Page 19 of Modern Romance May 2026 Books 5-8
Her breath snagged and maybe it was audible because his jaw flexed and she felt a shiver scrabble over her skin and then, to hide her reaction, she said quickly, ‘How far is it to your house?’
He hesitated a moment, and she had the feeling that he was debating something. ‘Just over an hour,’ he said finally.
‘And when are we going to see your father?’
‘He’ll be there when we arrive. He lives with me.’
He did? How was that going to work?
The panic she had been largely keeping at bay since she’d boarded her flight in London surged up inside her as the private time she would need to survive this arrangement they’d made seemed to evaporate before her eyes.
‘You don’t need to worry. He has his own rooms. But he rarely gets up before lunch, and he usually retires early.’
‘How did he react when you told him about the marriage?’
‘He was surprised, obviously. But he’s looking forward to meeting you.’
Dulcie tried to imagine her own father’s reaction. Colin Turner had been a controlling husband and a controlling father. That choice he had forced her to make as a child had been the first of many. She’d learned which path to follow to earn his approval, and he’d had her whole life mapped out.
Obedience had been rewarded but any deviation from the path he’d chosen had resulted in coldness and distance. After she’d changed her degree course from law to environmental sciences, he had stopped paying her tuition fees and her living expenses.
When, finally, she had learned the extent of his control and cruelty, she had chosen to walk away, and he had punished her by cutting her out of his life.
‘Do you want to start or shall I?’
She glanced over at Ettore. ‘Start what?’
‘We need to fill in the gaps. In our lives. It’s what we’d do if this reconciliation were real.’
‘You know what I do. I work at the lab as a technician and then I do shifts as a cleaner at the university.’
She knew she sounded like some truculent teenager, but when she’d met Ettore, she’d still been riding high from being offered her dream job at Genesis Agri-Tech. It was humbling to have to relive her bumpy descent down the ladder.
‘I’m not talking about the broad brushstrokes. We need to dig deeper. Get into the finer details. Like what you do outside work.’
There was nothing outside work. Her school and university friends kept in touch, but it was hard to do more than text them and meet for an occasional quick catch-up. And since Oscar had moved in with her, he was her focus.
‘I see friends. We go out to dinner. We go dancing. We go to parties,’ she lied. ‘What about you? What have you been up to?’
‘I oversee the family business. We own a vineyard. A couple of years ago, we expanded into olive oil.’
How had she not known that? But they had talked about their lives only in terms of the here and now. Everything else had been extraneous. An unwarranted intrusion into something that had felt distant and unconnected to who they were when they were together.
‘And outside of growing vines and olives?’
His eyes narrowed on her face. ‘I see friends. We go out to dinner, go dancing.’
There was a hard pause.
So much for filling in the gaps. Was this why their marriage had failed? But why would this version work any better?
Her fingers clenched and unclenched in her lap. She was starting to feel panicky again.
Back in Cambridge, the reality of what she had agreed to do had felt distant and unreal. It had been something happening in a far-off place called the future. It had been easier to focus on her motivation for agreeing. But now that she was here the inherent, unchangeable flaws of the deal they’d made were getting more pertinent by the mile.
‘What are they?’ Her eyes snagged on a honey-coloured building with crumbling, crenellated walls. Through the gaps she could see some chickens pecking furiously. ‘I must have seen five or six already. They look like little fortresses.’
‘It’s amasseria. They’re not fortresses so much as fortified houses. They’re very common in this region.’
