Page 1 of Modern Romance March 2025 (5-8)

Her Twin Secret

Tara Pammi

“You’re pregnant,” he said, after what felt like an eternity of staring at her.

His chest rose and fell, and it was the most agitated Nyra had ever seen this man she thought of as a mountain.

“Glad to see you’re sharp as ever,” she said drily, pouring oil into her palms. The rubbing action gave her something to focus on even though she didn’t require the blend she usually used to get rid of the oil paint stains from her fingers.

He pushed off the wall, as if finally, he could trust his legs to hold him up. It was so uncharacteristic of the smoothly confident man she knew that it balanced out her own teetering emotions.

There was nothing he could say that could hurt her anymore. Or touch her in any way.

Bafflement made his mouth slack. He rubbed a finger over his temple and she had the sense of contained but volcanic temper. And a reckless part of her wanted to see the explosion.

Chapter One

ThelastthingAdriano Cavalieri—chairman of Bancaria Cavalieri, one of the most prestigious privately owned banks in Italy—wanted to face when he returned home to Milan after four weeks of touring Southeast Asia on a rigorous schedule was the undeniable proof of his wife’s infidelity.

In the form of scandalous, tacky photographs that belonged on a filthy tabloid, no less.

He had acquired said wife, who had been a waitress/exotic dancer in Vegas nine months ago, in a once-in-a-lifetime, uncharacteristic impulse that mocked him now. A wife who was a mere twenty-two to his thirty-four—a cliché if he had ever known one.

The media outlets were still writing about his choice, after all these months. Fed and fueled by the fact that he had kept her out of the public eye.

Neither had Adriano stopped wondering the reason behind his own actions.

It wasn’t as if Nyra was exceptionally beautiful to have turned his head when other beautiful women hadn’t.

Her face, Adriano remembered from the first moment, had possessed a feral alley cat look with chiseled cheekbones, a sharp nose and a wide mouth. A face that was popular on the catwalk from the few shows he’d attended for Fashion Week in Milan.

Although hers was no doubt a result of missing several meals over a few years. A nondescript black cocktail dress had hung on her bony shoulders, making her look like a scarecrow whose stuffing had fallen out.

The only lushness to her was her wide mouth and those brown eyes—ordinary in every way—except for the depth with which they sparkled when she smiled.

And she had turned that smile on him, at the end of the first round of the game. Like an amplified sunbeam, it had cracked the frost around his uninterested, unmoving heart.

Even now, if he closed his eyes, he could remember how she’d bent over him, her hands caught between his on the table, her thick curls a curtain hiding them from the world itself and said, “Please, act like you’ve already bought me for this week, Mr. Cavalieri.”

One moment of their gazes colliding, one whispered entreaty, one soft graze of her cheek against his jaw, and he’d lost himself utterly.

And now, as he stared at the scandalous photos on his desk, that lush mouth open, her head thrown back in ecstasy with some man, he wondered if that moment had been orchestrated too.

He closed his eyes, wishing he’d never laid eyes on those photos. Which, in itself, was a strange thing, because he’d never shied away from truth.

It was a reminder of how well Bruno, his head of security and his best friend of nearly three decades, knew him that he’d first told Adriano on his flight back that he had “bad stuff involving Nyra” but to let him investigate a little more.

While even Adriano himself didn’t understand his relationship with his wife, it seemed Bruno, and even his childhood nanny, Maria—one of the very few people he trusted wholeheartedly in his life—approved of it. Maria, going as far as to say he smiled now, instead of baring his teeth at everyone in his sphere.

Given that Nyra had been up to something shady for the past month, he had braced himself for something bad as soon as he had gone on this trip.

After all, she’d sold her wedding ring and, according to Adriano’s mother, several valuable keepsakes from the family villa here in Lake Como, things her parents valued because this duke or that king had gifted it to some old, fat, privileged ancestor of his.

He’d initially laughed at his mother’s claim—at his father’s utterly hypocritical horror that he’d brought a common thief into their family. Such a stain on their reputation, the pair had declared, after splashing their own scandalous affairs for all of society to see for three decades.

Only to learn later, on Bruno’s investigation into the missing heirlooms, that the claim had been truthful.

Then her trips to London, which he had only discovered because he’d seen her walk into a seedy part of the city while he’d whizzed away in a chauffeured car in the middle of a meeting.

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