Page 2 of Modern Romance July 2025 #4-8

She was silently awarding him a brownie point when she realised that he wasn’t staring at her boobs—so many men equated the size of a woman’s breasts to their sexuality and availability, and hers were not small—his gaze was riveted lower on her middle, where her dress was ballooning in the wind.

His frowning regard returned to her face as he proceeded to lecture. ‘In your condition you should take more care.’

Her confusion gave way to dawning horrified comprehension. Did he…? Was it possible he thought she was pregnant? Humiliation pumped through her in a red-hot stream.

Her colour fluctuation alarmed him. He really didn’t fancy the idea of having a pregnant woman faint at his feet. ‘Are you all right? Do you need to sit down?’

She made a batting gesture, even though he was not making any attempt to touch her.

‘Me take care!’ she snapped, nostrils flaring.

‘I like that! You barged into me. One thing I really hate is people…men…who act like everyone has to get out of their way and are happy to trample on anyone who doesn’t!

And don’t say, “Don’t you know who I am? ” Because I do and I don’t care.’

Taken by surprise, he didn’t immediately react to the attack, coming as it did from a totally unexpected diminutive source. During the short static silence that followed her fiery outburst he read the anger and, yes, contempt blazing in her azure eyes.

‘I wasn’t going to. But good to know.’

The sarcasm and insincerity of his soft response made her teeth ache.

‘But actually you bumped into me.’ He had no idea if her outburst was the result of an unhinged personality or pregnancy hormones, but his willingness to cut her some slack was limited. He would never normally tolerate being spoken to that way.

‘We could debate this,’ she tossed back with a haughty sniff, ‘but I have better things to do.’

He watched her stalk off, sections of her rich chestnut-brown hair confined in a knot at her nape coming loose and falling down the back of the nightmare of a dress.

The aggressive little vixen clearly did not follow the current trend for showing off a baby bump in clothes that clung and celebrated a burgeoning bump.

Pregnant… I do not believe it , she thought, fuming as she stepped inside the gilded entrance hallway.

‘And I actually felt sorry for him. Almost,’ she mumbled under her breath.

The conversation that had elicited this sympathy replayed in her head as she took a couple of deep steadying breaths and told herself to calm down.

Deb had been force-feeding her the contents of a glossy magazine, reading out all the captions below the photo spread of her and her future husband, along with a detailed description of what she was wearing, name-dropping designers who were falling over themselves to give her freebies because of the Aetos name.

Lizzie had let the words flow over her.

‘I was worried about the new colourist…he came highly recommended though.’

‘Oh, your hair looks lovely,’ Lizzie had said.

‘Adonis thought it was a joke when I asked him if he’d ever thought of going a bit lighter.’

‘He is very handsome,’ Lizzie had conceded, glancing at the man who had stared out from the pages looking moody and broody and quite impossibly gorgeous.

At the time she had told herself that no one was that good-looking and it was the lighting and a few clever filters. Now she knew it wasn’t.

She felt a lot less inclined to feel sorry for him now as Deb’s response replayed in her head.

‘Handsome? Well, obviously I wouldn’t marry an ugly man no matter how rich he was. He’s not as gorgeous as Luke or Stephan, beautiful boys for fun, but not really keepers.’

It had taken Lizzie several seconds to realise that it wasn’t a joke. Her cousin really had been comparing the man she was to marry unfavourably to the pair of clones with blond-streaked highlights and tans that stayed just the right side of orange that her cousin had dated.

Actually, she might not have been putting the right faces to the names—there had been a few others whose names Lizzie couldn’t recall.

She just remembered that her dad and aunt had been pleased that Deb was getting out there.

Their approval was connected, Lizzie suspected, with the nameless married man that her cousin had got involved with in her early twenties.

‘I know he’s rich, but you don’t need his money. You don’t have to marry him if you’re not in love.’

‘You are such a child sometimes, Lizzie. Of course I want to marry him—he is Adonis Aetos. He thinks I’m perfect, which is what counts. Everyone else wanted him and I got him.’

Which, from her beautiful shallow cousin’s point of view, was the main thing, hence the fleeting sympathy Lizzie had felt for the groom-to-be. Now, having met him, she felt that they deserved one another.

As Lizzie stalked past a massive gilded mirror, her heart still thudding after her encounter with the tall, rude Greek, she caught sight of herself.

Her anger melted into horror. She looked, she decided, like an inflated balloon about to take off in the mustard-yellow silk—the colour of the season, she had been reliably informed.

The cut fell from an elaborately smocked bodice that flattened her boobs and at the same time made them seem even bigger, if such a thing were possible!

She had only herself to blame. She had chosen to believe the perfectly groomed, stick-thin sales assistant who had spoken about unflattering lighting.

She shrugged, her sense of humour coming to her rescue. It was just a dress. If she avoided every reflective surface she might get through tonight, so long as she wasn’t arrested by the fashion police.

When it came to things she cared about, Lizzie could and did fight her corner, but when it came to clothes, she didn’t care that much, and by the time she had fought her way into this dress she had been standing waist deep in a pile of rejected but safe black and brown—coincidentally cheaper—dresses.

Actually there had been two, but it had felt like a lot, and though Lizzie could have argued the saleswoman’s claim that darker colours were really not slimming to larger ladies, by that point she had lost the will to live.

Added to which she had already been late for her meeting with the new illustrator so she had taken the line of least resistance, working on the theory nobody was going to be looking at her. This was Deb’s evening.

But of course they would be looking and for all the wrong reasons.

She lifted her chin, pasted on a smile and thought, Man up, tomorrow the full frilly horror of it will be donated to a charity shop .

And it wasn’t as if it would be her worst fashion mistake.

She had form—that had been falling out of her halter-neck bikini playing volleyball on the beach.

She had spent the rest of her holiday in a kaftan while her ‘friends’—she’d discovered on their flight that she had only been invited to make up the villa numbers and cut down the cost—had flaunted their flat abs and perky boobs in nearly there bra tops.

This did rate as her most expensive mistake, but then her exasperated rather than generous father was paying, because, as he had said, he didn’t want the Aetos family to think she was the hired help.

Actually, Lizzie could have afforded her own expensive clothes had she wanted them. It had yet to dawn on her dad that her ‘little hobby’ paid.

When her first self-published book— The Feline Feminist , a story about the comic romantic disasters of a twenty-something woman written from the point of view of the heroine’s cat—had become an overnight success, Lizzie had been as surprised as anyone.

Now there were four books in the series, she had a publisher, an agent, the whole deal and while her dad had pronounced himself happy she had a suitable hobby he had advised her not to do anything foolish like pack in her day job.

Catching sight of a row of tasteful vanity units and mirrors as a door swung open, she detoured.

A few minutes spent repairing the damage from the rain to her face and hair would be well spent.

Standing in front of the mirror, she patted the frills that made her square shoulders look enormous and took a deep breath, reminding herself that, to quote Deb, no one would be looking at her.

The reality was she could have been a six-foot supermodel, not five feet two, and they still wouldn’t be looking at her, not with Deb in the room. Her cousin had the indefinable something that made every other woman invisible.

Deb sparkled.

She was sparkling when Lizzie slipped as unobtrusively as possible into the room where the two families, champagne in hand, were mingling before the formal get-to-know-one-another meal.

Lizzie stuck to sparkling water and the wall, where she blended in with the flocked wallpaper, and stayed there long enough to assess the level of awfulness to expect from the evening.

One or two women had gone for floaty, one was even wearing the same colour as Lizzie, but there the similarity ended.

It was in the red zone of her awful monitor.

Across the room Deb was wearing a necklace, presumably the one she had triumphantly told Lizzie was worth a cool million, that glittered around her swan-like neck and was matched by an equally hefty diamond ring on her finger.

She really was living the dream, or at least her dream. All the diamonds in the world would not make Lizzie embrace a life spent as tabloid fodder dodging paparazzi.

Surely no man alive, certainly not the one striding across the room and carrying all eyes with him, would be worth that? She watched the tall figure weaving his way with sinuous grace towards Deb, making Lizzie think of a very well-groomed and outrageously handsome moth flying towards a flame.

The way he moved was riveting, in a ‘jungle cat stalking its prey way’ riveting. You didn’t want to watch, but you couldn’t not!