Page 30 of Modern Romance May 2026 Books 5-8
And then they had kissed.
The memory of her lips on his swelled inside him, and suddenly it was all he could think about. Not just the kiss, but the realness of it and the truth of what happened in his hotel room and before when he and Dulcie had split up. How he had wanted to bury the pain of her rejection.
‘It’s not that complicated. We split up,’ he said quickly. ‘It was hard, harder than we both thought it would be, to unpick our lives, and it became an issue between us, and one day we argued, and it got out of hand.’
He had spent most of his life hiding his emotions, his disappointment, his hurt. But now he let himself sound a little uncomfortable.
‘But that doesn’t explain why you didn’t tell us later.’ His uncle frowned, doing confused again. ‘I can understand wanting the wedding to be private, but if the marriage was over, why keep it a secret then?’
‘Because it wasn’t over, and I thought any family involvement, however well intentioned, would only complicate things further. I needed to figure out if we could fix things on our own terms. I was trying to safeguard our chances of reconciliation by keeping it private until we had a clearer path forward.’
Which sounded completely reasonable, except his family would never have tried to fix his marriage. He knew that, more importantly they did, which was no doubt why they were looking at him with the same incredulous expressions on their faces.
There was a beat of silence and then Dulcie said quietly, ‘That’s not quite what happened.’ He felt her turn towards him and, glancing down, he saw that she was looking up at him calmly.
‘Ettore is being kind. It was my fault we split up, my fault we didn’t get back together sooner. I don’t come from this world, and I was nervous about joining it. Ettore wanted to give me time to adjust to the idea of being part of your family. He wasn’t being secretive; he was being thoughtful.’
‘So, you’re saying that you knew who he was all along?’ Checco leaned forward, his eyes fixing on Ettore’s face, his expression incredulous. ‘I thought you hated using your title.’
Dulcie was shaking her head. ‘He didn’t use it. But he told me about it.’
‘If you’ve finished interrogating my daughter-in-law, Checco…’ His father’s voice, frail but indomitable.
‘I apologise for my family, my dear.’ Edoardo lifted his cane, gesturing towards an embossed shield of a rampant lion above the doorway. The same shield that could be found in multiple places around the castle. ‘You must feel like you’ve walked into the lion’s den, but I promise—our bark is worse than our bite.’
Now, Dulcie smiled, that same sweet smile that she had bestowed on the old man that first morning at breakfast. ‘That’s a relief, because I left my chainmail at home.’
The remainder of the evening passed without any further incident. His family seemed to have reluctantly accepted that there was ‘nothing to see here’ and had typically moved on to talking about themselves.
Eventually, they disappeared one by one until finally it was just Edoardo, Dulcie and himself.
‘I have something for you.’ The old man reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a box. ‘I want you to have this, Dulcie. It’s something I gave to my wife, to Isabella, when she gave birth to Ettore.’
Dulcie felt her eyes burn as Edoardo opened the box and she stared down at a beautiful bracelet set with sapphires and diamonds. It looked old. It looked priceless.
Her hand moved to her throat, to touch the pulse that was beating jerkily against the skin there. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘It’s a Florentine design. Originally acquired by my grandfather for his wife on the birth of their second son.’
She opened her mouth to protest then closed it again. What was she going to say?I can’t take this because I’m only staying married to your son for money.
‘May I?’ The duke loosened the bracelet from the box, and she raised her arm mechanically, and it felt like an out-of-body experience watching him fasten it around her wrist.
Upstairs in her bedroom, Dulcie had almost decided not to come down but then Valentina had knocked on her door and gently offered to help her dress for dinner, and the idea of saying that she wasn’t planning on going to the dinner that was being held in her honour had been beyond her.
And it had been nice having Valentina there. Calming and reassuring in the way that she imagined a mother might be.
There were few memories of her mother that could be described as calm. Madeleine Turner was beautiful and before her marriage, she had been a talented artist. But as a mum, she was exhaustingly erratic and emotionally unstable. And subsequent maternal role models had been fleeting. Her father’s girlfriends had been kind but remote and, crucially, impermanent. There had been no one to plait her hair or talk to her about her dreams.
Or help her choose what dress to wear to meet her husband’s family.
Gazing at her reflection, seeing Valentina smile as she twirled in a circle, Dulcie had felt guilty again for lying. And she wanted to blame Ettore, but the truth was that she had been lying to people in one way or another her whole life.
Sometimes it was a lie of obfuscation. Not lying explicitly but keeping the facts so vague that people naturally came to the wrong conclusion. Other times, it was a lie of omission. She would leave out a salient fact. Like her absent, abandoned brother. And then there were the lies of exaggeration, inflating a truth to shape her story in a way that suited her purpose.
She tried not to think about it. Sometimes, she even imagined telling the truth in all its unvarnished, ugly detail.
Well, not sometimes—once.
