Page 27 of Modern Romance July 2025 #4-8

CHAPTER ELEVEN

T HE TWO TEENAGERS hugged their grandfather before they ran around the table to where Lizzie sat nibbling at a piece of toast. She got to her feet and was swallowed up in a hug.

‘I can’t believe the summer is over!’ Areti, her skin tanned to a deep gold, cried as she pulled Lizzie in for another hug. ‘God, school next week!’ she moaned. ‘I can’t bear it.’

Her twin rolled her eyes and took her turn hugging Lizzie. ‘Listen to her. She loves it, captain of everything going, whereas I—’

‘Are a swotty nerd.’

‘Granted,’ her twin acknowledged with a grin. ‘Our last year. Next year we will be free spirits or more likely terrified of starting uni.’

Lizzie remembered her last term at school.

The sixth year had been less traumatic than her early years and by then her main tormentor, Deb, had left.

The invitation to a holiday with the cool girls had made her feel her life had changed.

Then her bikini top had pinged off. She should have laughed it off, she could see that now.

But she hadn’t had the twins’ confidence so instead she had layered up and never really stopped layering until she had seen herself through Adonis’s eyes.

She wanted to say ‘don’t wish your life away’ to the twins, which made her feel very old, but she restrained herself.

‘You’ll come and wave us off?’

‘Of course,’ Lizzie promised, retaking her seat.

The room seemed still after the girls’ exit. The place was going to seem empty after the summer bustle of activity. Elena had taken Cora and Chloe back at the beginning of the week and all the men had gone back last week.

It was hard to believe that she had been here seven weeks.

Though Adonis had made several trips back to London and to Athens he had spent every night, or what was left of it, in her bed.

He was working from here, establishing his work base in an office away from his private suite.

‘Less distractions,’ he had said.

They spent a lot of time together swimming and riding, making love. They were idyllic moments she would always treasure. Thinking of them ending was the only cloud on her horizon.

‘Are you going to eat that?’

Lizzie, shocked out of her dreamy contemplation of the plate she had piled with scrambled egg, looked up and found Spyros staring at her from his place at the head of the table.

Everyone had been delighted when, without any prompting, he had decided to take part in the treatment trial, which he appeared to be, as the doctor had phrased it, ‘tolerating well’.

That, along with his new pain regime, had put him in a much more mellow frame of mind—mellow for him anyway—and the fact he had agreed to use a motorised wheelchair meant he was much more mobile.

‘I’ve had enough,’ she said lightly, aware that the shrewd eyes fixed on her missed very little.

‘You haven’t had any.’

She waved her piece of toast and smiled. ‘Filled up on toast.’

Spyros grunted. Since he had discovered that Lizzie was, as he put it, an adequate chess player, she saw him most days outside the noisy communal mealtimes and she’d grown very fond of him.

‘You want to continue our game later?’

She gave an apologetic smile. ‘Maybe not today. I’m feeling slightly off colour,’ she admitted, not quite meeting his beady eyes. ‘I’ll just go and see them off.’

‘You do that.’

‘Adonis is sorry he couldn’t see you off,’ Lizzie said, embracing Lydia as the remainder of their luggage was stowed on the jet.

‘Don’t worry, he said goodbye this morning.’ She took Lizzie by the arms. ‘We are all so happy he has you. You do know that?’

Lizzie didn’t say anything. What could she say that wasn’t a lie or, even worse, the truth?

With a sigh she gave a last wave to the faces in the window of the plane and got into the waiting car.

She didn’t go up to the house, instead she went to the beach. Over the weeks they had fallen into a daily pattern. Adonis tried to make himself free around this time and they swam in the warm blue water or sometimes just walked and talked.

It would have been easy for anyone watching to think they were a happily married couple for real.

She stripped off her blue cambric sundress, underneath which she wore a blue bikini.

She wandered down to the water’s edge, not wading in, just allowing the waves to gently break over her feet. She closed her eyes, allowing the image of Adonis, bare-chested in a pair of cut-off denims, to form in her head.

It was so vivid that when she opened them she was shocked he wasn’t standing there.

Enough of this, she decided, her chin lifting as her expression became resolute. She couldn’t keep delaying. She had to know.

Half an hour later she was standing staring at her own pale face in the mirror, the third test strip in her hand. It wasn’t really a shock, she’d suspected it for a full week—longer, even. All the signs had been there.

The irony was she had what Deb had wanted: Adonis’s wedding ring on her finger and now his baby.

Except she didn’t have his heart. That still belonged to Deb. Her face crumpled as a sob gathered in her tight chest. She pressed a hand to her flat belly, realising after weeks of denial that that was what she wanted: his heart.

She loved her husband.

The harsh hybrid sound that emerged from her pale lips was part sob, part laugh.

She loved her husband, and she wanted her mum, but she couldn’t have either. She sniffed and pulled her shoulders back. This was her problem and she had to deal with it.

How would Adonis react?

She pushed away the question. She couldn’t deal with that now. This was happening to her. She had to sort out her own thoughts before she faced him. She would tell him, obviously, but…but…he’d stay with her because of the baby, she was sure of it, and that wasn’t enough.

She pressed a hand to her head, which felt as though it were going to explode. She needed space.

The thought had barely formed when her phone pinged. She saw the name and shook her head, then, her expression thoughtful, she picked it up and read the text.

It was pretty much a repeat of the previous half-dozen she had received from her publisher, detailing the PR tour for her latest book they were trying to sell her on.

‘Why are you sitting in the dark?’

Lizzie blinked when one of the bedside lights was switched on.

‘What’s happened? What’s wrong?’ His concern growing, Adonis’s glance moved from Lizzie’s pale face to her clothes. She was fully dressed. ‘It’s half one. I thought you’d be in bed.’

‘Sorry, I lost track of time. I’ve only just finished packing,’ she said brightly.

‘Packing?’ The dark hooded glance shifted to the bags lying on the floor and the cat sitting in its basket.

She nodded. ‘Yes, it’s so exciting. They want me to do a PR tour for the new book and I thought, well, I’ve been here a lot longer than either of us anticipated, which is great, but Spyros is on the new course of treatment and I’ll be back before you know it.’

‘You’ll be back?’ he said in a voice wiped clean of any emotion, and then, in a voice that was no longer empty, instead filled with fury, he continued, ‘So how long have you been planning this?’

‘Not planning. It just kind of happened.’

‘We had a deal.’

‘I know,’ she said miserably. ‘But things have changed.’

‘I haven’t changed.’

‘I know.’

That was the problem: he hadn’t changed. He still loved Deb, and Lizzie would always be second best. She really didn’t want her baby to have a second-best mum.

‘I thought you were happy.’

She said nothing. How could she be happy when she loved a man who didn’t love her back?

Her silence fed the outrage, the sense of betrayal building inside him. He had trusted her and she had thrown that trust back in his face.

‘Fine! Go. I’ll get the jet fuelled up. It is at your disposal. I’ll get a driver to take you to the—’

‘Everyone is asleep, Adonis.’

‘Then they can wake up!’

‘I want to say goodbye to your grandfather.’

After a moment of nostril-quivering, jaw-clenching staring he gave a curt nod. ‘As you wish.’ And he was gone, leaving Lizzie to cry with no one but Mouse to hear her muffled sobs.

Lizzie snatched a few hours of uneasy sleep and woke early to throw up. So far pregnancy did not have a lot to recommend it, she decided as she examined the dark panda shadows circling her puffy eyes.

Had Adonis, true to his word, organised the jet?

She didn’t have a clue. She just knew that she really couldn’t face him again right now.

She knew if she had told him he’d stay married for the sake of the baby, but she didn’t want that. She was not about to settle. She’d had enough of pretending.

‘He doesn’t love me, Mouse,’ she said as she shoved the indignant cat into the travel basket and got a scratch for her troubles. ‘Nobody loves me.’

Dashing the self-pitying tears from her face, she gave a loud sniff and went to the only person other than Adonis she knew could get her off the island.

She wasn’t very coherent, but Spyros seemed to get the main point, which was she wanted off the island.

‘The PR tour is a marvellous opportunity,’ she explained brightly, hoping the concealer around her eyes was hiding the worst of the damage caused by her tears.

‘Couldn’t Adonis organise that for you? Didn’t he get back last night?’

‘He said he would, he might have, but he might have forgotten, and I don’t like to disturb him. He’s very busy this morning, what with everything…’ she said, her voice starting bright before it trailed away into a whisper.

‘The jet will need refuelling.’

‘Oh, will that take long?’

‘It’s a big plane.’

She nodded. ‘But when it is ready?’

‘It is at your disposal.’

‘Fine and I’m sorry that…’ Shaking her head, she hugged the old man before she picked up the cat basket and her rucksack.

When she had gone, Spyros pressed a buzzer that brought assistance running.

‘No, I’m not dead,’ he snapped. ‘Get me my grandson. Tell him I’m dying if you like. I need him here now.’