Page 157 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 5-8

‘I’ve bought you a dress for tonight.’

She was already backing away, tugging her shirt down.

‘I already have a dress.’

He sighed. ‘Iknewyou’d be like this!’ he said, sounding frustrated.

She loosed an incredulous gasp. ‘So you thought you’d soften me up? You thought that if you got me into bed I’d be fine with anything you say or do.’

‘Well, you’ve been fine so far,’ he tossed back audaciously.

‘I am not having you buying me a dress. I am not one of your... I refuse to be athing...aclothes horsefor you.’

Her occupation of his bed might have a short life span, but she had promised herself at the start that it would be on her terms. That she would be herself. That she would look back and not be sorry or ashamed.

That she would be sad was a given...

‘I have a perfectly good dress; you saw me pack it.’

‘Please stop acting like an oppressed teenager!’ The frustrated words were out there before his brain actually kicked in.

She looked at him the way he imagined a volcano might look before it exploded, annihilating everything within a five-mile radius.

‘It is a perfectly good dress, and you’d look incredible in a sack.’ Her eyes were still narrowed, but she looked less ballistic. ‘But tonight is... A few people besides my family might be there.’

‘“A few people”?’

‘A few politicians...a couple of church representatives—and we have a local celebrity.’ He named a Hollywood legend and her eyes widened. ‘Think of the dress as armour. When you look good, you feel more confident.’

‘I am not scared of your family—and isn’t dressing me up to look like I belong kind of negating the point you’re trying to make?’

‘Point?’ His brow creased.

‘The reason why I’m here. This is you sticking a finger up to your family, to show they can’t dictate your life choices or who your sleep with.’

The fierce pride that shone in her eyes as she challenged him made something shift inside him. Automatically he tried to pull his emotions back, lock them away—only to discover he couldn’t.

Soon this would be over.

The thought came from nowhere and echoed in his head as a sense of alien loneliness crept over him as he thought of a future without Clemmie in it.

‘I know that you are tough and brave and beautiful...’ he said, and then he stopped speaking.

‘What is it?’ she snapped out belligerently, one hand still fending him off, the other tucking her shirt into the waistband of her jeans.

He looked at her and saw her slipping inexorably away from him. He knew that he would doanythingto stop that happening.

‘You are a total idiot, Joaquin,’ she said. She sniffed loudly and glared at him, her green eyes flashing. ‘You know that?’

He nodded, still only half in the moment. His brain was playing catch-up with the emotions that had somehow slid through the wall he had built around them. ‘Yes, I do,’ he agreed, thinking he was not just an idiot, he was also a blind, arrogant fool.

Some idiots are born and others are self-made,he decided, and the taste of self-contempt was bitter on his tongue as he realised that he had found the thing he had been too cowardly to even acknowledge he craved and had almost thrown it away.

He had never thought to avoid love—why protect yourself from something that didn’t exist, someone who didn’t exist?

The level of his arrogance now seemed shocking.

‘I’ve got a big family, Clemmie.’

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