Page 6 of Modern Romance July 2025 #4-8

Doubtless she was living a lot of women’s fantasies. She took a sense-cooling moment to remind herself that this was not her fantasy.

He was rude and arrogant, but annoyingly her dislike was complicated by the fact she felt sorry for him. He had lost the love of his life!

At least he’d had a love.

She didn’t envy him. It was an awful thing to lose the person you loved. She’d been twelve when her mum had died, not suddenly but slowly, losing a little part of herself every day.

Early onset Alzheimer’s was rare and very cruel. At the time Lizzie hadn’t known that. She had just known that her mum, her best friend, the person she loved with a childish ferocity, was dying.

She hadn’t known it was her mum who had made her feel safe, secure in the knowledge that she was her Lizzie Rose. The most important person in the world to her. The one person she knew would always be in her corner no matter what.

She hadn’t known that until her mum was gone. Not on the day they buried her, that person was gone long before, but Lizzie had still loved her.

She had discovered young that loving came at a price and it was one Lizzie wasn’t sure she wanted to pay. The popular theory was you didn’t have a choice about falling in love, but Lizzie didn’t buy into the what the heart wants mantra.

She had vowed to disprove this theory, and so far she had.

She had never been in love.

Obviously she’d felt sexual attraction, but she’d not allowed it to go farther… Why risk it?

When people said it was ‘better to have loved and lost’ she thought of her mum, felt everything her twelve-year-old self had felt, and murmured, ‘I really don’t think so.’

Adonis waited until he was sure he had lost the couple of journalists who had stayed with them following in cars.

Even then he did not head directly, instead he took a circuitous route, to the building that housed his penthouse apartment.

It was possible there might have been a reception committee and that some enterprising journalist would have beaten him there but this proved not to be the case.

He drove directly into the gated underground parking area, where he pulled his bike into its allocated space between his cars before he dismounted.

With far less elegance, hardly surprising considering the disparity in their leg length, and the fact her knees were shaking, Lizzie followed suit.

She staggered slightly, righted herself and looked around before unfurling her fingers from around the strap of the bag she still clutched in one hand.

She flexed her numb white fingers to encourage the blood flow before she dropped the bag and pulled the helmet off.

After a tussle she managed it, though the last of the pins her hair had been confined by came with it, leaving her hair to spill untidily down her back.

Adonis’s eyes followed the spectacular progress of the rich chestnut-brown waves that bounced softly as they uncoiled, framing the creamy pallor of her pixie-chinned heart-shaped face.

‘Where are we?’

Her voice, quiet, soft and surprisingly low, had a breathy catch. At least she wasn’t having hysterics, which was a plus, but then her shock horror might have been an act…even though he would have sworn it was real, so real it had kicked him into protective instincts he hadn’t known he possessed.

Luckily he no longer went solely on his instincts.

‘I live here. Don’t worry, there is security, the building is gated, and, besides, I lost them.’

‘And I nearly lost my breakfast,’ she told him, thinking it would have been almost worth it to see how he coped with that situation.

He winced at the rather literal admission.

‘Lost who?’

‘The press pack who followed us.’

‘Why?’

His shrug, the unconvincing dumb act, fed Lizzie’s growing exasperation.

‘Why were they there? Why were they following me? Why did they think—?’ She couldn’t go on. It seemed too crazy a question to voice but there was no escaping the things she had heard.

Below the visor his lips curled. ‘You don’t know?’ he said, loosening the strap on his helmet.

She looked at him, really resenting his tone, his attitude. Him! ‘How would I know? But you appeared. You knew what was happening,’ she accused.

He laughed. ‘So you don’t have a clue… You are just an innocent bystander?’ he suggested, not bothering to hide his scepticism.

‘Sure, I invited that mob to breakfast. What can I say?’ Sarcasm thinly disguised her growing antagonism.

‘So you had no idea at all?’ he pressed.

‘Oh, for God’s sake. You can be as sarcastic as you like, you can sneer as much as you like, but it doesn’t alter the fact that I don’t have the faintest idea what you are talking about,’ she finished on a breathless quiver of sheer frustration.

‘If there is a conspiracy, no one has filled me in on it!’ she yelled, not much caring by this point if her response thickened the tension in the air or his sneery hostility. ‘And I am not going anywhere until you tell me what the hell just happened!’

He studied her face for a moment before giving an almost imperceptible nod.

‘Not here,’ he said tersely. ‘Let’s carry this discussion upstairs… My apartment,’ he added as she looked back at him with eyes that were brilliantly blue and even more unrealistically so than Deb’s. Did she wear the same lenses that Deb had and exchange them for green to match her outfits?

‘Not possible, just explain what just happened, and why it happened. I need to get to work.’

His dark brows lifted at her peremptory tone. ‘You work?’ He didn’t bother to disguise his scepticism.

‘I volunteer at a stables,’ she said, explaining the basics.

Pretty much confirmed what Deb had suggested. She lived in a house that Daddy paid for—the property prices in that exclusive little enclave did not come cheap—and she brushed horses. Also, her mouth was not made for pursing.

It was made for kissing. He pushed away the unhelpful observation while noting the fact the lush, pouting curve appeared to be an untouched natural rosy pink.

Did any female not wear any make-up at all? Not any he knew, but he had to admit Elizabeth Rose Sinclair could get away with it and then some. Her skin had a Celtic creamy pallor marked only by a designer sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her small straight nose and softly rounded cheeks.

Lizzie could feel the prickles of antagonism under her skin as she replayed the disdainful note in his voice, but she could not prioritise her desire to tell him to stuff it because she needed him to unravel the mystery.

What had made the media mob assume that…? God, it was too crazy. She couldn’t even think it, let alone say it! She felt as if she had just fallen down the proverbial surreal rabbit hole, and she hadn’t reached the bottom.

She really needed some help here. It wasn’t just the gaps she needed filling in, it was the entire thing. There were too many hows and whys in her head to count!

‘So what’s going on?’ she asked, telling herself that the answer would make her laugh and not really believing it. ‘You didn’t roll up in leather like a modern-day knight by accident?’

As she paused for breath she realised that the surreal events were catching up on her in a physical way…

Suddenly she could feel the crushing pressure of the baying mob, her dry mouth meant she had to moisten her lips every few seconds and the little internal tremors as she watched Adonis Aetos bend to remove his helmet were a big obstruction to calm, logical reasoning.

This logic bypass was probably the reason she couldn’t stop cataloguing his perfect features. It was an embarrassing compulsion but at least she wasn’t being too obvious—he was standing in profile and couldn’t see her ogling.

Was it his good side?

She seriously doubted he had a bad side, with the broad forehead, the chiselled cheekbones, strong jaw and the mouth that had launched a million fantasies.

His glossily abundant raven-dark hair was ruffled sexily, standing up in spikes on his perfectly shaped skull. The carved angles and strong planes, the dark stubble on his chin and jaw, added to the air of danger he exuded.

She blinked away the fanciful thought. Danger, she reminded herself—some things couldn’t be said too often—could not be attractive. This fact established, she was shaking her head, not ogling like a sad pathetic creature, when he turned his head sharply, possibly sensing her scrutiny.

His night-sky eyes really did have silver flecks… Where had she read that?

One brow lifted. ‘After you…’ With an elegant flicking motion of his long brown fingers he gestured to the doors of a lift she had previously not noticed.

It was as if he had not heard her at all.

Lizzie could take being tuned out by her family but enough was enough. There had to be a cut-off point. Tension added extra rigidity to her spine as impatience mingled with trepidation and she pulled herself up to her full and deeply unimpressive five two.

‘Just tell me,’ she said, refusing to be ushered anywhere. His expression suggested that he had never had any woman refuse the invite to his apartment before, though the invitation on those occasions would have been issued in very different circumstances.

His frown reflected his momentary confusion, the confusion of man who was accustomed to people falling in with his wishes.

‘You are being—’

In a voice that was deliberately slow and calm she cut across him.

‘I have never seen how sitting down and having a cup of tea makes bad news better, and it doesn’t take a genius to see nothing you are about to say is going to make me break out into spontaneous joyous song.

’ By the time she paused to catch her breath, calm and deliberate had become shrill and emotional.

As the breath she tried to catch remained out of reach she pressed a hand to her chest. The tightness felt like an iron fist as she struggled, fighting for oxygen, but not panicking.