Page 7 of Modern Romance March 2025 (5-8)

Mystery and adventure and yet also a warm resting place—at least that’s what he’d represented to her.

The room smelled of leather and old books and cigars and spice, the latter contributed by Adriano’s sandalwood scent and warm sweat. The scent association made her skin prickle with need, images of his powerful body bearing her down into the bed, his muscled thighs holding her hips hostage as he drove inside of her.

Sex with Adriano, slow and tormenting or hard and fast, was always an out-of-body experience. And yet it had always been the silent emotion glittering in his eyes, unspoken even in the utmost moments of raw intimacy that had always sent Nyra tumbling over the edge.

It was the one place where she was always courageous and bold and he was…hers.

Only hers, and her entire world.

As she searched through the darkness for the stunning breadth of his shoulders, the crooked tilt of his mouth to one side when he caught her staring at him, the rough cadence of his voice when he crooked a finger at her and beckoned her to him…misery swamped her.

What if it was truly over?

Her gaze caught on the blown-up photos in color scattered haphazardly on the behemoth desk. Her entire world narrowed down to some kind of black hole.

It was her face staring back at her from the pic, caught in a man’s embrace. Intimate embrace at that, for his leg was pushed up between hers and his face was buried in her neck. But her eyes were wide-open, almost challenging. The strap of what was clearly a lacy corset top dangled over one shoulder, revealing a breast. Its smooth gold flesh all the more obscene held up by a masculine hand cupping it from below.

Her face and her neck, and her body…but not her.

Shock and something like anger…crashed over her, and she had the sudden urge to grab the paperweight from the desk and toss it across the wall, to break something with her hands.

This wasn’t her. Relief crashed down on her, then got swept away by fresh anger.

Could no one tell that the woman in the photos wasn’t Nyra?

Adriano should know that Nyra would never wear such a top, not even in the dark intimacy of their bedroom. That she’d turned herself inside out with shyness when the couture designer had forced her to pick from rows and rows of lacy negligees and barely there lacy thongs should have told him.

She preferred cotton underwear and her husband’s discarded shirts as sleepwear. On the nights that he allowed her to wear anything at all.

Gold highlights glinted in that woman’s hair, while Nyra’s had bronze highlights that were already fading, showing her usual mousy brown color at the roots. From how she stood to how she tilted her head to how she wore her hair—everything about the woman in the photos was different from Nyra. Except the fact that she looked just like her.

Nadia…

Tears prickled Nyra’s eyes as she ran her fingers over the smooth cheek of the woman in the photo. After years of searching for her, her twin, Nadia, had finally reached out to Nyra a couple of months ago.

Nyra had been sent to live with her great-aunt Olivia after their mother’s death. While the old woman hadn’t been happy about being landed with a fourteen-year-old and hadn’t been the warmest person on the planet, she’d given her shelter and food. The moment she’d turned eighteen, Nyra had left for the US, where Nadia had been sent to live with some distant cousin of her father. Who, she’d told Nyra in those early days when they had still kept in touch through email, was an outright bully and tormented her endlessly.

Then, one day, Nadia had written to her that she was running away from home and disappeared completely. Years of not knowing how her twin was faring had hollowed out Nyra.

Finally, two months ago, Nadia had reached out through an old email account, begging Nyra for help. She’d returned to the UK, she had said, admitting that she was in trouble and needed financial help.

The fact that her twin couldn’t make ends meet while Nyra was married to one of the richest men in Italy and rolling around in comfort had twisted her inside out. So, Nyra had turned herself into a thief and a cheat to get her hands on funds.

After three planned meetings in London though, all she’d known was heartache and confusion, because Nadia refused to come face-to-face with Nyra. Swallowing her disappointment, she’d left envelopes full of cash all three times, hoping her sister would eventually be ready to see her.

Her fingers lingered on Nadia’s cheek in the photo now. That this was how she was getting a glimpse of her twin after nearly a decade of separation…tore at her. Caught in a cheap, tawdry photo by someone who had clearly tailed her, thinking she was Nyra.

Was it Bruno? she thought with sudden disgust. Had he been ordered by Adriano to tail her and click these pics of her? How could he have invaded her sister’s privacy like this?

And how could Adriano think that she would do this with…another man after everything they’d shared? How dare he?

Suddenly, the cruelty with which he had ended their relationship made perfect sense.

As if he was made of shadows, Adriano drifted into place behind the desk. He might as well have put an ocean between them, Nyra thought, looking across the expanse of it.

Thick, curved lashes hid his expression and she nearly stomped her foot in frustration. Three inches over six feet and with a broad-shouldered frame, he was too much masculinity to take in one glance. Too much magnetism to not get burned.

And she’d been so utterly lost in her own destruction, like a moth inevitably rushing toward the flame. But whatever it had been, it had been real, raw. In a moment of utter self-pity, tears filled her eyes and overflowed.

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