Page 210 of Modern Romance October 2025 5-8
‘God, I hope not. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.’
‘He’s not like we thought, Lottie.’
Jane’s voice wobbled a little, her tone was soft and sweet. Something twisted inside Charlotte. Something dark and angry. Something laced with indignation. ‘Oh?’ She managed to say, but the word was bitten out with a hint of her feelings of betrayal.
‘He’s actually quite...nice.’
Charlotte jerked to a standing position, striding part way down the plane aisle, before stopping and thrusting a hand onto her hip.
‘At least, he’s not the complete piece of work we’d always presumed,’ Jane continued meekly.
It was too much. Too much for Charlotte to hear. And from Jane of all people. Jane who was the one person that was always in Charlotte’s corner. The one person she thought of asherperson, who was supposed to fall in completely with Charlotte’s thoughts, on almost everything. Certainly on the family members who’d screwed her over so totally all her life.
‘I beg your pardon,’ her voice shook with outrage. ‘No one who goes through women like that is “nice”.’
‘I’m not saying he’s perfect.’
‘You hardly know him,’ Charlotte pointed out logically, trying to reassure herself, as well as make Jane see sense. ‘You’ve only been in Athens a few nights.’
‘I know,’ Jane replied crisply. ‘I guess I just have a sense for—,’
Charlotte continued to walk towards the door, standing at the top of it and looking down on the scenery. The private air strip was in the middle of Tuscany and the hills rolled away from them on either side. ‘Listen,’ she said quickly. ‘Nice or not, he’s my sworn enemy and you’re my best friend.’ She tried to lighten her tone, to suppress the fact she was feeling let down by the one person she’d always been able to trust. ‘I want that company,’ she reminded Jane. ‘And his father Aristotle has given me the perfect way to get it. To rip it out frombothof them. It’s not about Zeus. It’s about my mother. What they took from her and took from me. It’s about payback. It’s about what I deserve.’
Damn straight, she added for good measure.
But a moment later, she had cause to regret her outburst, because Jane sniffed and whispered, ‘I know.’
‘Oh, God. Jane. You’re crying. What’s happened? Please, tell me. I can’t bear for you to get hurt.’
‘I just—,’ Jane’s voice wobbled some more. Down on the tarmac, Dante was standing beside the car, his shirt sleeves pushed up to his elbows, revealing his tanned skin. Her mouth went dry, despite her concern for her best friend.
‘I want you to have everything you want, Lottie, you know that. But...’
Charlotte squeezed her eyes shut, because this was so completely, perfectly understandable, coming from Jane. Jane who had cried when they were fifteen and a butterfly had gotten trapped beneath a window right as someone had slammed it down—just the tip of its wing, enough to give the hope of salvation. But when Charlotte had thrust the window back up, the butterfly had been too crippled to fly. It had half-flapped but fallen to the ground. Jane had reacted immediately, bursting into tears at the sheer cruelty and unnecessariness of it. She was too, too kind.
‘You don’t want to hurt him,’ Charlotte said, softly, knowingly. ‘You’re too kind,’ she said, shaking her head, as Dante turned to her and put a hand on his hip. A gesture of impatience if ever she’d seen it. She had to focus Jane on the task at hand and then get off this plane. ‘Look, he’ll get over it. He’ll get over you.’
‘But not losing the business,’ Jane whispered.
Charlotte brushed that aside. ‘He’ll still be worth a stinking fortune. He can rebuild, do something else. He can use the same damned name, for all I care.’ She bit into her lower lip, trying something else, though feeling guilty for pushing Jane into something she clearly had issues with. ‘Let me put it this way. What do you think he’ll do if he gets married before me?’
There was silence.
Charlotte tightened her grip on her phone. ‘Do you think he’ll give one iota of thought about me?’
More silence.
‘Of course he won’t.’ She imagined that future with a shudder. ‘He’ll take his triumph, his ownership of all things Papandreo, and that will be the end of it.’
‘I’ll stay for a week,’ Jane conceived after a beat, sighing heavily. ‘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?’ Charlotte groaned, thinking of the time they were about to spend with Dante’s grandmother. What if Allegra San Marino hated Charlotte? What if she didn’t live up to the precious Jamie? What if Allegra disapproved of the marriage, Dante decided there was no longer any point to this for him and Charlotte was right back to square one?
But what if the opposite was true? What if Charlotte put on the performance of a lifetime this week, and Allegra San Marinolovedher. To the point where there was no way on God’s green earth that Dante could even consider walking away from her. Then, she’d be confident that no matter what, this wedding would go ahead, just as soon as legally possible.
‘A week,’ Charlotte repeated, fortified by the confidence that shecoulddo this. She got people to part with millions of dollars for her charities, every day of the week. She was great at convincing people of things, great at winning them over. ‘Okay, okay. I can work with that.’ And she could. She had to.
Charlotte had grown up around money. Not just because of the tens of millions of pounds her biological father had squared away to bribe Charlotte’s mother into silence. Charlotte’s mother had bought a big old house in the Cotswolds and decorated it in a style that would have made Martha Stewart swoon. If she couldn’t have her heart’s desire, she could at least live in the kind of house that people would drool over.
