Page 92 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 5-8

‘Put on your armour?’

Her armour...the façade she’d hid behind. Hair, make-up, clothes. First to project perfection, then to hide her scars. In that way, she realised now, Cilla had been always so much freer than her. She’d lived her life eschewing the expectations her mother had tried to force upon her. In the end, her sister had been more true to herself than any of their family.

‘What else do I have?’

Cilla stood and placed her hands on Ana’s shoulders. She was inches shorter and eighteen months younger, yet Ana felt like a child.

‘Yourself,’ Cilla said with a patient, knowing smile. ‘And she is enough.’

Aston didn’t hear a door open—and there was no announcement that anyone had arrived—yet he could feel something. A strange sensation, an awareness of another person with him. There was a change in the atmosphere. Aston turned slowly, his gut churning, filled with anticipation and dread. Knowing with certainty who it was, afraid of who he would see, because of how much he had to atone for. It didn’t even seem enough to beg forgiveness after the things he’d said that last, terrible morning. If Ana sent him away without a backward glance, then it would be wholly deserved. Aston could only hope she’d listen.

Ana came into view, standing there in a bikini top and sarong. Her appearance affected him as always like a punch to the solar plexus, forcing the breath right out of him. Today, the scars on her arm were unhidden. After how she’d been with him the first time they’d made love, her reluctance to show them to him, he was filled with pride at how far she’d come. She stood so unashamed, shoulders back, gaze cool and regal. The ego in him, one he tried hard to quash, wanted to believe that he’d played a part in her fearlessness today, but he knew that wasn’t the truth. It was all her. Her strength and her resilience wasdespitehim, not because of him.

Aston might have smiled had he thought she’d welcome it, because she also had a jaunty little paper umbrella behind her ear. It made him realise that this was yet another sign she’d likely moved on. He wouldn’t blame her if she had. Yet he could see the grey shadows under her eyes, how her normally plush mouth was a thin, tight line.

He wanted to go to her. Wrap her in his arms and tell her he was sorry for all the pain he’d caused, but this was no warm welcome. Not that he’d expected it. He considered himself lucky that he’d been allowed in at all, after turning up unannounced. Only some fast talking about how he was Princess Anastacia’s fiancé had garnered him any kind of attention.

‘Aston. How are your parents?’

So cool, so polite—the consummate princess, the woman frombefore. Before she’d allowed him a glimpse of how deep her passions ran, and that was fathomless. He tried to be heartened by the fact she’d used his first name but knew that, after everything they’d been through, she wouldn’t have been petty enough to call him Mr Lane. Should he tell her about his mother? He didn’t want her to think he was using it as a way into her good graces, but if he wanted only truth they had to start somewhere, and here was the right time.

‘My father’s well. My mother’s been in hospital.’

Ana started forward, forehead creased in worry. She checked herself, as if some invisible tether had pulled her back. ‘I’m so sorry. Is she well?’

His mother’s doctor had called Camille ‘her miracle’. ‘Yes...now.’

‘I’m pleased. When you go, please send them my regards.’

Her words stung like the slap of an icy wind. She was the perfect princess, the ice princess. There was not an ounce of warmth in her. Yet he knew how she simmered, what she hid underneath. How he craved to experience it again.

‘You could tell them yourself.’

Her eyes widened a fraction, her throat convulsing in a swallow.

‘What are you doing here, Aston? I thought you’d said all you needed to. Your message was quite clear.’

The things he should have said instead... How she’d been right. How he loved her. So many opportunities had been missed to build something towering and eternal when all he’d done was to try and tear things down—self-sabotage at its finest. Time to attempt a repair of what he’d so callously broken.

‘You were right.’

Ana’s teeth began to worry her lower lip. She wrapped her hands reflexively round her waist, then loosened them to drop them by her side.

‘In what way? There were so many.’

She’d been right ineveryway.

‘I’m a coward, hurting you to protect myself.’ He shook his head. ‘I love to climb, but I don’t want to climb Everest. I don’t want to climb any of those mountains. The thought exhausts me.’

‘Then why...?’

Now was when he had to lay the card showing one of the most painful days of his life on the table. To give her a glimpse of what had in some ways made him but, in more, had broken him. He’d never really faced Michel’s death, even though he’d thought he had over the years since. He’d fooled himself into believing he’d moved on, all the while being stuck in the past as that desperate, guilt-ridden twenty-year-old who’d carried those scars into his future. Though he’d not fooled Ana. She’d seen right through him.

He motioned to an uncomfortable-looking antique couch. ‘Would you like to sit?’

She shook her head. ‘I’d prefer to stand.’

‘Do you mind if I do?’ He wasn’t sure that his legs would hold him through the retelling of this story.

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