Page 9 of Modern Romance July 2025 #4-8

Lizzie was immediately ashamed of the uncharitable thought.

Poor Deb was tragically not here to defend herself, and Lizzie was no longer twelve.

Though even after all this time, she could still see Deb’s look of triumph when she had handed back the princess doll that had been in Lizzie’s Christmas stocking, not her own… with its golden tresses hacked off.

A fiancée?

Find someone?

His brow furrowed in bemusement as he struggled to make sense of her sudden change in attitude. She seemed relieved.

‘I’m sure she, your fiancée, must be very upset, but it’s easy to put right.’

And until then her own life was where exactly?

It would be a story, wouldn’t it?

And she would be at the centre of that story?

Her nightmare was being at the centre of anything. Her publishers had been incredibly frustrated when she had refused to do any publicity, but of course in the end the mystery—Who is this woman?—and the ensuing speculation had sold it, which, as her agent had told her, was all that mattered.

Fascinated, he watched the play of emotion across her expressive face. ‘I’m not too happy discussing my marriage plans in the open,’ he proceeded cautiously.

If he immediately corrected her mistaken belief that this situation was about a misprint, which appeared to be the conclusion she had jumped to, he could see them spending the night in this damned garage with her arguing the odds. ‘How about we take this upstairs?’

Take this upstairs…

She brought her lashes down in a protective screen as her wilful imagination lent those words a very different meaning.

She shook her head, willing the guilty fire in her cheeks to cool. ‘Is that really necessary?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘Oh, all right, then.’ She huffed out an eloquent sigh. ‘I wish I could start this day all over again.’ If she had she would not have got out of bed. While she liked to think she didn’t run away from tough situations, burying her head in a duvet held a lot of appeal at that moment.

She flinched at the light touch of his hand on the small of her back and tilted her head upwards. The hand was no longer in contact with her skin but she could feel the warmth, which the logical part of her knew was an illusion. Even so she allowed that warmth to guide her into the lift.

She didn’t say a word as the lift swished silently upwards to his apartment, but he decided he preferred her sly digs and outright antagonism to this silence.

He was convinced now that she had not been party to any of this, unless she was an award-winning actress.

It might not have been his doing, and he was as much a victim of his grandfather’s machinations as she was, but he felt a stab of inconvenient guilt anyway.

His grandfather wouldn’t give a damn about collateral damage so long as he got what he wanted, but her father must have been complicit. He had to be.

The private lift opened directly into the sort of apartment she had imagined someone like Adonis Aetos would call home.

Dizzying high ceilings, pale wooden floors, acres of glass with a view she wasn’t interested in, blonde, bland and expensive, she silently decided, her knees folding as she was pushed into a chair.

A glass with something amber in it appeared, and, not looking at the person delivering it, she swallowed it all in one gulp, ignored the burning sensation, and held out her hand mutely for a refill.

After a pause the refill, or at least a small one, arrived, and she disposed of that.

‘I don’t actually drink spirits,’ she mentioned after the fact.

His mobile lips twitched. Strangely she was the sort of woman who made you want to laugh and hug her at the same time. He’d never been a hugger and he couldn’t see any man hugging her without being able to resist the invitation of that lush mouth.

‘No, I can see that.’

‘I’m quite hot.’ She struggled to pull off her outer layer, a heavy Guernsey sweater, before dropping it and subsiding in her seat.

Adonis watched as she folded herself into the chair, the action revealing a gap of bare flesh between the floral tunic that had ridden up dramatically and her jeans, which had slipped down to hip level, the belt appeared to be the only thing holding them up and it was cinched in as tight as it would go.

Either she had lost a lot of weight or she habitually wore clothes two sizes too large.

He suspected the latter.

The busily patterned fabric of the tunic pulled tight across centrefold breasts—not that he had personally ever seen a centrefold.

Did they even exist any more? The bare area extended from the edge of her ribcage to just below her waist and the section of smooth skin had a pearlescent quality.

Her waist was so narrow that he found himself speculating that he could span it with his hands.

Her body, the bits he’d seen, were a total revelation.

The woman hid this body, very successfully, in a world where… He expelled a deep sigh and tore his gaze free. Who knew? barely covered his shock or his… He filtered the thoughts in his head and chose confusion—it was easier to admit to than arousal.

How was this even possible?

The phrase kept playing in his head like the needle on an old-fashioned vinyl record stuck in a groove.

‘Sorry, I lost it there for a moment there. Things caught up with me, but I’m totally fine now,’ she promised, fixing him with a solemn, slightly glazed, sincere stare.

‘Your fiancée, she must be a bit…cross? Tell her I’m sorry, though actually I really haven’t done anything, have I?

I’m a victim…’ The discovery came with a grimace of distaste.

‘God, don’t you hate being thought of as a victim?

I do. I think I might have drunk that…?’

‘Brandy.’

She nodded sagely. ‘I thought so. Nice. It stings but so does whisky, I think, and I might have swallowed it a bit too quickly. Let’s be honest, it was wasted on me.

I’m more of a prosecco and soda girl or maybe a white wine spritzer.

Don’t touch a cocktail—they are lethal, don’t you think?

There’s a lot of snobbery about alcohol, I think.

You do know…’ she added, noticing the clinging leather she was sitting in but not his fascinated expression and thinking, I have to stop talking ‘…this is a really awful chair, and I bet it cost you a fortune, but they saw you coming. All style over substance. I’m really going to stop talking now… Can I have a coffee? Maybe several.’

‘That might be a good idea. I’ll organise it.’

He returned a few moments later minus his leather jacket and carrying a tray with a coffee pot and cups.

‘Oh, my…!’ she said, staring at his white tee shirt.

‘Is there a problem?’

‘Oh, no, you just have… You must work out,’ she said, her eyes fixed on his biceps.

‘Upon occasion.’

After several coffees interspersed by a few intervals when she fought off the impulse to close her eyes, Lizzie tuned back in.

‘Do you have anything to eat—a sandwich maybe? I’m starving.’

Adonis watched as his visitor—or should he call her his future wife?—tucked into a cheese sandwich, the production of which had exhausted his culinary skills and would have won the scorn of Dmitri, who was due to come back today after a week’s downtime.

Dmitri filled his freezer with edible and healthy things.

He did a lot of other things that Adonis missed when the older man was absent.

After Dmitri had quit his job as Head of Security to help his wife care for their autistic son, Adonis had persuaded him to return and take on a more wide-ranging, flexible remit.

There were few people that Adonis trusted implicitly and Dmitri was one of them.

Considering the fact that he and Adonis’s PA were married, Dmitri already had access to Adonis’s diary—the role was almost a job share and the couple had complementary skills.

Initially the older man had been reluctant to accept what he had suspected was a charitable non-role, but he had soon realised after a short trial period that Adonis really did need him.

The line between employer and friend had become invisible.

Next week Dmitri was sifting through the candidates for a new member of Adonis’s security team, today he was meant to be coming here, officially to discuss the forthcoming trip to California but Adonis knew he would be trying to persuade him to attend his parents’ anniversary bash.

He’d fail.

‘Sorry, I can’t drink,’ Lizzie admitted, self-consciously brushing the crumbs off her upper lip. ‘But you have to admit… Your poor fiancée. You have to sort this out.’

‘I don’t have a fiancée.’

She blinked. Her voice, which he had noticed was warm and throaty when she wasn’t screeching at him, sounded hoarse as she stammered, ‘I—I don’t understand. Why…? H-how?’

‘The why is fairly simple: my grandfather thinks I need a wife. He decided to…intervene.’

Simple, he said. It didn’t sound simple to Lizzie. Aware that she was in danger of hyperventilating, she tried to slow her breathing but it was outside her control. Her sense of confused outrage was escalating, not receding.

‘How? Your grandfather did this!’

The heaving bosom, the narrowed, outraged blue stare that fixed on him like a laser—literally nothing could have been farther removed from the angry gaze he remembered at that dismal dinner party. It was focused on hating him in a much more personal way.

‘Well, I don’t have a signed confession, but his fingerprints are all over it. Do you need your inhaler?’

Her response to his concern was devoid of any gratitude; instead, there was plenty of exasperation. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, relax. I have been managing my asthma since I was ten years old. I’m fine. Your grandfather, really…that is just a…a wicked thing to do.’

‘Possibly…’ There was a fractional hesitation before he added, ‘But he is dying and I am actually quite fond of the old bastard.’

He gave a bleak smile as his magnificent shoulders lifted in an accepting shrug.