Page 14 of Modern Romance November 2024 5-8

Almost.

Then, as he worked on wiping away the streaks on her cheeks, he listened as she tried to explain the anomaly that this was.

‘I’m honestly the last person to cry. I mean that. Grace would be so upset if she saw me.’

‘Don’t think about it now, or you’ll get upset again. Think...’

‘Happy thoughts?’ she scoffed.

‘Neutral thoughts,’ he corrected, but then he paused, for usually he was not one for admitting that he was anything other than completely together. Nor was he one for sharing the tactics he used when a surge of emotion threatened to hit him, and how he managed to remain impassive even in the most trying of times. ‘It works. Just focus on something that you find neither happy nor sad.’

‘Such as...?’

‘It’s different for everyone...something that doesn’t excite you.’

‘Filing the late returns,’ she said. And even though he had no idea what that meant, at least she was talking. ‘I don’t hate it; I don’t enjoy it. I just...’ But then she took a shuddering breath and her tears were starting again. ‘Oh, I’m going to miss...’ She shook her head as if trying to clear it. ‘What’s your neutral?’

‘I have many.’

‘Share one.’ Her voice sounded urgent. ‘Please!’

Those stunning eyes moved to meet his, and while Sahir usually had a plethora of neutral thoughts he could rapidly summon, for a second or two he had none. Her eyeswerefamiliar. They were the same deep intense blue of the lapis lazuli embedded in the walls of the observatory. The colour of a clear night sky, with flecks of gold and silver. But they were by far too enchanting to explore.

Instead of dabbing her cheeks, he moved his hand so it rested on the wall by the side of her head as he attempted to find something neutral.

‘Cricket,’ he said, and saw her nose wrinkle. ‘At my school they were very serious about it.’

‘Did you play?’

‘I had no choice—I was very good at it. I have excellent hand-eye co-ordination. I was captain in my final year.’

‘Yet you hate it?’

‘No,’ he reminded. ‘Neutral.’

He knew she smiled—not because of her lips, but because he saw her tears dry and how her eyes shone with the escape he briefly gave her—so he gave her a little more.

‘My birthday is in July—the middle of cricket season. I would get tickets to matches, a piece of cricket art, another bat...’ He said it with all the lack of enthusiasm those gifts had mustered, and yet he smiled as he shared the memory.

His smile stole her breath—and also the newly found calm he had so recently brought. For how could she summon neutral thoughts as he smiled right into her eyes? How did she attempt neutral when she was suddenly aware of the proximity of his mouth and the fact that his hand rested on the wall behind her head?

He could never know how nervous this moment made her.

Or that she’d never enjoyed male company, even though she’d tried.

How could this man know that she didn’t do eye contact when she was staring so readily and so deeply into his eyes?

He was exquisite—but how hadn’t she seen it until now? Possibly she’d been far too busy trying to work out the playboy groom to pay attention to his suave, good-looking friend.

On the periphery of her vision she’d noticed the elegant man climbing from a silver car, and as they’d walked to the lounge she had been a little too aware of his exotic scent, but very deliberately she’d paid him little heed.

Another rich playboy, going along with the charade...

Now, though, she met eyes that were as black as night—or were they a very dark navy? She could just make out the iris. His hair wasn’t just black, it was raven—a true blue-black, and a shade she’d never seen.

‘Breathe,’ he told her again, and she was grateful for the reminder—even though it wasn’t the prior upset that had caused her body to malfunction again, it was the shock of such beauty close up.

Violet took in his stunning bone structure, his sculpted cheeks and straight nose, then moved her gaze down to lips that were so perfect they had to be the prototype...the one God and the angels had first designed. Every other mortal had got some variation, for these lips she was now staring at were perfection. A little large, but not anything other than deliciously so, and there was a neat pale line around the cupid’s bow that made her breath hitch. And how did you get a razor into that cleft in his chin...?

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