Page 104 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4
Everything had unraveled, been upended , and she might think it had needed that, but he did not think so. Upending confused things. His focus, his penance, was complicated now. Confusing. Instead of the one guiding light through a changed life.
He needed to get back to his cabin. To his penance and solace. He needed to find that center of pain instead of the enjoyment he found in her. It had all gone too far, and he needed to stop before he hurt her as badly as he’d hurt everyone he’d loved before he’d known better.
For some, love was a balm. He thought for his parents it had been. Love had likely saved them from being awful people, even if it hadn’t helped them be good parents.
But for him, love had only ever meant confusion and pain. Deep emotions that the only way to deal with had been to separate. To isolate. So he didn’t disappoint. So he didn’t get cut loose.
He was meant to be alone. To stand on his own two feet. To stay far away from people who would be hurt by him.
Amelia would so easily be hurt by him.
And still, he did not return to his cabin in the morning or the next or the next.
He spent his days at the castello, helping Amelia prepare for a damned ball he didn’t want anything to do with.
Yet day after day, he looked at pictures of his parents, of balls past, of the castello as it had looked in his childhood.
Day after day he was reminded of all he had lost, and it was supposed to be pain and punishment and what he deserved.
But something was happening inside him. Something was twisting those memories. Less like bricks and more like soft stones to be brought out and touched, their smooth, shiny exterior meant to comfort instead of weigh down.
Amelia spoke of next year . She spoke of future balls. Worst of all, she included him in that future . She spoke of how their “partnership” would need to change in the new year. She wanted to focus on events at the castello. He was going to have to take on more responsibility.
She spoke as if he was just going to stay . And he did not correct her. Not because he planned on staying, but because he did not know how to articulate how wrong she was about everything.
She had this rosy, happy version of a future in her head. Just as she seemed to have a rosy, happy version of the past there. She seemed determined to look on the positive side of everything , and he had never been around someone like that.
Even her father had not been full of optimism . Diego thought that was why he’d handled Bartolo as a slightly overbearing “assistant” as well as he had. They’d both had a rather nihilistic view of what the world was.
But Bartolo had thought in the face of that, you had to be the center of good in your life. That the world did not matter. It mattered what you did within the world.
I killed everyone I loved, including you, in that world. Then defiled your daughter. So.
A tiny bell tinkled somewhere, interrupting Diego’s thoughts. A prickle went up his neck, a ridiculous feeling of…something. He shook it away. Amelia was standing over by the tree, fastening little bows to the limbs. No doubt there was some bell there in the tree she’d rustled with her work.
Tonight she was dressed in some soft, casual set in the color of holly berries. She buzzed around the castello like a top, as tomorrow the first guests for the ball would arrive. They would host a large holiday dinner. The following night would be the ball.
Her energy wasn’t so much nervous as a determined kind of excitement. It did not remind him of his childhood, full of his mother’s anxious meltdowns over napkins or RSVPs. Amelia reminded him of a determined bird—she might flit from one branch to another, but it was always with purpose.
But he could not understand her current purpose—there were enough ribbons on the damn tree to cover all of Italy. He poured some wine into a glass and walked over to her, urging her to take it.
She accepted the glass and stepped back to admire her work. “I don’t know if that’s enough.”
“Well, I shall distract anyone who tries to count them.”
She smiled up at him, bright and warm. “My hero. Or you will be, if you wear it.”
She was the queen of these moments. Where a lancing pain, a horrible black cloud of all the ways he could not be the man she seemed to think he was, like a hero , were never quite strong enough to make him step away, because she immediately changed the subject.
No amount of having her dulled this ache. No amount of release seemed to change that she felt different from every sexual conquest who had come before. That something deep had lodged in his chest and he could not eradicate it.
But pain was the currency he lived his life by now, so as long as it hurt, he supposed it was not the worst thing that he stayed. Pain had to be right, didn’t it? Even if it was punctuated by a strange feeling, something soft and settled—contentment, he might have called it.
If he was planning on staying longer than the new year. But he was not.
“I will not be wearing a Babbo Natale hat,” he said darkly.
Mischief twinkled in her eyes. “Come now. Have some fun.”
Fun. Even before the accident, his idea of fun had never been this. And what he might have called fun was less about happiness or joy and more about drowning all those complexities inside him.
Drowning had always felt far more comfortable than struggling to the surface. A realization that had all his hard-held beliefs about pain crumbling a bit at the edges.
So he shoved it away. He would not change. Changing was weakness.
Only punishment was strength.
So why are you still here?
He stared down at Amelia, beautiful and happy. She was why he was still here, and it was wrong. It would have to change, but…not yet. “Only if you’ve a La Befana costume in the works for January, tesoro .”
“I will have my warts and broomstick ready to go.”
The laugh rumbled through him, foreign and light, but anything light, warm, joyful was followed by the icy needled barbs of realization that he did not deserve it.
Alone, he could immediately seek more pain, more penance. With her, she seemed to sense it. Anticipate it and find some way to soothe it. A touch, a smile, a kind word. A kiss, a caress, more.
He should have left then. He knew that. He was getting to the point where he’d told himself it would need to end—where good outweighed the bad he deserved.
But he did not leave or push her away. Instead, when she pressed her mouth to his, soft and sweet, he let himself be soothed.
They had come together in many different ways, but gentleness permeated this moment. Something soft and fragile, and though he knew he did not deserve to touch it, he gave himself over to the need to tend it, worship it.
His touch was as soft as her skin, his kisses as gentle as her spirit. He undressed her with a tenderness he had never felt and would have been terrified of if he could think beyond the drugging honey of her mouth.
She unbuttoned his shirt without hurry, pushed it off his shoulders as if they had the rest of their lives to sink into this moment, into each other.
He knew they didn’t, couldn’t, but for a moment he let himself pretend.
He lowered her onto the rug, the sparkle of Christmas lights danced over her perfect skin. He pressed a delicate kiss to each refraction of light. Her fingers threaded through her hair as she murmured words of encouragement.
When he entered her, it was on a merged sigh that felt like finally .
The physical pleasure bloomed with something else.
Moving together in a slow, sensual dance.
No thought to finding that last release, only the slow, unfurling blossom of a pleasure that went behind body to body, desire born of the sweet perfection of her body.
It had all become more, so much more.
She sighed his name, crested on a delicate wave. And still he did not rush or hurry. He tasted her, rolled with her so that she was atop him, taking her own pace and pleasure. A sensual angel, and all his. Only his.
His own release came on a rush of pleasure, of something deeper and alarming. It twined inside him, and when he realized that it was an emotion he could not label, he could not accept, it became pain.
It was a danger to feel this. To allow it. It was pain to have all this, all of her , open up something inside him.
Pain was the price.
He would accept it until it was not.