Page 18 of Modern Romance July 2025 #4-8

She looked around the cabin and realised they were alone. ‘Where are Jenna and Dmitri?’

‘They stepped out for a moment. There were only two parachutes, but they said they’d meet us there,’ he explained, deadpan.

‘Very funny.’ She sniffed, arching an interrogative brow.

‘They have gone through to the bedroom, to take a Zoom call.’

She wrinkled her nose at the explanation. ‘That sounds very high powered.’

‘No, personal. Their son, Robert, he needs routine. When he is in residential care, seeing them at the same times every day helps.’

She nodded at the explanation. ‘I suppose having a disabled child can put a lot of strain on a marriage,’ she mused.

Adonis took a leather seat opposite her as one of the attendants approached with a tray bearing coffee and sandwiches.

‘Thought you might be hungry,’ he said, before adding, ‘I am.’

As the attendant left he leaned back and crossed one ankle over the other, letting his long legs stretch out. Despite his claim to be hungry he seemed in no hurry to address the food.

‘Jenna’s first marriage broke down because the father couldn’t cope. Dmitri loves the kid. He is a great dad.’

Lizzie took a sandwich and waited until she had swallowed a bite before speaking. ‘Will your parents be there on the island?’ What were they going to make of his unlikely choice of bride?

‘My parents? That is extremely unlikely.’

Something in his tone made her ask. ‘You don’t get on?’

‘Get on?’ he mused, looking at her over the rim of a coffee cup. ‘We get on fine now that I am no longer an inconvenience.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘My parents always found that having a child in the picture got in the way of their great epic love story.’ He heard himself explain and immediately wondered why he was revealing this private part of his history.

Some of the tension bunched in his shoulders fell away when a logical explanation for his soul-baring almost immediately revealed itself: they were about to play a couple who had just eloped—it made sense that she would know something about his history.

He turned a deaf ear to the annoying voice in his head that inconveniently pointed out that the only thing Deb had known about his parents was that, according to her, they both looked far too young to have a grown-up son.

‘Your father resented the attention your mother gave you?’ Lizzie tried to keep her disapproval out of her voice. Not easy—the idea of a jealous manchild filled her with angry contempt.

Adonis laughed, and the discordant sound made her nerves jangle.

‘If my mother has maternal instincts they are well hidden. My parents both thought that having a child was the worst thing they ever did, though, I have to hand it to them, they did not allow my existence to ruin their lives,’ he explained with a cynical shrug.

‘They packed me off to school when I was seven and I spent most holidays on Xania.’

Horrified, Lizzie didn’t know how to respond.

After a moment she pushed out a troubled, ‘Hands-off parenting is a thing, I suppose,’ struggling to think of anything non-judgemental to say to even partially excuse his parents.

‘But I’m sure they didn’t really feel like that.

’ Even if that were true, it was truly terrible in her eyes that they had made their child think they did, made him feel he was unwanted.

An image of a young Adonis, dark eyes and a mop of jet hair, slid into her head and her anger heated once more.

‘I am not reading between the lines. They told me on more than one occasion that they wished I had never been born.’

He watched her eyes fly cartoon wide before narrowing into furious slits. Nostrils flared, she put the rest of her sandwich in her mouth and swallowed without chewing.

‘How? Well, they are…?’

‘In love,’ he drawled with a sardonic grimace of distaste.

‘A narcissistic match made in hell. They are totally obsessed with one another to the exclusion of the rest of the world. Their fights are things of legend and their making up—’ He caught her horrified expression and clamped his mouth over further unnecessary reveals.

‘Don’t look so devastated,’ he added, thinking there was a big difference in discussing some family details so she could act the role he had brought her here to play and serving up a sob story with a side-order invitation to wander around in his head.

‘I actually liked school. It taught me to be independent.’

‘I’ve heard people say that.’

‘And you don’t believe it.’

She shrugged. ‘I hated school,’ she revealed abruptly.

‘Well, secondary school at least.’ Maybe if she had not just lost her mum, her dad hadn’t gone on his cruise because looking at her reminded him of his dead wife, and the only female influence in her life hadn’t been the well-meaning housekeeper whose ideas of suitable clothes and guidance for a pre-teenage girl had been firmly rooted in the fifties, it might have gone better.

She had not complained to him, but maybe her dad had sensed she was unhappy when he had persuaded Deb’s mum to allow Deb to transfer to the same school, reasoning that her presence would help Lizzie.

It hadn’t worked out that way. Deb had arrived and instantly been the popular girl that everyone wanted to be with.

Lizzie hadn’t minded her cousin ignoring her.

In fact it had been preferable to the occasions when she’d led the bullying.

‘Why?’

‘The usual,’ she said, avoiding his eyes and shrugging. She was already regretting opening up this far.

‘You are not a very trusting person, are you, Lizzie Rose?’ he observed, studying her with an intensity that made her shift uneasily in her seat.

‘I don’t have much reason to trust you, do I? I don’t really know you!’

The utter absurdity of saying this to the man you had just married struck her forcibly.

She paused, biting her full lower lip between her teeth as she gathered her calm around her, pulling it tight like a comfort blanket.

Now was not the time for thinking about what she had done.

That time had gone. She just had to deal with the reality of the present.

‘My mum died just before I started secondary school. I missed her.’

He watched her expression close down and realised the world of hurt behind the composed words.

‘That must have been tough.’

Her jaw clenched as she thought, Do not be nice to me. Nasty she could take, but nice cut through the protective layers that she had built up over the years.

‘I was not…cool. The school didn’t have a uniform and, well, my clothes sense then was pretty much the same as it is now. I was a swot, and, well, you get the picture. But you learn coping techniques…’ Her voice trailed away as she articulated this for the first time.

‘Such as?’

‘Never let the bastards see you cry.’ She flashed him a defiant look. ‘Oh, and, of course, when you’re the butt of the joke play dim and laugh with everyone else. It comes in handy even now,’ she mused drily.

The wave of protectiveness that rose up in Adonis was shocking in its intensity. ‘Bastards,’ he murmured. ‘Or should that be bitches? Was your school mixed?’

‘Mixed, and I went from flat-chested to…not flat-chested overnight.’ Avoiding his eyes, she got to her feet and made a show of looking around for the cat. ‘Where has she got to?’

On cue, Mouse revealed herself by leaping onto a startled Adonis’s knee.

‘Theos!’

His bass rumble of alarm made her laugh. He was looking at the cat with the sort of expression normally reserved for an unexploded bomb.

She silently thanked her scene-stealing moggy for affording a distraction.

‘Let me take her.’ She bent, loose strands of her hair brushing his cheek as she gathered the purring cat up in her arms. ‘How long before we land?’ she asked, looking around for the cat basket.

‘Probably time to put it—’ he caught her eye and corrected himself with a half-smile ‘—her in her basket.’

She nodded.

‘You’re nervous?’

Lizzie laughed, secured the cat in her basket and turned, staring at the rings on her finger and feeling a contracting wave of fear swell in her chest. ‘Of course I’m nervous. People will never believe that—’

‘They will,’ he contradicted, rising in one fluid motion to his feet. Towering over her, he placed his hands on her shoulders. ‘They will believe because they will all want to believe. They will look at you and think you are exactly what I need.’

‘What, someone plain and homely? I don’t even know who they are other than your grandfather.’

‘Homely?’ he echoed before he threw back his head and laughed. He was still laughing when his hands dropped from her shoulders and he fell back into his seat in an elegant sprawl, all long legs, coordinated grace and off-the-scale sex appeal.

Lizzie planted her hands on her hips and glared down at him, using her anger to hold back the panic that was tight in the pit of her stomach. ‘I’m glad you think this is funny.’