Page 132 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

Tension threaded throughout her limbs.

Marriage was every commitment she’d never wanted, but she’d done it. For reasons unknown, she’dmarried him.And yet she’d walked away without a backward glance.

Her mother had never had the strength to leave her father. But Emma had left Dante.

Unbidden came the image of him with another woman. Her throat tightened against the wave of threatening nausea. Was that the reason?

Her chest seized.

Her lungs refused to function.

‘Did you cheat?’ she asked, because if he had cheated like her father had cheated on her mother countless times, she’d rather sleep on the streets than stay anywhere near him.

‘Cheat?’ he repeated, before closing the last few inches between them.

She prepared herself by pressing her heels firmly into the carpeted floor to steady herself for the impact of the vitriol that was surely headed her way.

But it didn’t come.

‘It has only been you,’ he murmured as he tucked the loose hair in front of her left cheek behind her ear. His touch was delicate. Soft. And it took everything she had not to lean into it. Lean intohim.‘Since the night we met, it has been only you.’

Blood flushed through her heart.

Air seeped into her lungs.

Only you.

The possessive sentiment scared her. Excited her.

Her mind wanted to reject his answer. Because how many times had she been told—seen—monogamy was a lie? Men always strayed. And yet here was Dante telling her that he hadn’t.

‘Theremustbe a reason I left?’

‘A reason you never shared with me.’ He dropped his hand to his side. But he didn’t remove the distance between them.

‘If our marriage was over, why didn’t we get divorced?’ she asked, her mind still pulsing with the need to know, to understand... She’d dedicated a year of her life to their marriage and then walked away. Without saying goodbye. Without demanding a divorce.

‘Does it matter?’

Her breath shuddered up her windpipe and out through her open mouth. ‘Of course it does.’

‘Why focus on the end of us when there was no end, no divorce?’ he said. ‘You left. We remained married. And now here we are. Together.Again.’

‘Because of an accident,’ she reminded him.

‘Accident,fate, destiny,’he countered. ‘Use whatever word you will, but you are here and so am I. So ask the right questions, Emma.’

‘The right questions?’

‘Questions I can answer without speculation.’

He was right, she realised. She could push and probe him for answers but only she knew, didn’t she? Why she’d married him. Why she’d left...they had both been her choices and hers alone, hadn’t they?

‘How did we meet?’ she asked. He may not be able to answer the question of why she left, but there were other questions that he could answer.

‘At a black-tie event. A charity auction, here in London. You were a waitress at the event and you collided with me,’ he told her. ‘Spilt your tray of wine. Wine that the hostess, the Princess of Vreotus, had donated from her very own vineyard.’

Emma expected self-consciousness to buckle her knees, because that meant the night they’d met she had been the help. But it wasn’t self-consciousness making her knees wobble. It was desire, blooming inside her and swelling with every flick of his obscenely long eyelashes. Almost as if her body remembered what her mind could not.

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