Page 124 of Modern Romance October 2025 5-8

He groaned, turning onto his back and in doing so, retrieving his arm from beneath the blond-haired woman lying beside him to fling it across his eyes. The sun had dared to slip through the cracks in the blinds that hadn’t been fully pulled down over the windows and was now creeping, unwanted, into his suite.

Wincing and restless, which only made the thumping worse, he turned onto his other side, only to come face-to-face with a brunette.

Svetlana. Agata.

Had there been a third? He really couldn’t remember. He’d met them at a bar in the marina last night and they’d cajoled him into taking them back with him. Although, he conceded, it wasn’t as if he’d taken that much convincing.

Raising his head, he risked a squint at his surroundings.

A bottle of champagne balanced precariously on a sideboard beneath a Renoir, a glass half full of whiskey perched beside it. A bra hung on the corner of a Matisse, his briefs directly belowanotherbra lying over it. A feminine sigh fell from kiss-bruised lips and he felt the blonde behind him snuggling deeper into his side as the brunette before him slipped a slender foot around his calf.

Normally, he wouldn’t have minded the continuation of the mutually pleasurable pursuits of the night before, but unusually he had things to do—all of which were most especially unpleasurable.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

This time he couldn’t be sure whether the thumping came from the hangover, or thoughts of his father. The man had been trying to reach him more insistently than usual, which meant one of two things. Either he was looking for money, or he wanted to tell Enzo that he was getting married. Again.

With that disturbing thought, Enzo raised himself up on to his elbows, unsettling both of his companions into varying states of complaint. He smoothed his palm over a thigh possessively hooked over his hip, flattered but not tempted.

Cries of ‘not yet,’ and ‘come back to bed’ fell on deaf ears as he threw back the covers and removed himself from the handmade larger-than-king-sized bed and stalked, naked as the day he was born, out of the room.

The need to clear his head drove him down corridors lined with small round portholes, letting an almost unforgivable level of light in. Sunglasses. He should have brought his sunglasses. His feet padded on the warm varnished teak as he passed several members of staff, all of whom were familiar enough with Enzo Rossetti to be nonplussed at their boss’s lack of attire and simply continued to maintain their gaze at eye level.

He was a man of no small ego, yet in the matter of his appearance, Enzo Rossetti had every right to be confident. At six foot two, broad-shouldered, thin hipped, with smooth skin that tanned easily and deeply, and dark hair that someone had once poetically described as the colour of a raven, the man was hard to ignore. And while he might have been known for his excess and largesse, when it came to his body Enzo may as well have been sculpted with surgical-like precision in the vein of the Italian grand masters whose work graced the Galleria dell’Accademia in Firenze. Women had, in fact, been known to moan in orgasmic delight just from the sight of the musculature of his backside.

Continuing up the stairs into the main quarters and passing a living area already spotless despite the extensive partying from the night before, Enzo stepped out onto the back deck of the superyacht that was his home for the summer and inhaled deeply.

He cast a lascivious gaze over the beautiful Sorrento coastline that was more familiar to him than perhaps any other place in the entire world. The colours so rich, so vibrant it was as if a painter had been overly zealous with their palette. Despite the jagged and rough hillside, villages clung defiantly to the coastline that was one of Italy’s most famous tourist destinations.

In all his extensive travels,thiswas the place that called to him the most. The unique smell of the Tyrrhenian Sea whispering of a heart home that he’d never actually had. The scents of the salt from the ocean and citrus from theSfusato Amalfitano—the elongated bright yellow lemon particular to the region—promising something undefinable that he yearned for in his deepest veins.

He opened his eyes and tried to peer down the coast to his next destination, Positano. Usually he would have moved on by now, but an old friend from Oxford was throwing a party on the island of Capri and had convinced him to attend.

‘You can’tnotcome, Rossetti. You’re the main attraction! Girls come from all over just to get a glimpse of the Ravenous Rossetti!’ Marcus had whined.

Enzo had flinched at the moniker that was his father’s, not his.

He walked to the edge of the deck free from the safety rail, the area often used to access the number of jet skis, eFoil boards, or the speedboat. However, in this moment Enzo had nothing so complicated in mind and, taking a deep breath, dived straight into the frigid depths of the sea.

Shock drenched his body in shivers of icy heat and burning cold. His heart pumped frantically as it struggled with the oxygen locked in his lungs. It had become a competition with himself, to see if he could last longer than previously, the pressure building and building until he finally propelled himself upwards, breaking the surface with a gasp for air. Enzo flicked his hair back from his face and wiped away the droplets clinging to his eyelashes and mouth.

He felt the heavy gaze of Agata—no, the brunette wasSvetlana—and gave his most charming smile before closing the distance to the side of the boat with an easy three strokes.

He hauled himself from the water onto the deck and reached for the fresh towel already being handed to him by a member of staff. Another held a tray on which sat a Bloody Mary with enough of a kick to worry the World Health Organisation, though it was spice rather than alcohol that provided the powerful punch this morning.

‘Bella mia, must you go already?’

Svetlana nodded. ‘Sorry,amore mio, Agata has a meeting at nine and I have to be at the consulate by eleven.’

‘You’re happy for Jensen to return you to the mainland?’ he asked.

‘Naturalmente,’ Agata said, blowing him a kiss that he caught with much affectation in one hand.

The sound of their laughter tickled his ears as he headed back to his suite, checking his watch to ensure he had time to shower before his phone call with Dubai.

While most of the world believed—and in fact, Enzo worked hard to make it so that they did—that he lived off whatever money his parents deemed fit to give him, Enzo Rossetti had his own, startlingly impressive income.

However, it benefited him to keep his investment company hidden behind several layers of obscure shell companies and false figureheads, primarily in order to keep his fortune away from the parents whose pursuit of money was almost as vicious as the pursuit of one-upping the other. If there was one thing Enzo hated above all else, it was the pursuit of material things above common decency.