Page 140 of Modern Romance January 2025 1-4

‘Do you need a break?’

Sebastian’s deep voice broke through her silent reverie. She blinked open her eyes and fixed him with her gaze, shaking her head. ‘I don’tneeda break. I just wanted to take one to enjoy this.’

He looked around, as if to understand what she was talking about.

She let out an exasperated laugh. ‘It’s just so beautiful. And do you know what else?’

‘Surprise me.’

‘No paparazzi,’ she pointed out. ‘It doesn’t matter that I’m wearing yoga pants and a loose top.’

‘Or that you’ve got mud on your cheek?’ he asked with a teasing tone.

She lifted a hand to her face and dashed at it. ‘Or that my hair is messy from where I got into a fight with a branch and the branch won.’

‘The path needs maintenance,’ he said, eyes lifting to her head, frowning.

‘The path is perfect. It’s all perfect.’

He looked around then, and now she knew he wasn’t just trying to see it from her perspective, he really was.

‘I suppose I’ve always looked beyond the island, rather than at it,’ he said. ‘Most of my memories of visiting this place are not good ones.’

‘No?’

They began to walk once more, the climb to the top of the hill gruelling in a way Rosie found pleasant.

‘I have spent countless nights on that deck, looking towards Cavalonia, and hating. Hating my grandfather, my father, even the country and people,’ he admitted, ‘though that was probably childish.’

She glanced towards the archipelago. ‘You hated me,’ she pointed out thoughtfully.

‘Disliked,’ he reminded her.

‘Past tense?’

He turned to face her, scanning her features thoughtfully. ‘It’s hard to say now, isn’t it?’

She cleared her throat and glanced away, something about the depth of his perceptiveness unnerving. ‘Were you tempted to sell the place?’

‘Why?’

‘Well, you bought it for your mother, and she didn’t want to come here. It brought you little pleasure when you visited. Why keep it?’

‘Hatred can be very motivating.’

She considered that, but it was hard for a heart like Rosie’s, built in exactly the same good-and-kind way as her mother’s had been, to comprehend the sentiment. ‘In what way?’

He made a scoffing sound. ‘You really cannot imagine how much it meant to me, to prove myself to the king? To my father? Both men cut me from their lives, as though I was nothing. As though I was worthless. Do you not think my success, professionally, was something I achieved because I wanted to prove them wrong? Because I hated, with every single cell of my DNA?’

Her voice faltered a little, the vehemence in his making it hard to think straight. ‘I think,’ she said, choosing her words carefully, ‘you would always have been a success.’ And to her surprise—and his—she reached down and weaved their fingers together, the contact sending awareness zipping through her veins. She squeezed his hand and then dropped it.

But a moment later, Sebastian reached for it once more, holding on as they walked. ‘You sound like my mother.’

She pulled a face and he laughed. Conversation closed. But something in his words stuck with her, and as they travelled across the island on foot, it occurred to her that the man she married really did have a darkness within him. She wondered if there was nothing he would stop at to achieve his aims? And his aims had centred, for a very long time, on reclaiming what he saw as his, what had been taken from him: the right to rule Cavalonia.

‘I don’t want to disturb them,’ she said, nonetheless stepping dangerously close to the edge of the cave and crouching down, gripping the rocks so she could balance carefully and see beneath them.

‘You won’t. They’re sunning themselves and wouldn’t care if twenty Rosalinds came to spy.’

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