Page 175 of Modern Romance November 2024 5-8

‘Well, I have to say it’s pretty cushy here, and I’ve never been on a yacht before. You know how I’m always up for new experiences.’ She tilted the smile up again at its corners, but there was something shadowed and sad about her face, and in her eyes, and it tugged at him.

‘I’m serious, Mia.’

She paused, glancing down again, and then admitted, ‘I don’t know why, Santos. I suppose because it felt wrong to leave you when you were sleeping.’

‘You left when I was sleeping last time,’ he reminded her, unable to keep from saying it, and hearing the bitterness in his voice. He’d woken up and felt the emptiness of their bedroom, the whole house, like a wind blowing through him.

‘Maybe,’ she stated quietly, ‘I didn’t want to do that a second time.’

He sifted through that statement, looking for truth, unsure if he could find it. ‘What about your things back in Ibiza?’ he asked, deciding to focus on practicalities. ‘Do we need to go back and get them?’

The smile she gave him was genuine, then full of rueful amusement. ‘We’re about twelve hours out from Ibiza, so I’m not sure that’s practical. But, in any case, I had everything with me.’

‘Just that one back pack?’ he asked in surprise, although really, why should he be shocked? He’d seen the wardrobe full of designer clothes she’d left back in Seville, the velvet cases of diamonds, sapphires and emeralds that she hadn’t taken.

She shrugged, her T-shirt sliding off her golden shoulder. ‘You know I always travel light. I’ll need to give back the dress at some point, but I don’t suppose it’s a matter of urgency.’

Santos stared at her, trying to make sense of what she’d said and what he felt. For the first time since his wife had sneaked out in the night without a word of explanation, he didn’t wonder why she’d gone—something that had confounded, infuriated and hurt him—but why she’d felt she had to, and with only one small, battered back pack.

It was a question that he needed to ask her, he realised...even if he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer.

Whyhadshe stayed?

It was a question Mia had asked herself many times in the thirty-six hours that Santos had been asleep. She had yet to come up with an answer that satisfied her. She’d left him once, after all, so she could surely do it again. It was what she did, what her mother had taught her to do.

‘You always know when it’s time to move on,’ her mother used to say.

How many times had Mia come back to whatever shabby flat or bedsit in which they’d been staying to find her mother chucking things in a bag, barely looking at her? Usually there had been a man involved, a man her mother had to avoid, whether landlord, lover or both. Mia had learned to sense when the sea change was coming; she’d felt it in the air and had braced herself accordingly for the inevitable detachment from the little life she had built for herself.

Maybe that was it, Mia reflected. This time shehadn’tknown. Santos’s insistence that she was his wife, that their vows mattered—as well as the fact that he’d wanted her there, in his sleep-fuddled pain—had somehow made a difference. It had made her stay even though, as ever, her instinct had been to run.

But, she’d reflected, maybe they needed to have a reckoning, if not a reconciliation. Mia still couldn’t see a way forward for their marriage, not when at heart she felt it had been a mistake. At the time, she’d been desperate to believe in it, in them. She’d been swept away on a tide of feeling, loving the way Santos made her feel—how he looked at her so wonderingly, as though he couldn’t believe she was real. How he’dtouchedher...

But since those first heady days they’d both said, done andfeltthings they couldn’t come back from: hard, hurtful things. Moving on had been the easier choice, but maybe not the right one. Not yet, anyway...until they’d made peace with their past.

Santos dropped his gaze, scrubbing his hands over his face. ‘I think I need a shower,’ he said, and Mia managed a light laugh, even though inside she felt heavy.

‘I think you probably do.’

He dropped his hands from his face and there was no mistaking the sudden, yearning heat in his eyes. Was he remembering the times they’d showered together back at the beginning of their short-lived romance? They’d soaped each other’s bodies, slippery flesh sliding and colliding with the water streaming down, all laughter and kisses until passion had overtaken them.

Mia swallowed. If he didn’t remember that, then she certainly did. She stood up from the bed. ‘Shall I leave you to it?’

‘All right,’ Santos answered after a moment. ‘But, after that, we’ll talk.’

There could be no mistaking the intent in his words—talk with a capital ‘T’, clearly. What did that even mean, though, when they hadn’t talked about the most important things? They hadn’t been able to for weeks and weeks.

‘Okay,’ Mia replied, keeping her voice as light as she could. ‘We’ll talk.’ Her talk was definitely with a ‘t’.

She slipped from his room, walking out to the sun deck at the stern of the yacht, the aquamarine waters of the Mediterranean rippling out behind the boat flecked with white. They’d been hugging the coast of Spain since they’d left Ibiza, presumably going back to the Aguila estate on the outskirts of Seville.

Mia pictured the high, mustard-yellow walls surrounding the Aguila hacienda with its many porticoed porches, the groves of Seville oranges and manzanilla olives stretching out all around in orderly rows of orange and green, and shuddered. Shecouldn’tgo back there. It had far too many painful memories—stilted, awkward encounters as well as heart-rending, blood-soaked ones she had done her best to forget, even though she knew she never, ever would. Not that Santos would ever believe that.

She thought of his mother looking so elegant and remote, trying to be friendly but with an icy hauteur that had never thawed and probably never would. Mia really couldn’t blame her. She was not the expected choice of wife for the heir of one of Spain’s oldest families. She had no pedigree, no breeding, no style or class—far from it.

With a sigh, she rested her hands on the burnished wood of the yacht’s railing. She didn’t have to go back, she told herself. She might be married, but she was still in control of her own destiny. And she and Santos might need to talk—even with a capital T—but she didn’t know if she could believe it might change anything between them. That, perhaps, was why she’d stayed—to convince him to let her go. Surely it wouldn’t be too hard?

‘Señora Aguila?’ The voice of one of the yacht’s cabin crew, Gabriela, came softly from behind her. ‘May I get you something to eat or drink?’

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