Page 148 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

The waiter had glided up again, ready to take their orders. Vincenzo specified cheese, in a voice curter than he would usually have used. Then he heard Siena say, her voice as tight as before, ‘And for me thetarte citron.’

She handed her menu back.

‘And coffee,’ she added. ‘Decaf. Thank you.’ Her voice was staccato now.

Vincenzo, not looking at her, ordered coffee for himself. ‘Not decaf,’ he stipulated.

The waiter moved off again.

For a moment there was silence.

Vincenzo cast about for something neutral, anodyne to say. The trouble was he couldn’t think of anything.

As if she had come to the same conclusion, Siena spoke abruptly. ‘So, we don’t really have anything to say to each other, do we?’ she said.

She reached for her glass, drank from it and set it down again. Looked across at him.

Her blue-green eyes, so striking, so expressive, were now expressing something caustic.

‘So there’s no point us trying to get to know each other, is there?’ she went on, her voice caustic too.

Vincenzo dragged his thoughts from her eyes and frowned slightly. ‘I’m not used to getting to know people,’ he heard himself say tightly.

He saw Siena’s expression change. Become veiled.

‘Especially women?’ she said. ‘After all, what’s the point in getting to know them? You won’t be sticking around, so why bother?’

The hostility was back in her voice, in her face.

His own face tightened. This wasnotwhat he wanted. His resolve not to make any reference back to their searing night together vanished. This was another part of her wall—like it or not—and he had to dismantle it if he could. In the same way as before.

‘Do you want an apology for that, too?’ he asked. ‘For not staying to have breakfast with you?’ He didn’t wait for a response, but spoke bluntly. ‘It wasn’t possible. I had a business meeting at eight-thirty, and after that meetings back to back all day—it’s what I do when I come to London: max out my time here. And as for that eight-thirty meeting—I had made the appointment,’ there was a caustic note in his voice too now, ‘long before I met you.’ There was an infinitesimal pause. ‘I had not envisaged that the previous night would be as it was.’

She broke eye contact. ‘Make that both of us,’ she said. Then, almost immediately, her eyes flashed back to his. Full-on. ‘Despite your charming assumption that it’s a way of life for me.’

Antagonism bit in every word.

Vincenzo stilled.

‘I believe,’ he said tightly, ‘that my original apology to you covered that issue.’

‘Did it?’ Her challenge was open.

‘Yes.’ He spoke with precision. ‘However, if you wish me to clarify, I herewith apologise for any inference I drew that you make a habit of spending the night with men you have only just met, so that identifying the one who might be responsible for any consequent pregnancy would require extensive paternity testing. It was a slur on your character as unmitigated as it was unwarranted.’

He paused again, then half lifted an eyebrow.

‘Will that do?’ he said.

She didn’t say anything but he could see her face working, as if conflicting emotions were cutting across it. He saw her swallow painfully. On an impulse he didn’t understand, he let his hand start to reach towards her, then he pulled it back.

He spoke again. But in a different tone of voice now.

‘Look, shall we just accept and believe that each of us acted out of character that night? That, for whatever reason, our id got the better of us—if you want to analyse it in Freudian terms. That seems as good a way as any, but do choose any other that makes sense to you personally. We succumbed to something we very probably would never have done under other circumstances. And...’ he drew a breath ‘...if we accept that, then maybe we can also accept that what happened just happened, for whatever reason, and put it behind us.’

Even as he spoke, making himself sound reasonable and rational, he was conscious of a level of hypocrisy deep within him. But he set it aside. The fact that whether she was dressed to kill, as she had been that night, or dressed deliberately plainly, as she was on the present occasion, her looks would always draw his attention was completely irrelevant to the current situation...

I have to ignore that. Because it is the very last thing that I can allow into the situation we are trying to deal with.

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