Page 98 of Modern Romance December 2025 5-8

She couldn’t afford a new phone and her whole life was on it.

‘It’s a really old phone—you don’t need it, I do.’ She tried to inject calm reason into her voice but could barely hear her words, let alone the intonation, above the thud of her own heartbeat vibrating in her eardrums.

‘Need it!’ mocked the one holding her phone. ‘Posh, isn’t she…?’ He turned with a flood of expletives and a titter and found his companions were not where they’d just been. He couldn’t think why they had run and the phone he had just been tauntingly holding up had been snatched back. ‘Bitch!’ he snarled and grabbed her.

Amy had sometimes imagined how she would react in a situation of this sort, never actually thinking it would happen. Because it didn’t, did it? Things like this happened to someone else. She had always decided that a brains rather than brawn response would be the best plan, given she was only five foot three. Her first option was to run, and she was actually quite fast, but if that wasn’t an option she would try talking her way out of the situation.

Resorting to violence had never been one of the options.

It turned out that reality differed from theory big time! Blind instinct along with panic kicked in and she began to struggle wildly as she wriggled, feeling a small moment of satisfaction as she stepped down hard on something she thought—she hoped—was a foot.

The grunt and curse suggested it was. But then the arm around her neck tightened and ice-cold brain-numbing fear conquered every other emotion.

She felt darkness lower across her vision and nerveless fingers dropped the phone—but then, quite suddenly, she could breathe again. As her brain sparked into life she was aware, in her peripheral vision, of someone who was very tall. Like a puppet whose strings had been severed she fell to her knees and stayed there, breathing hard. Aware too that things were happening off-camera while she fought the urge to vomit.

She eventually got to her feet and, with her eyes still squished closed, addressed her hoarse question to a point over her shoulder. ‘Have they gone?’

‘They have gone.’ A few harsh words followed in a language she could identify but didn’t know.

The voice she could identify in any language.

Amy didn’t need to look. She knew that voice at a cellular level, as well as the person it belonged to.

She had no clue in the world how he was here, but he was.

Had she gone mad?

Or sustained a knock on the head?

Both seemed a lot more likely than Leo being here in this place, now. Her heart hammering against her ribcage, she lifted her braced hands off her thighs, her palms slick with sweat. She straightened up slowly and, with one hand anchoring her messed hair that had come adrift during the short, frantic tussle, she opened her eyes.

He’d found a wall to lean his shoulders against, looking nonchalant and unbelievably sleek and exclusive. He didn’t even have a single hair out of place.

‘Leo?’ A whisper was all she could manage as she stared in shaky disbelief at the tall figure, cataloguing every detail of his patrician features, every shift of expression on his face. It was still all angles and intriguing hollows, with strong classic features creating a miracle of symmetry. Looking at him acted like a trip switch that turned her brain off as she experienced a weird collision of past and present.

Seeing him that last time, the hurt and disillusion in his face before he’d walked away, had always stuck with her. There was no hurt now; his dark eyes were shuttered, stance relaxed, though there was a telltale tension in his flexing jawline that some might miss. But she knew that face so well, or at least a younger version of it, that she didn’t miss anything. Not the tiny scar by the side of his mouth—she remembered tracing it with her finger—nor the waves of sinful male magnetism that poured off him.

A debilitating weakness slid through her and she wrapped her arms around herself as if that would keep the tight ball of her suppressed emotions in place. She was shivering despite the tendrils of heat that were breaking out across her skin, leaving a fiery trail.

Leo was there—impossible but a fact, the same but different. Nine years had built muscle, hardened the lines of his extraordinary, fascinating face, with its broad forehead, sharp commanding nose, a mouth that was all sin…and eyes that felt as though they were reaching into your soul.

She recognised, as her brain kicked into life, that it was better to acknowledge this was nothing more than sexual attraction. Admittedly on an atomic scale, but it was all just hormones and chemical reactions.

Nothing more.

Of all the things she could have said—should have said—she heard herself gasp accusingly, ‘You speak Italian!’

His lips quirked and her traitorous stomach flipped. ‘It seemed only polite to learn my mother’s tongue.’

‘Of course—congratulations. It must be nice to have family.’

‘That must have hurt.’

She shook her head, struggling to make sense of the tangle of emotions flooding her thoughts. Shaking her head, she said, ‘I don’t understand what you mean by that…’

‘It could have been your family too—that must have hurt.’

An angry retort trembled on her tongue, but then she remembered her father’s reaction to the news. ‘I was happy for you, whether you believe it or not.’