Page 38 of Modern Romance May 2026 Books 1-4
The soft warmth of her skin on his gave the comfort he craved, but did little to dispel the nausea raging through him.
After the longest time had passed, he quietly said, ‘When you said in the rose garden that you’d wanted rescuing from your life… I think I understand now what you meant.’
‘It was the loneliness that was the worst.’ Exhaustion now made her voice barely audible. ‘Working for you made me stronger and happier and more confident in myself, but then I’d go home and feel like a lost little girl again. I learned to cope and find ways through it, but sometimes…’ Her voice tailed off, but he already knew what she would have said. That sometimes her loneliness had been more than she could bear.
He could hardly bring himself to ask. ‘Were you very lonely in our marriage?’
She took such a long time to answer that he thought she’d fallen asleep. When she did finally answer, he wished she had. Sleepiness etched into every syllable, she whispered, ‘It’s the loneliest I’ve ever been. When I married you, I lost you.’
After a few hours of sleep coming only in snatches, Domenico gave up. Marnie was sleeping peacefully, nestled beside him, an arm slung over his waist. When he carefully moved it off him, she rolled over and burrowed deeper beneath the sheets. She was in the exact same position when he’d finished showering and dressing.
His heart the heaviest he’d ever known it, he pressed a kiss to her temple and slipped downstairs.
Stomach too tight for food, he asked for black coffee to be served in his home office. There, he settled at his desk, turned his computer on, and began searching. He knew exactly where to start his search, but it took three cups of strong coffee before he knew it was time to stop.
He’d hoped to find evidence that Marnie’s father had died. Hoped he’d be able to tell her that when he’d walked out on her mother, he hadn’t walked out on Marnie too, that he’d met an unfortunate accident with a bus or suffered an aneurysm. Anything would have been preferable to the truth that her father was alive and living only half a mile from the flat he’d abandoned her in.
Scraping his fingers through his hair, Domenico drew in a ragged breath.
Marnie’s fatherhadabandoned her. She’d been right not to want to track him down. Peter Ware was now as great an alcoholic as the woman who’d born his only child. How he was still alive was one of life’s great mysteries.
Another of life’s great mysteries was how the hell those two selfish degenerates had produced a child like Marnie. The biggest mystery of all was how the hell Marnie hadn’t turned out like them. She’d defied all the odds. Defied them without any help. Taken her life into her own hands.
The strength and fortitude it must have taken for her to do that. And all without any bitterness at the hand life had dealt her. Quiet anger towards her father for his abandonment, quiet sadness and attempted understanding for everything else she’d gone through.
Dio, if that had been him, he’d have wreaked vengeance oneveryoneand laid a trail of fire in his wake.
But vengeance wasn’t Marnie’s way. Not against her father for abandoning her, not against her alcoholic mother who’d abandoned her in a different way, and not against her husband for being so monstrously selfish he made her parents seem like amateurs in the selfish leagues.
Domenico had treated her worse than anyone.
No wonder she hadn’t wanted to come back to him.
Dio, how could she even look him in the eye without wanting to stab a knife into his heart?
Rubbing his eyes, he swallowed in an effort to keep down the coffee he’d drunk. But even the guilt-nausea ravaging him made him think of Marnie and how she’d taken her sickness—severe sickness—so stoically. Not a single word of complaint of the new hand life had dealt her. Probably because she’d learned at a young age to take care of herself during sickness, just as she’d had to take care of herself in every other way. It was the only time Domenico had stepped up to the mark and taken care of her the way she deserved, and even then it had primarily been because she was carrying his child.
She’d dreamed of a fairy tale. He’d given her a nightmare and expected her to be grateful for it. He’d not even had the decency to give her a fairy-tale wedding, and as he thought this, he closed his eyes, remembering the photos of their ‘big day’ his brother-in-law had taken. Domenico hadn’t even bothered to hire a professional photographer for it, and when Gio had emailed the photos to him, he’d flicked through them only cursorily.
He hadn’t wanted to see what they showed.
Taking a deep breath, he searched on his desktop for the folder and opened it.
He scrolled through them, one by one. The perfunctory kiss to seal the marriage in the registry office, so perfunctory their lips had hardly touched. No pictures of them being strewn in confetti because there hadn’t been any confetti. The bride’s pretty white dress had remained untouched.
Only a handful of ‘official’ pictures in the pretty garden of the manor house they’d dined at, all at his mother’s insistence. All group shots. The bride and groom and the groom’s family. None of the bride’s family because she didn’t have a family, and the groom had been too fucking selfish to care.
And then he reached the photo he’d barely let his eyes glance at before, but which he must have soaked in and retained in some part of him because the beats of his heart had become even weightier the closer he’d got to it.
The photo was of Domenico’s mother and sister sitting at a bench table in the garden, smoking. Despite being a non-smoker, Marnie had gone out with them, probably at his mother’s insistence. His mother and sister were talking animatedly, Marnie seemingly listening and smiling along with them. It was only when you zoomed in that the sense of something being wrong crystallised into something concrete. Marnie’s gaze was far away, not just off into the distance but somewhere else completely. The deep grey of her eyes the lens had captured was filled with abject misery.
He’d been the cause of that misery. Him. His monstrous selfishness had trapped the purest heart into a loveless marriage. He’d never allowed himself to see her as fully human, never allowed himself to care about her needs or wishes or even ask what they were. And he was still doing it, he realised, utterly sickened with himself. Marnie had told him she had no wish to trace her father, and he’d disregarded that wish. It didn’t matter that his intentions had been good; he’d still ignored her wishes.
She deserved so much more. Deserved so much better.
Marnie deserved so much better than him.
Domenico had no idea how long he gazed at that heartbreaking photo, but by the time he finally blinked his stare away, he knew what he had to do.
