Page 50 of Modern Romance September 2026 Books 1-4

‘Not at all. It’s where my parents created the facade of a happy family but the reality was that they had us all on different trajectories practically from birth. We all had separate nannies. Schools. They couldn’t have pushed us apart more effectively if they’d tried.’

Hope could see the flicker of pain in his eyes and her heart ached for him. And his siblings.

She thought about what she was going to say next for a second and then decided to risk it. ‘I saw on one of the news websites that your brother is getting married to a queen. They look very happy. She’s beautiful. Are you going to call him?’

‘I’m sure he’ll be much happier not to hear from me.’

‘Axel, it wasn’t your fault… Are you going to let your parents keep pushing you all apart?’

The car had come to a stop in front of the villa and Hope’s door was being opened by the driver. Axel was not going to answer her. It was none of her business.

Hope got out of the car and a woman appeared at the entrance of the villa and greeted Axel warmly. He introduced her to Hope as Amelia, his housekeeper. The woman beamed and Hope returned her smile. The woman spoke in rapid-fire Greek to Axel as they walked inside and Hope looked around the spacious reception hall—marble floor, a grand staircase leading upstairs.

Axel looked at his watch. ‘I’m going to go straight to the office. I have to prepare for the face-to-face with Damian Baros tomorrow evening.’

Tomorrow. Time was running out. ‘Where is the event taking place?’

‘In his villa. It’s not far from here.’

Clearly this was where all the billionaires lived, high in the rarefied air of the hills around the city.

Axel said, ‘Amelia will look after you and a stylist will come with some options for the event.’

Hope felt panicked. ‘But how will I know what to choose?’

‘Don’t worry, she has the information and she’s used to dressing people for these situations.’

‘OK.’

‘The driver is at your disposal. Feel free to go into the city and look around. I won’t be back until late tonight. Don’t wait up.’

Hope watched as Axel—who’d seemingly morphed back into the man she’d first met—got into a silver bullet of a sports car and took off back down the drive with a roar of the engine.

The idyll of the island was well and truly broken. Hope should be welcoming that and using it to enforce more of a distance. But she felt bereft. Already.

She tried to tell herself that she was wrong about Axel. She didn’t really love him. It was just hormones. Delusions. Proximity. He couldn’t be the man she loved. He didn’t want what she wanted.

And spending this time with him had only solidified for Hope what she wanted—the sense of peace and home that she’d experienced on the island. She tried to convince herself that he wasn’t integral to that feeling. She was. She would create that with someone else. Someone whose vision of the future aligned with her own. A home, a family. Love.

Because he was too busy building an empire for a family that had been fractured from the start. Building it for a family he intended to have purely so that they could then inherit an empty legacy.

‘Miss Hope?’

Hope looked around to find Amelia indicating for her to follow her upstairs and so she dutifully followed the woman and let her show her into her sumptuous suite of rooms with its own little terrace overlooking the lush gardens and Athens beyond.

Her hands itched to undo some of the beautifully elegant but meticulously bland decor evident in Axel’s properties. There was no stamp of his personality anywhere. As if he didn’t allow himself to have any discernible impact on anything. But then she remembered him stopping outside that art gallery in the island town near the villa the other day, with the huge, boldly coloured canvas in the window.

He’d agreed with her that it wasn’t his style and yet she’d felt how taken he was with it. So why hadn’t he admitted it?

Hope chastised herself now. Here she was in one of her wish-list travel locations and with a driver at her disposal and what was she doing? Mooning over a man who spelled doom to her heart.

When her luggage arrived at the room with another member of staff, Hope changed her clothes and set off to explore Athens.

Chapter Ten

When Axel returned to the villa later that night, all was quiet. He went into the living area and saw a throw on the couch, a pair of Hope-sized trainers on the ground.

He also noticed brochures from different places around the city—the Acropolis and the museum. The archaeological museum. The National Gallery. He picked that one up. It had always been his favourite museum. He’d go there and linger for hours over the art, delaying the inevitable return to the family villa and the airless atmosphere—Ares in his room with door firmly shut.