Page 101 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 5-8

It hadn’t been the most promising of starts, but things had thawed during that first long summer holiday, and then they had bonded over their respective parents’ disastrous unions and a mutual determination noteverto marry, because marriage was for idiots.

‘At least you have one good parent. Both of mine are rubbish,’ he had told her during one of their early exchanges, and she had realised he was right: shewaslucky.

Her dad might be a nightmare but her mum, despite her bad taste in men, was fantastic. His family might be loaded—the Perez family were old moneyandnew money, his grandfather having built a second fortune when he’d invested in a computer firm that soon became a global brand, and all Joaquin had to do was ask and he got anything he asked for—butboth hisparentswereawful!

In fact, the entire Perez family were snobbish. They were the sort of people who guarded the family name and were willing to go to great lengths to maintain the illusion of being theperfectfamily. Their name might be synonymous with philanthropy, but they were ruthless when it came to preserving their own good name.

It helped if you had the money to buy yourself out of trouble—and they did. A Perez didn’t divorce, Joaquin had explained to her. They stayed unhappily married. Although according to him his own parents might have broken with that particular tradition.

His dad had bought his mother Maplehurst Manor. And after that gift his mother had conveniently forgotten his dad’s pregnant girlfriend—the one who had killed herself. There would be no baby to embarrass the Perez family and the girl had not had any relatives.

Ironic, really, that his family cared about their family name too much while her own dad didn’t care about his at all.

Despite the fact they had both grown up and changed as their lives had taken very different paths—though Joaquin’s contempt for marriage remained—their friendship had lasted.

Hence Clemmie came to have a billionaire hedge fund boss listed in the contacts on her phone.

They made a point of texting weekly, and sometimes it was more, but it was eighteen months since she had last seen him face to face, and their exchanges did not include the salacious details her mum craved. Like everyone else, Clemmie got her gossip from social media and news outlets, which seemed to suggest Joaquin was on the point of matrimony on a weekly basis.

She supposed it was inevitable that they would grow apart, and that the process would speed up once he did settle for one partner. Girlfriends or wives might not like their man texting another woman at two in the morning—though to be fair it hadn’t been that time where he was—no matter how innocuous the text.

That time she had turned over and gone back to sleep, meaning to respond the next morning. She was going to miss those selfish texts...

She shrugged off the heavy, self-indulgent weight of self-pity before it could claim her. What was the point of getting down about something that hadn’t happened yet and might not?

Her lips twisted into a small self-mocking smile. It could be she was flattering herself, because not even her mother, who frequently called her ‘pretty’, would claim she was the sort of woman beautiful women felt threatened by. And Clemmie herself was too much of a realist to make that claim.

She was philosophical about her lack of looks. It wasn’t that she was plain, precisely, but her features were not symmetrical enough for conventional beauty, or even prettiness. Her mouth was too big for her small triangular face, and her colouring was not to everyone’s taste. Though the combination of creamy freckled skin, red hair and pale green eyes did make her stand out from the crowd.

‘Well, if he does turn up with some woman in tow give me a text.’

‘I will,’ promised Clemmie, who until that moment had not even thought of such a possibility.

Now, as she climbed the stairs to finish packing, it wasallshe could think of. That and the low-level nausea churning in her stomach. She really shouldn’t have skipped lunch.

There was no reason he shouldn’t be bringing his latest lover, and no reason he should tell her if he was. She had never allowed herself to foster any romantic feelings for Joaquin, even when it had occurred to her that there was a very good reason that conversations stopped when he walked into a room.

He was, of course, an off-the-scale gorgeous and sinfully sexy man. Way back she had had a few breath-catching, skin-tingling moments that she had probably been too inexperienced to hide from him, but he’d pretended not to notice. Or maybe the brutal truth was he genuinely hadn’t?

She had no intention of finding out. She valued their friendship too much for that to happen. Besides, she had observed from a distance the casual, often callous way he treated his lovers, and it was definitely better to remain his friend—which was a much more permanent position.

Luckily, she hadn’t fallen in any real way—which, if her mum was any measure, meant beinginlurveinvolved being totally oblivious to a man’s faults.

Clemmie was well aware of Joaquin’s faults, and she wasn’t about to allow herself the self-indulgence of filling up space in her head with unrequited lust. Life was too short for self-induced unhappiness.

Besides, not only was she not his type—which seemed to involve having curves, endless legs and a pout—sometimes men were just sopredictable—he was definitely not her type. He couldn’t be, because there was still a big question mark over her ‘type’.

She had met men who ticked all the boxes on her list—the list in her head...it wasn’t as if she had a spreadsheet or anything. She was prepared to be flexible—just not the sort of flexible that got her lumbered with a compulsive liar like her dad. Unfortunately, all the men who seemed suitable, and also fancied her, did absolutely nothing for Clemmie—not even a tingle.

She didn’t really count the kiss she’d shared with Joaquin on her eighteenth. Well, she couldn’t. That had only been a birthday kiss, and they’d both laughed about it the next day—him more than her.

But then he hadn’t instigated the kiss, had he? Though in her defence wine had been involved. The bottle he had packed in the luxury picnic basket he had pulled from the boot of his sports car when they had arrived at her favourite lakeside spot.

The sun had shone...it had been a perfect day. The wine and the sun had made her sleepy and she had lain down on the blanket, a hand lifted to her face to protect her eyes from the sun, and fallen asleep.

At first she had swatted at the grass tickling her nose, and then, when she had opened her eyes, she had seen the hand holding the grass belonged to Joaquin, who was stretched out beside her. He had long left behind being skinny and lanky by that time; he had filled out in all the right places.

She had said something rude and pulled the strand of grass from his fingers, and he had grinned his ‘fallen angel on steroids’ grin.

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