Page 103 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 5-8

He hadn’t shared the details of his alternative arrangements with anyone except in the text he had sent Clemmie, who hadn’t got back to him.

That hadn’t rung alarm bells.

There would be a reason.

He had speculated briefly about what that might be...a new job...or a new boyfriend?

The idea seemed...

He felt the weariness he had experienced of late settling over him and pushed both it and the question away. For a friendship to last into adulthood there were unspoken boundaries which had to be maintained, and he wanted that friendship to last. Actually, probablyneededit to, he acknowledged.

His thoughts drifted to that moment when he had come close to overstepping that boundary. When Clemmie had been just eighteen, and a little bit tipsy, he had watched her sleep, her lashes fluttering on her cheeks, her breasts rising and falling. He’d just been thinking about adjusting the parasol to protect her face from the sun when she’d given a little cry in her sleep, her arms thrashing as she fought off some invisible demon in her daymare.

Did she still have the nightmare she had once told him about? he’d wondered. The one where she tried to save her sister but found there was a choice: she could save her sister or herself. She always woke up crying in shame, feeling irrationally responsible for her twin’s death.

She had reacted to the tickle of his piece of grass on her face and opened her eyes, and in that moment, before she was even fully awake, she had kissed him.

He still didn’t know how he had not responded, when every instinct in his body had been urging him to explore the warm lips being offered up to him, to push her back on to the rug and...

But a small corner of his brain had kept repeating,This is Clemmie...this is Clemmie.

And it had been Clemmie—but not the Clemmie who was his.

Clemmie was a constant in his life. She was the antidote to his adulatory press releases and to all the people telling him how brilliant he was. Sometimes her outlook on life left him anxious for her; she had an ability to view the world through rose-coloured lenses—though maybe that should be green. Clemmie possessed the most extraordinary aquamarine eyes that could smile without moving any other muscle in her expressive face. Despite her pale colouring and pre-Raphaelite mass of red curls, her lashes were naturally dark, as were her straight brows.

He was thinking of her face when he arrived on the street where she apparently now lived. It was long, with no defining features to make it seem any different from several of the roads he had driven through to get here, lined with tall houses mostly split into apartments.

He scanned the area for a parking space. Some of the redbrick Victorian houses had their original wrought-iron fences, but most had knocked the walls down and concreted over the tiny gardens to create parking spaces. He was about to give in when an MPV beside a builders’ skip pulled out and he neatly pulled into the space.

He located the number that Clemmie had given him, but before he could hit the doorbell it suddenly opened, revealing a long, narrow hallway painted in an anonymous discoloured cream. The only colour came from the original encaustic tiles on the floor.

CHAPTER TWO

‘HI!’

There was a long pause while she stared at him as if she was in a desert and he was a cool, deep pool of water. She was struggling to elevate her gaze from his mouth. On one level she knew what she was doing, and that she must look like an idiot, but she couldn’t stop any more than she could stop breathing.

This made no sense!

She wanted to kiss him—and not in a warm and friendly way.

Her lashes flickered as she struggled to make some sort of logical sense of the jumbled thoughts that slid through her head.

Nothing was different. He was still the same Joaquin—just eighteen months older than the Joaquin she had shared a fish and chip supper with, sitting on a bench while he talked with animation about his new literacy programme, sounding committed and caring, and so genuinely angry that some children lived in homes without books that she had wanted to hug him. She’d had no issue at all in following through with the impulse, laughing when he had complained she’d got grease on his suit.

So what had changed? It wasn’t as if she didn’t already know he exuded a pheromone cloud that could poleaxe a woman at fifty paces. He was even dressed similarly today, because like on that evening he had come straight from a meeting. He was wearing a dark suit, a pale shirt, his narrow silk tie providing the only splash of colour. His hair was a similar length—short, but starting to curl on his neck the way it did when he needed a trim.

His skin still had that golden glow, with the faint shadow of stubble on his jaw an earthy addition to the miracle of symmetry that was his face. All strong angles and intriguing hollows, with penetrating dark, heavy-lidded eyes set beneath thick brows and framed by long, curling lashes any woman would have killed for. He possessed a sinfully fascinating mouth that combined lushness in the full lower lip with control in the sensually sculpted upper.

In short, he was chiselled perfection, then and now, but now she wanted to kiss him.

Shereallydid.

These thoughts raced through her head as she tried to breathe through the moment, before managing a creaky inhalation and painting on a smile just this side of inane.

Asking herselfwhywas for later. Now was the moment to stop looking like a total drooling fool!

‘Hi, back,’ she said brightly, breaking through the paralysis.

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