Page 189 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 5-8

‘So are you. But okay, if it shuts you up, he married a friend of mine from high school and they had a couple of kids before she was killed in a crash.’ She shrugged. ‘He seemed nice enough at the time and I thought we might make a go of it, except we didn’t, and no, there were no children. He already had two—and he didn’t want more.’ And she hadn’t either, not after what she’d endured. It had seemed the perfect arrangement, her reluctance to have children meshing perfectly with his insistence that two was enough. At the time she’d been grateful to find someone she wouldn’t disappoint, because she couldn’t bear the disappointment. Someone who was happy just to have her. She was lucky, everybody told her, to find someone who professed to care for her when she’d been so close to rock bottom. At the time it had seemed a second chance, almost too good to be true.

As ultimately it proved to be.

Because it turned out she did disappoint him in so many ways. Only occasionally at first, but then more and more frequently, until it seemed that hardly a day went by when she didn’t do something to annoy him, whether it was buying the wrong brand of tinned tomatoes, or stacking the dishwasher the wrong way, or failing to cook meat loaf exactly the way his mother did. And she realised that all he’d really wanted was someone to manage the house and his kids.

She paused. ‘And now, can we order?’

‘That’s a shame,’ he said, still smiling. ‘I always thought you would make the perfect mother. You seemed such an earth mother back then. All these years I imagined you with a clutch of children living on a farm somewhere close to nature. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.’

Mari’s senses were stretched razor-thin. She closed her eyes against the barrage of pain. They were both performing. Acting. Pretending to voice lines of romance and love to those around them while instead interrogating each other.

But the knowledge that he’d imagined her with a clutch of children… All these years? When had he even given her a second thought? But yes, he was happy to state that he was sorry her marriage hadn’t worked out. And he seriously wondered why she hated him so much. The man had no clue. But why did he have to bring that up now, when they were supposed to be sitting here celebrating and drinking champagne? Why did he have to remind her of the pain that had sliced through her, the pain that they should have shared, but she’d had to bear it alone?

‘I’m sorry he hurt you.’

Her gaze met his eyes. Slate-grey eyes that held a trace of empathy, but there was also a hint of smugness in his smile. As if he’d rescued her, and she was now in a better place.

She gave up any pretence of smiling and studying the menu and put it down on the table. ‘You’d think I would have learned something, wouldn’t you?’

A question mark might just as well have appeared in his eyes. ‘I never hit you.’

‘I never said he hit me. There are other kinds of hurt. Like the hurt when you left me. Like the hurt of you telling me that you’d been delayed. And then months and months later getting a phone call saying it would be best if we called it quits.’

He sighed, raking the fingers of one hand through his hair, his smile all but gone. ‘Come on, Marianne, it wasn’t like that.’

‘Mari,’ she interjected. ‘It’s Mari now.’

‘Look, it was twenty years ago. We were just kids.’

‘I was nineteen. You were twenty-two. Not quite kids.’

Not too young to make babies together.

‘And my father had a heart attack. You knew I had no choice but to go back to Spain. You insisted I went.’

‘Of course I did. And you told me to wait for you. That you’d be back. Only when you told me to expect you, you weren’t on the plane.’

‘How was I to know that my father would have another heart attack? How could I get on a plane and leave my mother then? I’m sorry I was too busy to let you know. I’ve always been sorry I was too occupied at the time to let you know.’

She nodded. ‘So, you didn’t come back. Instead, you call me months later and tell me that you have no idea when you might be able to get back so we should call it quits. That it’s probably for the best.’

God, she hated the way she sounded, but this conversation had been waiting to be unleashed ever since she’d walked into his suite. If he hadn’t recognised her, if he’d let her go then, let her walk out like she’d wanted, this conversation need never have happened. But proximity had brought it to the surface, like a boil waiting to burst and spill its putrid contents, or a volcano about to erupt and unleash its core of molten lava. And then he’d had to go and say he’d imagined her with a clutch of children living somewhere close to nature and it had pulled the pin on her grenade.

‘Did you really think this conversation would never happen? That we could make this deal and that you could brush what happened all those years ago under the carpet and pretend it had never happened? Surely the great Dominico Estefan is not that much of a fool?’

All pretence of smiling was abandoned. His spine stiffened, his eyes flared, sparks on metal. ‘So much for a celebration of our engagement.’

‘Was that what tonight was meant to be? It seemed more like performance art to me, you playing to a crowd.’

He glowered. ‘Are you going to be like this the entire time we’re together?’

‘Don’t blame me. You’re the one who wanted to marry a woman who hated you.’

‘I’m paying you,’ he said. ‘Ten million dollars—’

‘To marry you and pretend to your mother it’s a love match. The hatred comes free of charge.’

He stared at his untouched glass. ‘I don’t see any point extending this dinner date.’

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