Page 158 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

Dark and difficult sense—but sense.

So that is why he made all those vile assumptions about me—thinking the worst of me...

Quietly, she spoke again, wanting him to hear—wanting him to believe. ‘I’m not like that,’ she said. Her voice was low, intense.

For a long moment—dark and difficult—his eyes held hers. She could feel her heart beating in her breast as she went on holding his eyes still.

Suddenly, his lashes swept down over his eyes, shutting her out, cutting off the moment. Then they opened again. His expression had changed, and Siena felt her stretched nerves ease. A half-smile, twisted, pulled at Vincenzo’s mouth, as if in acknowledgement of what she had said.

‘I should not need you to say it,’ he said.

‘No,’ she agreed, still meeting his eyes, ‘but perhaps it helps all the same...’

He gave a nod. ‘Perhaps it does,’ he echoed.

He glanced away for a moment, out over the promenade across the road, then looked back at Siena. The wry expression in his face was there again.

‘We have moved on again,’ he said.

He was making his voice light, she could hear it, and she answered him in the same fashion. Wanting to for her own sake—and for his.

‘Yes,’ she said.

She reached for her own drink and took a draught, her mouth dry.

The arrival of their salads was timely, giving respite from what had been said...revealed. They were huge—Vincenzo’s laden with flaked crab meat.

‘Enjoy,’ said their waitress, casting a look at Vincenzo.

He gave her a polite nod of thanks, but nothing more, and with her sigh almost audible the waitress headed away.

The waitress’s were not the only female eyes to be lingering on Vincenzo, Siena could see. At least two other women sitting nearby were throwing him covert glances.

It was totally obvious why. The combination of his lethal looks, fatally augmented by his Mediterranean aura, made it impossible for anyone in possession of a double X chromosome to be unaware of him.

She let her eyes rest on him for a moment as he got stuck into his crab salad. He was casually dressed, but the style and expense of his clothes was unmistakable. The open-necked polo shirt bore a designer mark on the breast pocket that she vaguely recognised as that of a top Milan fashion house. It was worn with superbly cut but casually styled chinos, and rounded off with an even more beautifully cut and styled dressed-down jacket.

He looked cool, Italian—and devastating.

She gave a silent gulp, bending her attentions to her own salad.

Casting about for a safe subject, wanting an easier topic of conversation—less intense, less dark and difficult—she said, ‘I wonder if Lyme Regis is very far. It would be worth seeing. The harbour has a high, protective breakwater called the Cob, made famous by Jane Austen,’ she said.

Vincenzo raised a querying eyebrow.

Siena elaborated. ‘She set a key scene there inPersuasion, her last novel. The heroine’s sister-in-law, whom the heroine fears is going to marry the man she herself loves, but who no longer loves her, impulsively jumps down from the steps on the upper Cob to the lower and is nearly fatally injured.’

‘Only nearly? No tragic ending, then?’ he said sardonically.

‘No, it’s all right. The rival to the heroine does make a full recovery, but she falls for one of the hero’s friends and marries him instead, so the hero is free to realise he loves the heroine after all, and they get their happy-ever-after.’

‘That is reassuring,’ observed Vincenzo. ‘At least in novels there can be good resolution of life’s problems.’ Siena heard his voice change. ‘Perhaps we must strive to do likewise in our lives too,’ he said. ‘Even when those problems seem...intractable.’

His eyes rested on her. His expression was grave.

‘I appreciate, Siena, all that you are doing. Truly I do. You are meeting me halfway, and I hope I am doing the same.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Do you think this is helping? Time together like this?’

She met his gaze, and there was honesty in hers. ‘Yes. It’s strange—it can’t be anythingbutstrange. But, yes, I think it is helping.’

---