Page 81 of Modern Romance July 2025 #4-8

She, more than him, knew just how idiotic that would be.

But that lazy, assessing, patient look in the depths of his eyes…

Cassie went weak. Her mouth trembled and everything, every nerve in her body, trembled because the air sizzled with the tension of emotions that had been locked away for eight years and because of the finality of what he’d just said.

Her hands shook and she felt herself drop the tray as if it was happening in slow motion.

Aghast, she watched everything fall: not the coffee, because that was still brewing in the cafetière, but everything else on the tray went flying through the air in an aerial bombardment, landing with a resounding crash at their feet.

‘Cassie!’

He pulled her towards him and she buried her face against his chest, trying and failing to staunch the tears that were finally released. Her sobs were broken and wretched.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, when they finally eased to shaky little hiccups.

‘You’re crying for the past.’ Leo tilted her face so that their eyes met. ‘And for the future we never had.’

He kept his voice level and unemotional but his heart constricted.

God, had he ever wanted any woman the way he wanted this one?

Her tears seemed to soak into his soul and revived all those feelings from the past. She hadn’t been the only one to cry for a future denied.

He’d thought the pain of his mother’s abandonment couldn’t be matched but he’d been wrong.

No way could he revisit that dark place from which he had surfaced and propelled himself into the one he occupied now. He slammed an iron door against the weakness of a tenderness that was trying to push its way into him.

‘But the past is the past. Tears will never change it.’

‘Leo…’

‘Go sit. I’ll tidy all this mess.’

‘I… Leo…’

‘We need to leave this alone, Cassie. We need to stop picking away at it. This isn’t where we are now.’ But his voice was just a little unsteady and he stood back to thread his fingers through his hair.

Cassie nodded and did as he said even though she could still feel the searing pain of hearing him slam shut the door on things inside her that felt raw and unfinished. She could still hear the harshness of his response, the absolute, painful sincerity in his voice.

There would never be any point appealing to a side of him that might not have shut down completely, because he didn’t have that side left. The past was a subject she would never slip into again.

She was back in control by the time he’d cleared away the broken bits to replace them with new mugs and this time no accident happened when he set the coffee in front of them.

The atmosphere had settled into something approaching normality and for that she was grateful.

He might be bitter in retrospect, but he had moved on.

He wasn’t hung up on a past neither of them could change.

‘Will you leave tomorrow?’ She cleared her throat and shot him a quick look from under her lashes. ‘Like I said, I’m due to go see Mum, and then there’s a small break with the catering before things pick back up in a couple of days, mostly with office parties.’

‘Clothes are being delivered by ten this evening,’ Leo murmured, ‘And then I think I’ll play the devoted fiancé and come with you to see your mother.’

‘No need.’ Her voice was more terse than she’d intended but, after that crying jag and feeling his arms encircling her, she just wanted some time out to recover some of her sapped emotional strength.

‘Very peculiar if I didn’t, wouldn’t you say?’

‘She has no idea you’re here.’

‘You can tell her. Think of the awkwardness if she found out afterwards. What if the kind, helpful person who delivers my clothes recognises me and word gets round? Your mother shouldn’t belatedly find out that she’s missed me because I couldn’t be bothered to visit her.’

Cassie frowned. ‘It just feels as though…as if…’

‘As if what?’ Leo queried. ‘Play with fire and you might end up getting burnt, Cassie. You got found out in a lie and decided that it wouldn’t do any harm to take the easy way out by making up a story about me, thinking that it would be a safe bet because I wouldn’t be around.

You could say what you wanted about me, turn me into the villain of the piece and I would never be any the wiser. ’

Put like that, it sounded pretty awful, but there wasn’t much there she could disagree with. ‘Not necessarily a villain…’

She’d roped him into a charade for her mother’s benefit and, now that he’d found out, he’d understandably come to find out what was going on.

Much to her heartfelt relief, he’d decided to go with the flow when he could have demanded she tell Mary the truth.

Underneath the tough exterior, there was a core of empathy that had moved him to see just how much it meant to her that she not hurt her mother if she could help it.

It was the same empathy she had felt wrapped around her when she had cried against him—a weakness that wouldn’t happen again.

‘It just might be easier to get rid of you if you never actually put in a physical appearance,’ she said truthfully.

Leo glanced down.

He had to try hard not to burst out laughing.

She’d always had a way of making him less serious, less cold, less driven.

And, more than that, making him feel ten feet tall, as she had when she’d sobbed in his arms, although he wasn’t inclined to find that amusing. It had been disturbing, if anything.

Right now, however, her honest statement made his lips twitch.

He also couldn’t fail to appreciate the gaping difference between Cassie and the ex-girlfriend currently caught up in a stalking game.

One wanted him to conveniently disappear, the other would have pinned him to the floor with super-glue so that he couldn’t move.

‘You have a way with words, Cass. You make it sound as though what you wanted was a puppet you could create a story around before consigning him to the scrap heap. I almost feel I should apologise for showing up and spoiling your fun.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I’ll try to be underwhelming.’

‘I don’t think that’s possible, Leo,’ she said without thinking.

‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ he murmured.

With his dark eyes pinned to her face, he felt a familiar stirring, an awakening of desire that was now off-limits.

It was easy to recognise just why anything further between them would be a real complication.

Her softness reached into him, stirring up all sorts of things.

They’d both felt something when he’d held her, but had both shied away from it.

But his libido still had some catching up to do with his common sense. He thought of her as he’d seen her in bed, naked, willing and wanting him.

He thought, too, about seeing her out of bed—laughing with her head flung back, frowning at something he’d said, teasing him every time she thought he might be getting a little pompous.

Those thoughts were a lot more unsettling, and he refocused on her, but this time there was genuine curiosity in his expression.

‘Did your parents approve of the last one?’ he asked and he could tell that she wasn’t following him. ‘The ex of yours who failed to make the grade in bed.’

‘That’s…’

‘One hundred percent my business, bearing in mind we’re engaged.’

‘But we’re not.’

‘What if your mother asks me something I should know? Granted, I might be able to give her your favourite colour or your favourite annoying reality TV show when you were nineteen, but what if she decides to talk about the dearly departed boyfriend who couldn’t cut it?’

Leo knew that he was brazenly fishing but he was unapologetic about that.

‘You know my favourite colour?’

‘It was hard not to when you wanted lilac trainers for your birthday present, and a matching lilac sports top, and white ankle socks with lilac trims. What was wrong with the guy?’

‘Nothing was wrong with him, Leo. We just weren’t on the same page.’

‘Next you’ll tell me that he was perfectly nice , which is the most damning word in the English vocabulary. We’ll have to get our stories straight about this so-called relationship of ours and how it mysteriously developed off her radar. What have you told your mother, exactly?’

‘As little as possible,’ Cassie admitted.

He remembered those lilac trainers… He knew her favourite colour…

Something inside her warmed and melted just a little.

Maybe he wasn’t doing this just because he had a kind streak.

Maybe he hadn’t agreed in the hope that sex might be on offer as an added bonus.

Could he be here because something deep inside him had actually missed her, something he could barely consciously acknowledge?

Was it buried underneath all the lessons he’d learnt from what had happened between them?

Of course not…but her mind still played with the fantasy. She knew it was crazy to think like this but her thoughts grew wings and flew, and she let it happen. The memory of those strong arms made her head spin and her heart race with crazy wishful thinking.

At least for a short, indulgent few seconds then she reminded herself that he wasn’t going to stick around, finding excuses to be in her company because he’d missed her.

He’d made that perfectly clear. There wasn’t a trunk of clothes stashed in the boot of his car just in case.

She surfaced at the sound of his dark, velvety, amused voice.

‘Yes, I suppose when it came to the back story, the minimum was always going to work best, bearing in mind you would have killed me off in record time. I guess you would have needed to leave some leg room to tire of my philandering ways as I flew back and forth around the globe, but not much more than that.’

‘I would never have killed you off! I wouldn’t have turned you into an actual villain!’