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

“Am I to think that the tears represent regret? Or are they of remorse?”

She dabbed them with the back of her hand, telling herself that they were the last she would ever shed over him. “I haven’t done anything I regret or have to repent. Except maybe thinking that you’re different from other men.”

“Ahh…it’s a madness both of us contracted, I think. So?” he said, that deep, gravelly voice vibrating with impatience and so much more.

“What, Adriano?” she said, his name falling from her lips like a caress even in the midst of roiling fury. It was entrenched too deep to be plucked out at a moment’s notice. “Is there a question you’re actually asking me instead of issuing decrees? Tell me, if I don’t leave, will you have your rabid family drag me outside by my hair? Will you call thepoliziaand tell them your wife is a thief and a cheat and…what, a slut?”

His chin reared down and he took a step back from the desk. As if her blazing anger was a shock wave he hadn’t expected to encounter.

If she wasn’t shaking with said anger, Nyra would’ve laughed at how shock painted his features. There was nothing in the world that could catch Adriano unawares. Nothing that could shake or dent his self-possession.

Had all these months meant nothing to him? How could they, if he thought her capable of this?

“You’ve been lying to me for months, stealing from my family…”

“Nothing you would have missed. Nothing that would harm anyone. You know that I—”

Laughter escaped his mouth, making him look painfully gorgeous. “Is it true that you’ve stolen silver candlesticks that have been in the family for two hundred years?”

Nyra’s cheeks heated. “Yes. I sold them because I needed the money. I sold the diamond ring you bought me as a wedding present and swapped it with this cheap one,” she said, turning the ring round and round on her finger.

The cheap metal had begun to leave a green ring on her skin since she refused to take it off. To take off the one he’d bought her had been torment enough.

Given the state of her marriage currently, the ugly ring of green however seemed like a better fit.

“Why? Why did you need the money?” he said, surprising her with that particular question.

“I…” God, where did she even begin?

“Why refuse an allowance or a bank account in your name or even an expense card if all you wanted was money all along?” Adriano said, not giving her the chance to answer. “Why pretend to morals you don’t have?”

The depth of his frustration calmed her rising temper.

Yes, he had jumped to conclusions, but she had laid the foundation of lies for him to build on. This was on her. At least a major part of it. Most of it. “I needed the money urgently, Adriano. And it’s true that I made up reasons for—”

“What…to see your lover at a seedy motel in some godforsaken part of London? To run around behind my back?” Something that sounded like pain reverberated in his words. “Or had you begun gathering funds for your exit strategy? Would I have had a grand first anniversary present request to pad it?”

Nyra found herself moving around the desk, toward him, before she had decided to do so. As if she was nothing but a magnet and he her true north.

The familiar scent of him enveloped her senses like a lash, threatening to bind her to him. Her arms trembled with the effort she exerted to stop herself from throwing herself at him.

His chest would be hard and solid and he would hold her against him, hold off the incoming storm. In his arms, she’d always felt safe. From that first night, when she’d asked him to hold her while they slept.

In a life that had been lonely and bereft of touch and warmth for so long, he had been like a blanket made of sunshine.

He stepped back from her, as if her touch, her nearness would taint him.

When she looked into his eyes, there was nothing but a cold, dead frost there. And that confirmation there—that he believed all those loathsome things about her—was enough to kill the last tendril of love she had for him.

“If you want to believe that I cheated on you, that I went seeking this man in some cheap motel in London,” she said, grabbing a photo and throwing it at him, “that I undressed for him while you were working in some remote corner of the world, that I welcomed his touch and kisses and let him do all the wicked things you do to me, that I let this man move inside me with the same desire I showed you, then there’s nothing more for me to say.”

His head jerked up as if she had dealt him a body blow. Beneath his olive skin, a paleness emerged and it struck her like a coiled snake in waiting, shaking her resolve.

She backed away from him, nearly getting tangled in her own feet, afraid of her own neediness and the overwhelming urge to please him, to soothe him, and to court his approval, even as he shattered her heart.

Maybe she hadn’t truly loved him then, because leaving shouldn’t be easy, she thought, reaching for the damned door handle, eyes blurry with tears.

“Nyra?” Her name fell from his lips softly, with none of the contempt he clearly felt for her.

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