Page 125 of Modern Romance October 2025 5-8

Both Luca Rossetti and Amelia Gallo had done so, making not only a lifestyle but a career out of messy divorces and relationships, all under the heated gaze of a very public spotlight. A spotlight he had grown up under and been burned by more than a few times. But like any adversary, Enzo had eventually bent the spotlight to his will and now it was a tool that he used, cloaking himself in it and using it to his advantage.

And with that thought, Enzo stalked back into the belly of the boat, still naked but feeling immensely better.

Despite the fact that Enzo Rossetti had disappeared into the depths of his obscenely expensive yacht a full minute ago, Erin wasstillholding the binoculars to her eyes, frozen, irrevocably marked by the sight of his naked form. And Enzo Rossetti had a lot of...flesh. Toned, and tanned and—

‘Erin, is he still there?’ her friend Samara asked through the Bluetooth headphone in Erin’s ear.

‘No,’ Erin replied, shaking off the afterburn of the images seared into her mind’s eye. She cleared her throat before dropping into the seat on the small balcony of the hotel room in Capri that she’d booked just two days before, and puffed her cheeks out with the breath of air that had become stuck in her lungs.

Oh god.She was never going to be able to pull this off.

‘You can do it,’ Samara insisted, as if she’d heard Erin’s innermost thoughts.

‘Sam, he’s six years older than me, a whole volleyball team more experienced than me, and he’s literally everything I dislike in a man.’

‘You don’t have to like him to marry him.’ Samara’s reply sounded defiant, almost too defiant, and Erin cursed herself for forgetting Samara’s own impending nuptials, to a man she’d never even seen, let alone knew enough to like.

‘Has Gallo been in touch?’ Samara asked, staving off Erin’s apology.

‘No,’ Erin replied, pushing aside the newspaper she’d picked up that morning, with pictures of Enzo and two women splashed across the front page. ‘And I don’t think he will be until either I marry Enzo Rossetti or give up on Charterhouse.’

‘Which you’ll never do...’

‘Which I’ll never do,’ Erin confirmed, looking out at the superyacht moored just outside of the marina. It was obscene, ostentatious and near offensive as far as she was concerned. It was rumoured that Enzo didn’t possess a single piece of property. That he spent all of his time flitting from one hotel room to another, and that even though he’d spent every summer since his eighteenth birthday on some form of luxury boat, he couldn’t even be bothered to buy one for himself.

Wasteful.

Enzo was wasteful and Erin didnotapprove. Which had been firmly put down on the ‘For’ column of her For and Against list, when she had been debating with Sam over whether to agree to Gio Gallo’s hare-brained scheme. In her mind’s eye she saw the list again:

FOR

He is amoral.

He is careless.

He is wasteful.

Ownership of Charterhouse.

AGAINST

It’s wrong.

I can’t do it.

Sam had, quite rightly, pointed out that whether Erin could do it or not was not a reason for or against, but merely something to be worked around.

‘So we’re sticking to the plan then?’ Sam asked.

‘Yes, we’re sticking to the plan,’ Erin replied.

‘Good. I like a plan, and yours is sound,’ Sam insisted, the support and confidence she offered to Erin more welcome than Sam could ever imagine.

Erin had discovered the invitation for Samara’s network, Conxion, in her email inbox in the second year of university, just as her sober-driver app had begun to take off. Working flat out on the app and studying for her bachelor’s in business management hadn’t left room for making friends. And just when Erin had been at her loneliest, over two hundred miles away from home and her mother, Conxion and the women in the network had made her feel seen and supported.

Linking business-minded women across the globe of all different nationalities, ages, and experience levels for support, problem solving, and the opportunity to see other women doing what they were doing, had been a literal lifeline.

A lifeline that she was using even now to help with the plan she had come up with, just like one of her beloved detective fiction heroes.