Page 80 of Modern Romance July 2025 #4-8

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘H AVE YOU BOOKED a hotel?’

Cassie looked at him. Her fiancé! Pretend fiancé, of course, but just thinking about Leo in those terms made her heart skip a treacherous beat.

He’d pushed up the sleeves of his black cashmere jumper and her eyes were compulsively drawn to the dark hair curling round the matt silver band of his watch. She looked away before he had a chance to see her staring at him.

‘I thought about it but, in the end, I decided that it was probably not the best of ideas,’ he replied.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Join the dots, Cass. If I’m here and we’re supposed to be engaged, then what if someone in the hotel vaguely recognises me and, when the gossip hits the streets, puts two and two together?

It’s very busy out there. The entire town seems to be out and about.

Why would I be staying there if my fiancée is holed up in her house twenty minutes away?

Wouldn’t the loved-up couple be spending their hard-won time actually in the same place? ’

‘So you came here with the expectation of staying in my apartment?’

‘I actually came here in the expectation of driving back to the airport and taking the next flight back to New York. Believe it or not, I’m accustomed to flying at any hour of the day or night.

If it was too late, or I was too tired to drive to the airport here, it wouldn’t have been a problem to get a driver to take me, and there would always be the option of having a private jet ferry me back to civilisation. ’

‘So you came here to…’

‘To find out what the hell was going on. Call that natural curiosity. I was a single man when we parted company, and now I’m suddenly on course to be married, and the odd thing is I can’t remember proposing.’

Cassie squirmed. Of course he would have been curious.

Of course he would have come to see her.

One minute she’d vanished, the next minute she had mysteriously become his fiancée.

Leo wasn’t the sort of guy to shrug that off as a misunderstanding.

Everything he said made sense and she was an idiot for concocting a scheme that had more holes in it than a sieve.

‘Okay, I get that.’

‘That’s very understanding of you.’

‘Can you please stop being so sarcastic?’

‘Like I told you, that’s tricky, considering the situation I find myself in.’

Their eyes tangled and the atmosphere was suddenly static with electricity.

No sex: that was the important stipulation.

But, looking at him like this, all she could think about was sex, touching him and having him touch her.

She could feel her heart beating so hard that it felt as though it might burst out of her rib cage.

‘Keep looking at me like that,’ Leo ground out in a rough undertone, ‘And I might start asking whether you’re serious about the no sex rule, Cassie.’

Cassie breathed in sharply, mouth tightening.

‘You’re so egotistic, Leonardo Cruz.’

‘Is that what you want to call it?’ He shrugged, although his dark eyes remained on her with laser-like intensity. ‘Okay. I’ll let it go.’

‘Just tell me what you intend to do now.’ Cassie dragged the conversation back to a practical level because she was finding it hard to bring her disobedient body to heel.

‘Now it looks as if you and I are going to be spending the night together.’ He held up his hands as though she’d interrupted him, even though she hadn’t.

‘I’ll take the sofa. There’s no need to fret that there’s going to be anything further between us.

’ He stood up, stretched and began gathering things from the table.

Stuff had been eaten but she couldn’t remember eating it.

‘I wasn’t going to fret about that, and there’s no need to help clear away. I can handle this.’

‘Slight fly in the ointment is the fact that I haven’t brought a change of clothes with me because a sleepover was the last thing on my mind.’

Because it’s well and truly finished between us , was how Cassie translated that, and it hurt.

She covered the sting of his remark with a tight smile, ‘Surprisingly, there are no spare men’s outfits hanging in any wardrobes here.’

She began clearing away, and despite her objections he helped, creating a fake domestic-bliss scene that made her grit her teeth because it couldn’t have been further from the truth.

‘Is that department store by the church still up and running?’

‘Mel and Acton?’ Cassie asked, sliding a glance across to him and he nodded. ‘Yes, why?’

‘Will it be open now?’

‘With Christmas just round the corner, nothing shuts till ten. As you pointed out, everywhere’s packed, stuffed full with people on red alert to recognise you.’

‘Now who’s being sarcastic?’ But he grinned. ‘I’ll call them; get them to deliver the basics to me here.’

‘They don’t deliver.’

He looked at her and smiled slowly. ‘You’d be surprised what rules can be changed when there’s sufficient money on the table.’

He pulled out his mobile, scrolled for a couple of seconds and then turned away to begin talking on the phone.

Cassie watched, fascinated, as he strolled off back into the sitting area, for all the world as though he owned the place.

In a way, that wasn’t so surprising, because he’d become the guy who gave the impression of owning the space around him, wherever he happened to be and whoever he happened to be with.

Maybe he’d always been that guy, she thought.

‘Done,’ he said with satisfaction, returning to the kitchen and propping himself against the wall to look at her as she blinked her way back to reality and carried on tidying.

Eventually, with the dishes neatly stacked on the draining board, Cassie turned round to look at him. ‘Very impressive,’ she said politely. ‘Did you manage to get what you were after?’

‘Isn’t it? And, yes, I did.’

‘Would you like some coffee? Or would you rather I show you where you’ll be sleeping? I have two bedrooms, so there won’t be any need for you to toss and turn on a sofa overnight.’

‘You almost sound as though you’re trying to get rid of me.’ He looked at her, assessing, with his head tilted to one side. ‘Did you get a two-bedroomed place so that your mother could stay over now and again?’

‘How did you jump to that conclusion?’ Cassie returned his steady gaze and was suffused with a heady, drowning feeling. To do something, she spun round to put the kettle on and reached for a couple of mugs.

In Mustique, she had been on safe ground.

They’d both been there for one thing and one thing only: sex.

Within those very defined parameters, she’d known how to operate, and being so far from everything she was accustomed to had made it even easier for her to stick within the confines of their deal.

This was very different. She was aware of her feelings now, sensitive to the impact he had on her and the way her heart was open to him, although he didn’t know it. She was alert to danger, and with him here in her apartment, big, powerful and darkly, sinfully sexy, danger seemed to be everywhere.

Her skin tingled with it and she ached from the absolute necessity to keep a physical distance between them because it felt as if she might go up in flames if she got too close.

But he knew her.

‘We go back a long way, Cassie,’ he said, practically reading her mind. ‘Underneath the outgoing, popular girl back then, there was a gentleness I always recognised in you and found appealing. I also knew how much your family meant to you.’

‘Then you should understand why I did what I did, why I ended it with us. I know I said this to you before, but I really and truly believed that it was for the best that I let you go—let us go—to give you the chance to pursue your dreams. I knew how much leaving here meant to you back then. If I’d explained the situation, you would have been conflicted. ’

‘You took away my agency, my right to have an input into the decision-making,’ Leo said coolly. ‘Like I think I’ve said before. Which reminds me that there’s no point walking down this road again. It’s always going to lead to a dead end.’

Took away his agency … Put like that, in those stark, bleak terms, Cassie could see how her choice to break up with him without any explanation put her on par with the mother who had taken away all his choices by disappearing.

It was a different situation, for different reasons, but still—a scar that had formed long before she knew him had been torn open.

How could he ever forgive her? She’d been unaccountably crushed that he hadn’t made the slightest effort to find out how she was, at least to try and discover why she had done what she’d done, but now she could see that there would have been too much pain inside him at the time and over the years that pain had crystallised into bitterness.

Cassie lowered her eyes but she could feel the anguish surge through her.

If only he knew how deeply she still cared for him, how easy it had been for those feelings to reawaken because they had never really gone away.

But for Leo… For Leo, he could separate the physical attraction from any emotional connections because those connections had been completely severed eight years ago.

She clenched her jaw but couldn’t quite manage to drag herself away from the memories of past suffering and hurt—not just her hurt but the hurt she had unintentionally inflicted on the man she had loved so deeply.

‘What we shared, Cass, was the pure, unencumbered purity of sex. If sometimes a memory surfaces of whatever else there was between us, it’s just that—a memory—nothing more.’

His eyes darkened and she could see the sensual intent there, banked down but simmering patiently under the surface, waiting for her. He wanted her, still wanted her, and he knew that she still wanted him, even though now they both knew the folly of getting physically involved all over again.