Page 18 of Modern Romance March 2025 (5-8)

God, she was a pushover.

“Tell me what you plan to con out of me.”

“When my sister…whenever Nadia gets out of the rehab clinic, I would like to have her live with me. Provide her with some kind of financial help so that she can make a new start. And—”

“Yes, to everything. I will have a trust fund sort of thing set up for her too. You can review it and see if suits what you have in mind.Excepthaving her near you if she gets discharged during the pregnancy.”

“What? Why?”

“You’re clearly very emotional about her, and I don’t want you to distress yourself if she slips up or if your reunion doesn’t go as planned. Or if she isn’t interested at all in getting to know you. I know that she refused to say a word to you on the call.”

That blunt reminder hurt, but Nyra couldn’t change her mind. “She’s my twin, Adriano. I’ve tried to find her for years.”

“So a few more months won’t be that much,si?” he threw back seamlessly.

He was right, and yet Nyra was feeling contrary enough not to want to fall in with his plans. “And what about you?”

“What about me,cara mia?”

“You…create emotional distress in me too. Being around you reminds me how naive and stupid I was. How I let you—”

His palm came to rest against her mouth. “Stop it, Nyra. You were not,are not, any of those things. I was—” his nostrils flared “—in the wrong. The minute I knew you were lying to me or hedging the truth as it were, my view of you got skewed. I do not handle…” He thrust a hand through his hair. “When I saw those photographs…”

“I don’t want to talk about them,” Nyra said, slapping her hand over his mouth now. “I…can’t have a reasonable discussion about it.”

“When, then?”

“Maybe never,” she said perversely.

He grasped her wrist, pressing his fingers over the pulse. “Is that all you want of me?”

She swallowed. “Yes. That’s all I want of you.”

“Bene,”he said with a wistfulness she’d never seen in him. Something unsaid tinged the cool night air around them. Something as hungry and bright as her longing for him. “I will leave you to settle in, in peace.”

Nyra nodded, feeling bereft at the thought of sleeping alone in that fluffy, cloudlike bed.

In the nine months that they’d been married—three of which he’d been traveling—she had gotten thoroughly spoiled with a comfort she hadn’t known in years. Since Nadia and she had been separated at the age of thirteen, to be exact.

Not sleeping alone was a luxury.

In that, she had hit the jackpot with Adriano. The man was a live furnace, his densely packed body giving off heat like no one else’s business. And even better, he liked to share that heat with her by wrapping those corded forearms, and those lean, powerful legs all around her.

While she was always cold. He would do an exaggerated pretend shiver every time she tucked her cold feet between his shins and then warm her fingers between his large hands.

But it wasn’t her body that he’d warmed on all those nights when he pulled himself away from the bank and his family and came to her. To this apartment.

It was the cold frost that she’d surrounded her heart with that he had melted with his passion, his kindness, his attention.

Only now, when she didn’t have it, did Nyra realize how little she had understood what he gave her. And how well he’d protected her against the cold and the world.

Until he had ripped it all away from her in one moment. Throwing her out to the cold world again, with no hesitation.

But now she had her self-respect, as much as it would warm her up in a cold bed. And she wasn’t going to give it up in a hurry.

When he bid her good night at the door to their suite, without so much as a kiss on her cheek, tears prickled at the back of her eyes.

God, she was turning into such a contrary, emotional creature but she couldn’t help it. After washing up, she went to his side of the closet, grabbed one of his shirts and pulled it on over her bra and panties, then settled under the luxurious sheets.

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