Page 40 of Modern Romance May 2026 Books 1-4
‘Can you hear yourself?’ she whispered, the words she had to fight to get out almost strangled.
‘Yes. I’m doing what I should have done a long time ago.’
‘No, you’re not.’ Clambering off his lap, her legs were shaking so hard that she had to lean against his desk to remain upright. Drawing all the strength she could muster into her voice, she looked him dead in the eye. ‘You’re doing what you’ve always done—what’s best foryou.’
His flinch almost made her laugh. Maybe she would have laughed if she wasn’t trembling from her fight to control the tears pleading for release.
She couldn’t believe this was happening. After the closeness they’d found, the love they’d found—and ithadbeen love, she knew it, and would never let herself believe she’d imagined what they’d shared and what she’d felt in his kisses and seen in his eyes—he was slamming the door on them.
‘Everything has always been about you and what you need, and it still is,’ she choked out. ‘Your conscience over your treatment of me has finally caught up with you, and so you’ve unilaterally decided to gift me my freedom and give me primary custody of our child as a form of penance to salve it. How very magnanimous of you, and how very Domenico to make me fall in love with you again and then drop me from a great height, and then pretend it’s for my benefit. Do you even believe that? After last night?’
Now she did laugh, even as the tears finally spilled over, as the truth of his actions slapped her across the face.
‘But ofcourseit’s about last night,’ she despaired. ‘This is you all over. You want to control everything, even what lies in our hearts.’ She wiped the tears away with the sleeve of her cardigan, but it did nothing to stem the flow. At least she couldn’t see his face clearly through the tears. At least she wasn’t forced to suffer the expression on his face and read the truth she knew would be resonating on it. ‘You’ll never let yourself love me, will you? Not properly. Not with the whole of your heart. It’s so much easier to push me away than get tied up in all those messyhot and passionateemotions that only Carmela was allowed before she broke you.’
‘Goddamnit, Marnie, this hasnothingto do with her. I’m doing this foryou, don’t you see that, and I’m doing it for you because—’
‘No, you’re doing it foryou,’ she interrupted, her voice cracking even as it rose in pain-filled anger. ‘Did you consider for a minute what I want? Did it cross your mind for a second to ask if I even wanted my freedom from you? No, because it was never about me. If it had been, you’d have known that I’d already forgiven you for the past. I’d forgiven you because of my own part in it, for failing to find my voice and keeping everything bottled up—you made me see that. It was never just you, Dom. It was both of us, but you don’t want an us, not in the way I do, because if you’d asked me, I would have told you the only future I want is with you, and now it’s too late. I forgave you the past, but I will never forgive you for this. You want me out of your life—consider your wish granted.’
Chapter Thirteen
DOMENICO WATCHEDMARNIEspeed-walk out of his office with the sensation that he’d just been hit by a truck.
What thehellhad just happened?
He tried to think, but his mind was reeling as he tried to make sense of it all, especially Marnie’s upset at being given the freedom she’d wanted for so long. Why hadn’t she snatched it out of his hands…?
The force of another truck slammed into him.
He’d done itagain, he despaired.
In his desperation to make things right, he’d failed to ask what she wanted and taken the choice out of her hands, and as this thought impacted him, another truck smashed into him, this one right in the solar plexus.
How very Domenico to make me fall in love with you again…
He blinked hard and straightened, his thrumming heart now competing with his reeling mind to stop him from thinking straight. That had to be a false memory, surely? How could she possibly have fallen in love with him after everything he’d done to her…?
More memories flowed, jumbled and scattered, all of them Marnie’s chameleon eyes, the only part of her where the truth always shone if you only opened your own eyes to see it.
She’d glided into his office with love shining out of them. Love for him.
Marnielovedhim. She loved him, and…
A cold sweat broke out on his back as he replayed their conversation from her perspective; from the perspective of a woman who’d only ever known rejection from those she loved.
Pulling himself to his feet, he set off after her at a run.
Marnie didn’t know where she was walking to, had no destination in mind, knew only that she had to keep walking to keep her heart pumping and her lungs inflating and deflating because if she stopped the tight pain in her chest would engulf them.
She couldn’t fall apart. She mustn’t. She had to think of her baby, but oh God, oh God, thepain.
She’d barely registered passing the maze when she saw the chapel ahead of her. Marnie had been to church only a handful of times in her life. Each of those times had been in primary school for the compulsory Christmas Christingle service. She remembered feeling cold on her skin but warm in her heart in those services. It had been such a lovely, comforting feeling that she’d taken herself to the last two services after her dad had left and her mum had been in no state to take her. It was the first time Marnie had forged her signature on a permission slip.
Now, she felt the opposite of how she’d felt in those services, and she picked up speed, suddenly longing to feel a glimmer of that long-ago warmth and comfort.
To her despair, the door was closed.
Frightened at how close she was to screaming her pain, she stumbled to the stone wall behind it and found the wall-high door, mostly hidden by thick foliage from the hedge running the length of the wall. It was the door that opened into the secret garden. It was so long since it had last been used that the doorknob was reluctant to turn, but eventually it did, and she had to push against the door with her arm while turning it to get it to open.
