that the knowledge a marriage was imminent for Zeus was making his brain and body perceive Jane as more special somehow than she really was.

But even as he thought that Hail Mary, he knew it was a false hope, because the way he felt for Jane had everything to do with her, and nothing to do with the arcane inheritance surrounding the company.

He stood from his desk angrily and strode across the expansive office, staring out at the landscape of Athens’ central business district.

It was a view that usually puffed his chest with pride.

He loved this city; he loved his family’s contributions to both it and the broader landscape of Greece.

He was a Papandreo, and in taking over the running of the company, Zeus was carrying on a proud, important tradition.

Not once had he questioned the righteousness of that.

But his father’s stupidity and weakness had put everything in jeopardy.

Now guilt was making the older man weak in an even worse way than infidelity: he was being reckless with the business.

He was willing to bring in an outsider to run it, never mind her lack of experience and the fact she was his bastard daughter with God only knew who.

Zeus’s entire world was shattering, just like it had again and again as a boy, a teenager and finally, for good when his mother had died.

Though by then, he’d hardened his heart to her loss, knowing that it was coming, accepting that he was powerless to save her, and that he would not make her pain worse by showing his grief.

He wouldn’t burden her with that; he was brave, to the end.

Breathing in deeply, so his chest stretched and flooded with air, he turned his back on the view and stalked back to his desk, reaching for his phone. No replies, still.

Grinding his teeth, he picked up his phone to make a call, but not to Jane. If only to prove to himself that he was still in control of his life, that he wasn’t as utterly and completely at her beck and call as he feared he might be.

‘Finally,’ Jane groaned down the line, sinking into the sumptuous sofa of her hotel suite and staring out at the windows. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to ring.’

‘Sorry, I was on a flight.’

‘To where?’

‘That doesn’t matter.’ Lottie sounded harried, though.

‘Is everything okay?’

‘Fine. What’s up?’

Jane frowned. ‘I—’ But now that it came to it, she struggled to find the words.

How could she tell her best friend that the man they’d always, always hated was the most deliciously sexy person on earth?

And that he also happened to be kind and interesting…

? It felt like a betrayal of the highest order, and so she cast about for how to begin.

‘Is it Zeus?’ Lottie demanded. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m… Yes. Of course. Why?’

Lottie expelled a long breath. ‘I just— I’ve been worrying that maybe I sent you on a quest to the lion’s den. I couldn’t live with myself if he hurt you, too, Jane.’

Jane squeezed her eyes shut, unsure how to confess that she feared she was the one who would be hurting everyone if she wasn’t very careful.

‘He’s not going to hurt me,’ she promised, and found the words were spoken with confidence.

‘God, I hope not. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.’

‘He’s not like we thought, Lottie.’

Silence sparked. A silence that Jane perceived, because she knew Lottie as well as she did herself, was loaded and important.

‘Oh?’

Jane bit back a groan. ‘He’s actually quite…nice.’

Nice! What a weak, watery word to describe Zeus Papandreo.

‘At least, he’s not the complete piece of work we’d always presumed.’

‘I beg your pardon. No one who goes through women like that is nice .’

Jane chewed on her lower lip. ‘I’m not saying he’s perfect—’

‘You hardly know him,’ Lottie pointed out. ‘You’ve only been in Athens a few nights.’

‘I know,’ she said, wondering why inwardly she rebelled against that as a concept. Hardly knew him? It didn’t seem to come close to describing their relationship. ‘I guess I just have a sense for…’

‘Listen,’ Lottie interrupted. ‘Nice or not, he’s my sworn enemy, and you’re my bestest friend.

’ Her tone was joking, but Jane didn’t smile.

‘I want that company, and his father—Aristotle—has given me the perfect way to get it. To rip it out from both of them. It’s not about Zeus.

It’s about my mother, what they took from her, took from me.

It’s about payback. It’s about what I deserve. ’

A single tear slid down Jane’s cheek, because Lottie wasn’t wrong, either. Jane knew what the secret affair had done to Lottie’s mother, who’d never stopped loving Aristotle, even though she did her best to hide it. ‘I know,’ she whispered.

‘Oh, God, Jane. You’re crying. What’s happened? Please tell me… I can’t bear for you to get hurt.’

‘It’s just— I want you to have everything you want, Lottie, you know that. But…’

‘You don’t want to hurt him.’

She squeezed her eyes shut.

‘You’re too kind,’ Lottie groaned. ‘Look, he’ll get over it. He’ll get over you.’

‘But not losing the business,’ she said, remembering the pride in his features when he spoke of his place in the Papandreo legacy. Only that night, she’d hated him for his pride, because it had been stolen from Lottie. Now? It was intrinsic to him.

She toyed with the fabric hem of her shorts.

‘He’ll still be worth a stinking fortune,’ Lottie pointed out. ‘He can rebuild, do something else. He can use the same damned name for all I care.’

Jane swallowed past a bitter lump in her throat. Loyalty to Lottie was her principal duty, but only just.

‘Let me put it this way,’ Lottie continued. ‘What do you think he’ll do if he gets married before me?’

Jane stared across the room in silence.

‘Do you think he’ll give one iota of thought about me?’

Jane scrunched her eyes closed.

‘Of course he won’t. He’ll take his triumph, his ownership of all things Papandreo, and that will be the end of it.

’ Lottie’s voice stung, and Jane understood why.

This was about so much more than the company.

Lottie had been wronged her whole life by these people, even though Jane couldn’t have said with certainty if Zeus had even known about her.

The effect was the same. Lottie had grown up believing herself to be a shameful secret, seeing hurt in her mother’s face and heart, knowing herself to be, in some way, an instrument of that.

And if, or rather when, Zeus married, he would, Jane had no doubt, shut down any legal recourse Lottie had to staking a claim on the business.

‘I’ll stay for a week,’ she said on a soft, tortured sigh. ‘One week, to give you a head start. After that, I’m leaving Athens, and Zeus, and I don’t ever want to hear his name again, okay?’

‘A week?’ Lottie groaned but quickly cut herself off. ‘A week,’ she repeated with much more strength. ‘Okay, okay. I can work with that.’

Jane grimaced. ‘Lottie…maybe there’s a way you can have some of the company, but not all.’

‘Are you actually suggesting I compromise with those bastards?’

Jane sighed softly. She had been, but she should have known better. She’d witnessed the hatred Lottie felt for them—up until very recently, Jane had felt it, too.

‘No.’

‘Look, take care of yourself,’ Lottie begged. ‘I know I’ve asked you to do a lot. I know how hard it is for someone like you to be, I guess, kind of ruthless, but for me, can you just try ?’

She nodded unevenly, then remembered Lottie couldn’t see her. ‘One week,’ she promised, and disconnected the call with a thud in the region of her chest.

One week was a slight head start to Lottie, but not a huge disadvantage to Zeus, either. And it did give her the safety to see him again, without worrying about how to extricate herself. She flicked her phone screen to life and loaded up Zeus’s text messages.

How about dinner tonight? I can come to you…