Page 49 of Modern Romance July 2025 #4-8

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T HEO WOULD FIND a way to punish Rebecca. This was his only thought as he watched Atlas and Rebecca put their heads together and make each other laugh on the patio of his personal, private home.

Atlas’s was the loud booming laugh Theo remembered from his youth. Sometimes, back then, it had made Theo laugh and smile in return. But sometime around the first time he’d been sent away to boarding school, thanks to Wife Number Two, Theo had come to see beyond the charm, the laugh, the amusement.

Atlas could entertain a crowd. He was enjoyable to be around, as long as there was enjoyment to be had. He could make you think he cared deeply about you and your happiness.

But he refused to deal in any other emotions. So it did not matter if you were sad, upset, hurt, furious. He was going to find it funny. He was going to put a positive spin on it, and if you insisted on wanting to discuss and see a serious matter through, he was going to withdraw.

Theo knew this was why the wives never lasted. Though Ariana had been around for some time now. Four years? Five? She remained, despite the past months of upheaval following Atlas’s brush with death.

Theo glanced at her, sitting quietly and involving herself in the conversation not at all.

She had taken maybe two sips from her glass, and now sat back and kept her gaze firmly on the ocean beyond them.

Her hand draped over her stomach in a gesture that irked though he could not put a finger on why.

He supposed he would have to remember her name now. She was in his home. She had been introduced to Rebecca. While Atlas liked to drop by on occasion, sent by whatever whims ruled him, he had never toted along one of his women before. Married or no.

But Theo could see in her eyes, in the faint frown around the edges of her polite smile, she was finding her time with Atlas a lot less entertaining than she had once.

It would all crash and burn again, and who would pick up the pieces? Theo. It was always him. He would have to keep Atlas away from the business and his own vices. He would have to hire someone to watch after him to ensure he was following the doctor’s orders.

They ate dinner. Theo didn’t say more than five words. Neither did Ariana. Atlas dominated the conversation, per usual, though he pulled Rebecca into it because she was new. A shiny thing to pander to.

Rebecca smiled and laughed and puffed up Atlas’s considerable ego, which left Theo feeling more and more tense. His staff brought dessert out to the terrace and Theo suffered through the continuing Atlas Nikolaou show—something he hadn’t had to do since before his father’s heart attack.

Luckily, he had a reason to insist upon an early night. Rebecca was growing a child and needed her sleep. He had the staff show Atlas and Ariana to their room, and hoped he could find a way to send them on their way tomorrow.

Early.

While he marched through the house to their room, Rebecca walked next to him.

As they took the stairs, she even linked her arms with his, kind of leaned into him in an intimate gesture he did not know what to do with.

It wasn’t born of anything that might happen in the bedroom tonight.

It was a kind of casual friendliness that made no earthly sense to him.

Nor the warmth that spread through him, the desire to wind his own arm around her, and hold her close just so she was there.

“I have a better understanding of you now,” Rebecca said as they walked, and she didn’t sound appalled , so he supposed he would count that as a good thing.

He had to. Tonight had proved to him that he had been…

weak. He had let the weeks pass without pressing and insisting on what needed to be done.

He’d allowed himself to consider her staying a win, and it wasn’t. It was a tiny step toward what must be done. Forward movement was essential. Locking down the foundation for his child, his son , absolutely necessary.

There could be no more pretending.

“Well, that is good,” Theo said, frustrated his voice sounded tight and tense instead of simply sure .

“Because I fear we cannot wait much longer to be married. There will be many legal logistics to work through on that front before the baby is born. The kind of thing that will take the few months we have left.”

Rebecca sighed and looked at him with a sadness in her eyes he didn’t understand. She stopped his forward progress in front of their— his —bedroom door. “What will marrying me solve for you, Theo?” she asked. Seriously. Curiously. Not an accusation, an actual question.

But she missed the point.

“It is not about me , Rebecca. It is about the child. Marriage—two parents—offers stability. You of all people should know it. You benefited from it.”

“I benefited from two parents who loved each other and me.” She said this very softly. Carefully. Like a verbal tiptoe.

But the word love felt a bit like a stab through the ribs. “Love doesn’t matter, Rebecca.”

“Theo…” She sighed again, moved into the room. So he followed her as she seemed to struggle to explain something.

She didn’t have words, so he gave her his. “I have watched my father fall in and out of love his entire adult life.” He unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt as they seemed to choke him suddenly. “It didn’t keep my mother in place, or any of his wives. Did you watch Ariel?”

Rebecca perched herself on the edge of the bed, watched his movements around the room. He felt like a lion in a zoo. Powerful. King of his domain. Caged and watched.

“Ariana, you mean?” Rebecca asked lightly.

“Whatever. It does not matter, because it was clear she was on her last legs.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’ve been through this routine before. Withdrawn.

Uninterested. They start the relationship fawning all over him, laughing at all his jokes.

” He decided to do away with the whole shirt.

Maybe it wasn’t late, but he was tired and Rebecca needed her rest. “They’re dazzled by him but dazzle doesn’t last forever.

Eventually the theater of Atlas Nikolaou gets old, and they leave.

Have I mentioned that?” he asked, only half paying attention to her because the room was unbearably warm.

He strode over to check the vents to ensure they were working.

“It’s always them that leave. Never him trading them in for a younger model like the press likes to claim. No. They leave first.”

Rebecca was unfathomably quiet. He felt the undeniable urge to fill the silence, even when he knew he should sink into it instead. “I know the signs. She’s going to leave.”

“I think you misunderstood her quiet.”

Theo stopped moving, realizing he’d been pacing and he needed to stop . He stared at Rebecca. “What is there to misunderstand?”

Rebecca seemed to consider her words carefully as she watched him with shrewd eyes. “I think she’s pregnant and miserable.”

For a moment, Theo could not find his voice. He could not fully grasp her words. Clearly she was wrong. Confused. Swayed by her own pregnancy. “You… My father is nearly fifty-five years old.”

“But Ariana is not,” Rebecca replied, a kind of gentleness to her tone that seemed to sweep out the foundation of all his denials.

Pregnant. His father had not impregnated any of his wives. He had not doubled down on that mistake. And now…

She was wrong. She had to be wrong. “You’re wrong.” Even as that picture of Ariana sitting on the patio, pale and tight-mouthed, her hand draped over her stomach in a gesture he realized irked because it was one Rebecca often made.

Rebecca shrugged. “Maybe I am,” she agreed. But it was patronizing .

It bothered him that she wouldn’t even argue. Because it left space for him to look back at the evening. The fact Atlas had brought her here. He hadn’t paid her any attention when he’d been in full entertainer mode, but there’d been a physical carefulness with her.

No. No.

“I’ll even say, I hope you’re right,” Rebecca continued.

She got to her feet, crossed to him and rubbed a hand over his shoulder as if to comfort him.

“Your father is very charming, but he is very…self-absorbed. There’s not a meanness to it, but it’s shallow.

I can’t imagine he was a very good father to you as you were growing, any more than he was a very good husband to the array of women he married. ”

“He did not abandon me.” Theo moved away from her hand. “There is that.”

“Do you think that means you owe him? Because I’m pretty sure raising his own son was the very least he could do. And he only did it when it suited. Sometimes he sent you off to boarding school.”

“Boarding school is not a punishment. Many people of my station go to boarding school. It’s an important experience.”

She made a sound that wasn’t agreement. He scowled at her. “You wouldn’t understand. You did not grow up with money. With a business legacy to uphold.”

“No, but I grew up adjacent to it. Patrick didn’t go away to boarding school.”

“Patrick Desmond is a fool and a nobody,” Theo spat. An emotion he refused to accept was jealousy roiling through him. “The Nikolaou empire spans the globe, Rebecca.”

Again she made that agreeable noise, her dark blue eyes watching him as if she absorbed everything, even the things he didn’t say out loud. Even the things she shouldn’t see. “You don’t like your father. Why do you defend him?”

“I am not defending him. I am laying out the facts. Was he a poor father? Yes. A poor husband? I can only assume. So what?”

“It affected you.”

“No, omorfiá mou .” Nothing affected him. He used the building blocks he’d been given to shape himself into everything he was. “I used it to make me into who I am.”

Rebecca watched Theo roam the room. He pretended to be doing things. Dressing for bed. Charging his phone. But she felt a kind of anxious frustration pounding off him.

She understood parts of it. There was something about Atlas that had left even her feeling on edge. There was a demand inherent in his good nature. Like you had to go along with it or you might be punished in some way.

It was interesting, because Theo was far more severe, far less genial, and yet he never made her feel as though she could make a wrong step. They could have a disagreement. She could get mad at him. And they would… deal . Not retreat. Not…punish.

And this contrast had left her feeling protective of Theo. She wanted to bundle him up and tell him everything would be okay—not that he’d ever allow it, not that he could admit to himself that things weren’t okay, but the need to soothe was there.

How did you soothe someone who refused to admit they were upset?

“We will have the wedding here,” Theo announced out of nowhere, as if she’d agreed. “A small affair. You may invite your parents, of course.”

She wasn’t even surprised by his sudden return to insistence on marriage.

She realized now he saw it as some kind of…

insurance for their child. He didn’t view marriage as a partnership.

He didn’t believe in love. He thought some legally binding contract would create a foundation for their child that he’d never had.

And because she now understood that, she didn’t feel angry by his insistence or heavy-handedness. She only felt sorry for him.

She wasn’t going to marry him out of pity , but arguing with him over it would get them nowhere right now. Maybe she should just go along until she found the right time to…

What? Change his unchangeable mind?

She would simply get swept into marrying him just as she’d been swept into staying here. And her anger, fear, reticence over that kept…leaking away.

Maybe it was crazy. Maybe she was falling for him, and it was just like Patrick all over again. Put a rich man in front of her who showed her even a drop of interest and she weaved foolish poor stable girl fantasies.

But she had settled into a life here and she liked it. She could picture a bassinet in the corner of her and Theo’s room. Walking with the baby strapped to her along the beach. Hand in hand with Theo.

It was a ridiculously romantic fantasy that she knew couldn’t possibly come true.

Theo’s determination that he was always right would ruin it.

This wasn’t love . Maybe she was getting to know him.

Maybe she liked him and spending time with him quite a bit.

The sexual chemistry certainly hadn’t dulled, but clearly she was the same fool she’d been when Patrick had begun to show interest in her.

And even if she somehow convinced herself this was different—though it wasn’t—Theo didn’t believe in love. He thought it as fickle as his father.

He wasn’t proposing a loving marriage anyway.

He was essentially proposing a business merger—the business being their child.

And Rebecca knew that he was in for a rude awakening when the child was born—when their son was born.

Rebecca may not have ever had a child, but she understood children had their own personalities.

The boy wouldn’t be something they could control with the right environment, with the right legal partnerships in place.

Theo would never accept this. No matter how hard she had tried to get through to him about attempting to impose his will on her, it had gotten her nowhere. Trying to show him he was wrong hadn’t done a thing but land them in bed. She ended up doing what he wanted, always.

If it was just her, maybe she would have—pathetically—gone along with it. But she had a son to consider. To love. To protect.

So she needed a new tactic. She needed to learn a damn lesson. Which is when it finally occurred to her.

She couldn’t do this alone. She had hoarded her relationship with Patrick. Though her parents had been aware, they hadn’t been involved. Even Mr. Desmond had been aware , but he’d kept his distance and then thrown a new bride in front of Patrick the second Rebecca was out of the picture.

This time around, she needed help.

“Before I could possibly marry you, I would need my parents’ support. Which means, you’ll need to come to Ireland and meet my parents. Get to know them and vice versa.”

She expected excuses. She expected him to balk. But he turned to her, gave a sharp agreeing nod. “Consider it done.”