Page 59 of Modern Romance Collection March 2025 (1-4)

Lynna didn’t bother to make a face at Irinka. “Are you guys hungry? I could whip us up some breakfast.”

It wasn’t likely there was much in their kitchenette, but she’d find a way, she decided. She strode into the room, all of her friends trailing after her even though there wasn’t really the space in the kitchenette for the four of them.

“What’s going on, Lynna?”

“In what regard?”

“In the regard that you married Athan Akakios. There werepregnancyrumors about you in thepress. We barely heard from you for weeks. And now, with very little warning, you’re back, sans your husband.”

“It’s very simple. The arrangement no longer suited, so I came home.” She opened the little pantry. There was some pancake mix, but unless someone had stocked the fridge in her absence, no milk or eggs to go with it. Could she manage from scratch?

“It doesn’t seem all that simple.”

She moved to the refrigerator. “Why not? I’m back at work.” No milk. What were her other options?

“Well, you have a tendency to panic cook for a crowd when something is wrong,” Auggie said.

“In other words, you like shoving food in people’s faces so they can’t talk to you,” Irinka added.

Lynna looked at none of them. “I’ll run to the store. Pick up some things.” But when she turned to the exit, all three of her friends were standing next to each other, blocking the doorway. She managed to keep her expression bland. “What are you wanting from me, ladies?”

“The truth,” Auggie said earnestly.

“The truth is as I said. Athan could not uphold the terms of our deal. He wanted…” Lynna hated that she faltered. “It was too complicated. He was…confusing things.”

“What things?”

“All the things!” Lynna almost shouted, but she held herself back at the last minute. She straightened, focused. “It was ridiculous. I don’t know what game he was playing. I don’t know what I was thinking letting him touch me, but it’s over now.”

“So youdidsleep with him,” Maude said, as if that had been a very involved discussion somewhere along the line.

She wasn’t going to think about it. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I mean, historically picky Lynna takes a lover kind ofdoesmatter,” Irinka pointed out.

“I assure you, it does not,” she said, adopting her haughtiest and mostdon’t touch this subject with a ten-foot poletone. “He was complicating things. I did not want to. So I left.”

There was a beat of silence, but still her friends did not move.

“Did you fall in love with him, Lynna?” Auggie asked gently.

Love? Why was everyone so suddenly concerned withlove? She scoffed. “How could I love him? He betrayed my family. He all but killed my father. Purposefully destroyed his legacy. How can you even ask me that?”

“That didn’t answer my question. Do youlovehim?”

Lynna shook her head. Her throat was almost too tight to speak, but she had to. “I don’t want to.”

“Still not an actual answer,” Maude said, but not without a gentleness to her tone.

A gentleness Lynna wanted nothing to do with. “What the hell do you want me to say?”

“The truth,” the three of them said in unison.

“He ruined my father’s life. On purpose.” She remembered him as he was. So cocky and arrogant. So like his father. But there had always been a warmth in Athan. A kindness Constantine did not have. Even her father had seen that, though he’d never counted it as a mark against Constantine. Only a positive for Athan.

Because he’d seen them both as two separate people, instead of one Akakios conglomeration. Before.

Before.

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