Page 8 of Modern Romance May 2026 Books 5-8
‘Then let me tell you.’ He spoke quietly but there was an authority to his voice.
‘No.’ At the margins of her vision, she saw a man turn to stare at her. But she didn’t care. Nor did she want to hear Ettore’s reasons. Didn’t he understand how cruel it was to ask her to do that? ‘Our marriage is over. I thought I’d made that clear the last time we met.’
She made as if to step past him, but he moved neatly to block her escape and she felt a sudden suffocating panic. Not because she thought he would hurt her. Ettore had been passionate in bed, and he was physically strong, but even when provoked by Oscar, he hadn’t hurt her brother, just restrained him.
But he was too close. So close that she could see the faint trace of stubble on his strong jaw. So close that she could feel the sheer, unfiltered maleness of his lean, muscular body. Close enough that she could remember the way he would roll her over to straddle him, his hands moving with devastating precision over her skin until she was just a pulsating, helpless extension of his body.
She blanked her mind, irritated at her brain’s disloyal and baffling ability to focus on the good when there was so much more of the bad.
‘Obviously, I’m not expecting you to make up your mind now. I understand it’s a big decision to take so I’m happy to give you twenty-four hours to think it over. I’m staying at the Conisbrough in London—’
‘I don’t care where you’re staying. And I don’t need twenty-four hours. You could give me twenty-four years, and my answer would be the same. Whatever it is you’re selling, I’m not interested in buying it.’Caveat emptor.Buyer beware. She had bought into love with Ettore and been burned.
‘I’m not selling you anything, Dulcie. I’m offering you the chance to get your life back on track. And not just your life. Oscar’s too. I know he’s struggling and that you’re supporting him. But can you give him the help he needs? Because I can. I can make that a reality.’
‘You leave my brother out of this.’ She was instantly, fiercely protective, shaken too that he knew so much about their lives. Though still not afraid of him.
His face was hard then, the bones like granite beneath the skin. ‘As I remember, it was you that put him front and centre and above all others.’
Not always, she hadn’t, and she would regret that for the rest of her life.
‘You don’t know anything about my brother or me—’
‘I know that he’s still drinking. Still violent. That he lost you your job—’
‘He’s not violent!’ Oscar got loud and incoherent when he was scared and he threw things and smashed them, but he had never hit anybody, never hurt her.
Not intentionally, and only that one time when he and Ettore first met.
Her pulse slowed as Ettore’s words replayed inside her head and then she frowned. ‘How do you know that? About my job?’ Her eyes narrowed on his face. ‘Have you been spying on me?’
His jaw tightened. It was something that she had never quite managed to understand, that way he had of suddenly putting distance between himself and other people. It was as if a barrier had risen up like that privacy screen in the limo her friend Dina had hired for her hen night. In the past, it had happened sometimes when they were out in a restaurant or in the street when someone got too messy or too loud.
But never with her. Never when they were alone.
It made her feel slightly sick, knowing that she was now someone he wanted to keep at arm’s length.
‘Not spying, no. I was trying to find you. So that we could have this conversation. You’d changed your number and your address, so I went to where you were working. Where you used to work, as it turned out.’
Staring down at Dulcie’s taut face, Ettore managed to hold onto his temper. In part, that was only possible because he was still reeling from his abrupt, inexplicable volte-face.
He had come to Cambridge fully intending to tell Dulcie that he wanted a divorce. He had the paperwork in his pocket, more for effect than any legal requirement. But then he had seen her outside the lecture theatre, and everything he had planned to say had been overridden. In fact, he had gone a step further and, instead of demanding a divorce, he had suggested the opposite. And now he couldn’t backtrack without looking either stupid or unhinged.
Which quite frankly felt like a fair assessment of his current behaviour. He couldn’t recall when he’d ever acted so impulsively.
Not true, he thought, remembering his humbling scamper across Charles de Gaulle airport, a coffee cup in his outstretched hand.
Meeting Dulcie Turner in a rare moment of freedom had felt like serendipity and salvation all rolled into one. Marrying her two months later had been a spur-of-the-moment impulse, a random act of recklessness in a considered, constricted life.
With her sparkling smiles and her love of the natural world, Dulcie was the complete antithesis of the cool, metropolitan women he’d dated in the past. Women like him, who had a role to play. She tasted like freedom and possibility. She was sunshine and sherbet on his tongue.
The intensity of his attraction had overruled common sense and the whole unassailable inappropriateness of his response to her.
And now it had happened again. She had turned him into a creature of impulse.
He swore silently. How the hell was he going to explain this turn of events to his family? To Carlo?
But explaining away the unexplainable, the unreasonable, the irrational was his superpower.
