Page 30 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 5-8

‘You want to guess why I don’t trust women?’ he said slowly.

‘I’m thinking it’s because maybe someone broke your heart.’

His laugh was bitter. She reallywasidealistic. Better tell her the truth. ‘Not exactly.’ He paused. ‘How much do you know about my mother?’

‘Not very much.’ She shrugged one bare, freckled shoulder. ‘Only that she was the first wife of Floriana’s father—your father—and she died years ago. And that, well…’ She hesitated. ‘Nobody really talks about her.’

‘Because very few people know anything about her,’ he ground out. ‘And that was deliberate. The facts were hidden. My father made sure of that. There was no social media to allow for other people’s version of events and the twisting of the truth.’ His words trailed away, because this was forgotten territory. How long since last he had entered this particular minefield? Not since he had walked out of the office of the therapist assigned to him in his early teenage years, never to return.

‘What was she like?’ she asked, her soft words punctuating his thoughts.

He tried to be objective. To piece together the fragments of things he had been told and the stuff he’d found out for himself. Far worse, of course, were the things he now allowed himself to remember… He swallowed. His own disturbing reality, which surfaced from time to time no matter how deeply he had tried to bury it. He’d often though it strange that there was a verb ‘to dream’, but no equivalent for the flipside of dreaming. Nobody talked about ‘to nightmare’, did they? And yet that was what his early childhood had been. A living nightmare.

‘She was very beautiful and very rich,’ he began heavily. ‘The only child of elderly parents who were entranced by their ravishing butterfly of a daughter and completely spoilt her.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Like so many before him, my father fell hopelessly in love with her, and she was pregnant with me when they were married. But very quickly, she began to be disillusioned with her new role.’

‘Go on,’ she prompted as his voice faded.

‘She got in with a wild crowd and grew to hate thiscastelloand the life it offered,’ he stated, his mouth hardening. ‘She began to spend more and more time with her new friends in Rome.’

‘With you?’ she asked quickly.

‘Not initially,’ he answered. ‘For a while I was left here, with my father and a nanny.’

‘And you were…happy?’

‘How could I be?’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘She might have been the worst mother in the world, but she was still my mother. And aren’t children living examples of the concept of hope over experience? They keep on going back for love from their parents, time after time, no matter how often they get pushed back. Don’t you know that, Kelly?’

‘Yes,’ she agreed quietly, remembering the way she used to secretly dream of her father coming to find her, despite all the unflattering things her mother had said about him. ‘I do.’

He pulled her closer and now he was back there, frozen in that snapshot of time. How could the image still be so sharp, even after all these years? ‘And then, one night, she came here with a boyfriend in the howling rain and they bundled me into a car and sped off into the night.’

‘And nobody stopped them?’

‘No, Kelly. Nobody stopped them because in those days society was heavily weighted towards the mother’s wishes. Some of my male friends in the throes of acrimonious divorces tell me it still is,’ he added caustically. ‘She was apparently a consummate actress who convinced everyone she couldn’t bear to be parted from her only child. When required she was able to play the part of a loving mother while for the rest of the time, she took her pleasure in drugs.’

‘Drugs?’

‘Why so shocked? Plenty of people get addicted. Her drug of choice happened to be heroin.’

‘Romano—’

‘No. I’m giving you the facts. Which you asked for, remember?’ he bit out. ‘But if this is going to deteriorate into a mess of emotion then I’ll stop right now. I told you. Crying leaves me cold.’

‘I’m not crying,’ she said, for the second time, but this time her voice was sombre rather than defiant as she jabbed at her eyes with her fists. ‘Tell me what happened.’

He made a harsh imprecation beneath his breath. ‘Long story short? She overdosed and nobody knew about it. Even I didn’t at first, and I was alone in the house with her. At least not until after a couple of days of being unable to wake her, when I went to the front door of our place in Rome. I remember the door being so heavy and almost impossible to open,’ he reflected, as if this were important. Because wasn’t that an infinitely preferable memory than the vision of his mother’s waxy corpse, and the first fly buzzing in through the window to land on it, and the tears which were streaming down his cheeks as he was gathered into the horrified embrace of a kindly passer-by? ‘Perhaps if I’d raised the alarm sooner they could have taken her to hospital to have her stomach pumped and she might have survived, but we’ll never know.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Five,’ he stated abruptly.

‘Oh, Romano,’ she breathed, and he could hear the horror in her voice.

‘No,’ he said, steeling his heart to the distress which was clouding her beautiful eyes. ‘I told you because you asked and, for some reason, I wanted to tell you, because you know little of the ways of the world. To explain why I have no intention of ever marrying or having children of my own. But that’s it. That’s all. I don’t want your sympathy, however well meaning, and I don’t want to discuss it any further. Do you understand?’

Tiptoeing his finger slowly down over her belly, he saw her eyes darken although she had started biting her lip, as if she despaired of her own reaction. ‘This is what I want from you, Kelly. The only thing. An uncomplicated liaison. We take our pleasure until the well has run dry. Which it will.’ His voice dipped as he resisted taking the finger further and he waited until he could sense her growing restlessness before he framed his next question. ‘So. Is that enough for you?’

Was it?

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