Page 3 of Modern Romance May 2026 Books 5-8
What he needed was a wife. A wife who would be willing to stand by his side and share his life and all its accompanying privileges and burdens.
What he wanted was a wife who would put him first above all others.
In other words, not Dulcie Turner.
Which meant finding a wife would have to wait.
First off, he needed to get a divorce from Dulcie, the woman he had impulsively married just over two years ago. And then separated from six weeks later. It had been a spectacular, uncharacteristically reckless act of self-harm. Fortunately, its brevity meant that no one in his family knew anything about it. Not even Carlo.
Far better if it stayed that way. He could get some anonymous lawyer to send her the paperwork, but wouldn’t it be better, safer, more satisfying to do it in person?
And now that he thought about it, he couldn’t quite understand why he hadn’t sought legal closure before. There was no possibility of a reunion. Dulcie’s rejection was so tangled up with his mother’s savage words after Edo’s death, he couldn’t go there.
Couldn’t prod that wound.
It would be far easier, far less painful to find a new wife, one who would do what Dulcie had so conspicuously failed to do.
Chapter One
BREATHING UNEVENLY,Dulcie Shaw slid through the door of the lecture theatre. The professor giving the lecture, Dr Claire Blake, was already speaking to the assembled students, and Dulcie sat down hurriedly on the last empty seat in the back row and opened her laptop.
She’d run all the way from the labs, and her heart was pounding so loudly she couldn’t hear Dr Blake’s voice but thankfully her notes would be available online.
Several rows closer to the stage, a young man with blond hair and a lazy gaze glanced over at her with a mixture of curiosity and disdain. He was an undergraduate. She recognised him from the labs. But it was unlikely he recognised her, she thought. Working as a lab technician was like having the power of invisibility.
She didn’t dislike the undergraduates. Most, especially the girls, were polite in that awkward way of people recognising their privilege and wanting to apologise for it. Some simply ignored her. They were mostly male and, even without exchanging a word, she knew they had been raised in homes and schools where the women who cooked and cleaned and applied plasters to scuffed knees were not the kind of women who mattered enough to notice.
They were the kind of men who had a compartmentalised life. They were binary in their thought processes. For them, and, in consequence, for those who crossed their path, life was a flow chart of clear, simple choices.
Me or your mother.
Me or your brother.
Her shoulders stiffened. Because clear and simple didn’t have to mean those choices were fair or right. Sometimes the act of choosing was wrong.
Of course, she was generalising. Not all men were like that. Maybe it was just her father and her husband. But it would be a long time before she tested that theory because, after what had happened with Ettore, she had sworn off dating.
Before him, she had always been careful to keep her relationships on a casual footing. She’d told the men she’d dated that she didn’t like labels, but the truth was even letting someone hold her hand had felt as if she were putting it into a snare.
She’d got away with it because, thanks to her father’s decision to send her to an expensive boarding school, she knew how to smile, to sparkle on command. She’d danced and giggled. And then she’d moved on.
Before things had got too deep or too complicated. Before they had got close enough to have power over her. She couldn’t let that happen. Couldn’t trust anyone to have that power. Power corrupted. It damaged lives. Wrecked relationships. Safer to stay single or travel light.
And then she’d met Ettore Marchesi. Thick dark hair, eyes the exact same colour as the bronze coins on display in the Fitzwilliam Museum up the road, and a sensual mouth that should have warned her to keep her distance.
‘For those of you who are interested, I’ve added a link at the end of the lecture.’ Dr Blake’s voice snapped her attention back to the stage, and she stared fixedly at the screen.
Met.
The word popped into a bubble above her head as if she were a cartoon character.
It was such a small word to describe such a life-altering encounter. Meeting Ettore had been like atoms colliding to create an entirely new state of being. A state where hope and anticipation, and the excitement of sharing her life without borders and checkpoints, had felt normal. A state where she had been a different person. A Dulcie who had been confident in her choices.
And she had chosen him.
Chosen.Again, such an insipid word.
There had been no choice. Her need for him had been as inexorable and fierce and irresistible as a black hole.
