Page 43 of Modern Romance May 2026 Books 5-8
‘I thought it covered a multitude of—’
‘Sins?’
His eyes found hers and he looked at her with hypnotised intensity for what was arguably an unnecessarily long time, and yet every second that passed felt essential. ‘I was going to say interpretations. Although I think I prefer sins.’
Heat blossomed between her thighs.
He was replaying their night together. She knew because she was replaying it too and, meeting his melting, gold gaze, she was dizzy, light-headed.
‘I just wanted—’ he began.
‘You don’t have to—’ she said.
They both stopped at once. ‘We need to talk,’ he said after a moment. ‘But eat first.’
She had lost her appetite, but then she remembered what that police officer had said to her when Oscar was arrested for causing a disturbance. She had sat at the police station all night waiting for him to be released and one of the officers had taken pity on her and brought her a bacon roll and a cup of tea. ‘If it’s going to be a long day, I have a fry-up and a cup of tea to fortify myself,’ he’d said. ‘I can’t offer you a fry-up, but I can manage a butty and a brew.’
Breathing out unsteadily, she nodded. ‘Okay, but could you just sit down?’
He sat on the bed beside her, and she ate her bacon and eggs, nibbled at some fruit and then drank her coffee. As she put down her cup, she forced herself to meet his gaze.
‘So, about last night…’
‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ he said firmly. ‘I want to talk about today.’
She could feel her body tensing. ‘What’s there to talk about? We had sex. It’s what married people do. Unmarried ones, too, as it happens.’
‘I don’t want to talk about sex either.’
Because it was a one-off. He had wanted closure and—
‘I want to talk about us. This. This arrangement we made.’
It was like being blindfolded with her head on a block, waiting for the axe to fall. Except she wasn’t blindfolded. She could see his face and was going to have to look into his eyes as he swung the axe.
‘Are you saying you want to end it?’
‘No.’ His gaze burned into her, his voice fierce and so adamant that she almost flinched. And there were no words to describe what that one word spoken with such assurance did to her then. How it carved through her, hollowing her out with need and hope and fear and yearning all at once.
‘That’s not what I want at all.’
He reached out and pulled her towards him, gently at first and then more roughly, drawing her closer until his lips found hers and he was kissing her then, an open-mouthed, unbound, demanding kiss, his hand tightening in her hair, his mouth hungry, clumsy with hunger as if they hadn’t just spent the night with his body in hers and on hers in a feverish waking dream of touch and relief and release.
She whimpered against his mouth, arching into his body, her nipples hardening as they grazed his chest.
‘What I want is to spend some time alone with you. What I want is it to be just the two of us. Because I am your husband and you are my wife. But my family are here and they’re not exactly shy and sensitive. So, I think we need to go some other place. I think what we need is a honeymoon.’
Ettore felt Dulcie’s body stiffen with shock.
Which was fair.
He had brought her here to Italy to perform a charade of ‘happy ever after’ for his family but a honeymoon had not been mentioned for the very obvious reason that it was extraneous to requirements.
It didn’t feel extraneous now.
It felt like an imperative.
He could see a pulse beating frantically against the delicate skin of her throat and he stared at it, mesmerised, trying to decipher her answer as if her pulse were beating out a message in Morse code.
