Page 1 of Sinful Promises

Chapter One

The September tour finished with a whimper. I wasn’t blessed with any steamy action. I didn’t do anything exciting or new, and I certainly didn’t add any more firsts to my list.

And, on top of all that, with each passing day after Roman had stood me up at the Oktoberfest beer hall, he became more and more aloof with me.

Maybe it was because I was avoiding him as much as possible. Maybe it was because Lydia was in his face all the faaaarrrking time. I mean, seriously, that woman was on a mission.

Or maybe it was because every time he asked me what was wrong, I’d repeated the same response. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

I was far from fine though. I felt like my guts had been ripped out and stomped on. Just seeing Mr. Perfect made me angry. And sad. And it left me totally messed up.

When I saw him with Lydia, them laughing together and touching each other, fury rose in me like an evil ghost, scaring the bejesus out of me over how jealous I was.

Oh, I fought it.

I fought it with clenched teeth and clamped fists and wine. Lots of wine. And way too much chocolate.

Roman and I were never meant to be together. That was a cold, hard fact I could not ignore. If something crazy happened, and totally off-the-fucking-rocker crazy like us hooking up, even if it was for just one night, it would ultimately end in excruciating heartache.

I would never do that to myself again. Never.

It wasn’t until after I’d finished the tour with Roman and I woke the next day in London, with the sun on my face and the bedsheets strangling my legs, that I reached utter clarity over how to deal with him.

It was like my dreams had forced every broken piece in my emotional puzzle together and made me whole again.

I knew what I had to do—stop pretending that I was falling for him.

It was a stupid idea anyway. Love did not exist.

It was best for Roman too. He was a good man. He deserved to find someone special—a Miss. Perfect just like him.

What was that saying? If you love someone, set them free.

I didn’t need his sisterly-love looks shackling me with stupid notions of his affection. And he didn’t need me shackling him.

I wanted to see him happy with another woman, someone without the kind of baggage I was carrying around. Someone who could live in the same country as him.

It was like an enormous anchor had been lifted from my chest, and I could breathe again.

From now on, I was going to do what I should have been doing—focusing on seeing and experiencing as much as possible with my remaining time in Europe. My to-do list was enormous, and wasting energy on my stupid emotions over Roman was monopolizing my time.

When I told Zali my decision, she seemed relieved.

She’d even listed a couple of items that I absolutely had to do before I was kicked out of Europe, and to my surprise, not all of them involved sex.

During my ten-day break, I did as many fun things as I could. I’d seen enough museums and art galleries to last me a lifetime. It was time to focus on London’s quirky historical attractions. London had been an inhabited city for over two thousand years, so it had plenty to offer.

I had coffee and an apple tea cake at an underground café that, a couple of centuries ago, was a public toilet. It sounded stupid and utterly gross. But nope. It was fascinating and tastefully done. The ancient urinals were overflowing with thriving succulents and the two-hundred-year-old wrought-iron entrance was incredible.

I bought some rooibos and vanilla tea from a tea shop that had been operating from the same location for over three hundred years, and they had the paraphernalia to prove it.

I went to a Roman temple that was rediscovered in 1954. How anything that grand could get lost in a city like London was beyond me.

I even went to prison. The Clink was a jail that operated between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. It was hard to believe that this jail was shut down eight years before the first colony had even settled in Australia.

It reminded how much I was not looking forward to returning to the country on my passport.

Maybe it was time I started thinking about where I would settle next. I had to go to Australia to start with. That was a given.

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