Page 142 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 5-8

‘Do I not haveanyredeeming features?’

‘Does being the best person to have around in an emergency count?’

‘Am I?’

‘You did save my life.’

‘Which time?’

‘I would have got out of that tree on my own!’ Her expression sobered. ‘No, this time you really did save my life.’

His discomfort was palpable.

‘Sure, I’m a hero,’ he returned, self-mockery in his voice. ‘They are minutes I would not like to relive,’ he admitted, his eyes clouding as the chaos of the crash flickered frame by frame through his head. Those seconds when he’d thought he would not be able to free Clemmie would stay with him for ever. Followed by the dread that his split-second decision to drag her out had inflicted upon her irreparable damage.

‘Why are you so scared of change, Clemmie?’

‘I’m not,’ she countered. ‘I’d just miss you as a friend.’

‘Sex doesn’t have to change that,’ he said.

He was not sure he believed his claim but, set against the fact he had never wanted anything more in his life than to take this new shrewish, sexy Clemmie into his bed, truth was a secondary importance.

‘But it always does—and don’t ask how I would know, becauseI know.’

‘So, what is the alternative? You’d actually want marriage with some guy you’d gift your innocence to?’

His contemptuous mockery stung as she thought,No, I want love!

‘I do still think marriage is a mug’s game,’ she said, ‘but that doesn’t mean I’ll settle for casual sex. I want an emotionally satisfying relationshipandgreat sex. Is that too big an ask? I don’t know...?’

‘You are making this more complicated than it needs to be. Do you really think we could go back to being platonic now and pretend none of this ever happened?’

‘Casual sex—’

‘I’m not a stranger you just met in a bar.’ Dark stains of frustrated anger appeared across the slashing angle of his cheekbones, emphasising the knife-edge, the sybaritic carved slant.

‘It would be casual because that is the only sex you do. I happen to want sex with a person who doesn’t just have a convenient gap in his diary. I want him to be...’

The feelings she kept boxed up inside her beat against the protective self-restraint she had built up.

‘To be what?’

She wanted so much to saynot you, but she knew that it wouldn’t be true. This was definitely an insight she could have done without at that moment.

‘You say we’re not strangers? Well isn’t that the point? The sort of sex you are talking about would only work if I didn’t care about you.’ She swallowed. ‘And I do.’

There was a short static silence.

‘Some things don’t need to be said.’

‘Actually, they do. But do you know something? I think you care about me, but not in the right way.’

She stopped, her expression going blank. Those words had acted like a key opening a closed door, releasing all the memories trapped inside.

It hurt in a way that bruises and cuts never hurt.

How happy the doctors would feel to be proved right. She was one for the textbooks, a classic case, burying a painful memory, a painful truth she didn’t want to own.

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