Page 12 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4

CHAPTER FIVE

B UNNY’S SMOOTH brOW furrowed and then eased again. Sebastian was studying her with frowning annoyance and her tummy turned over sickly. She decided to be honest. ‘I forgot about them.’

‘You… forgot ?’ he shot back at her in disbelief, studying her intently. Could anyone possibly be that honest?

Sebastian had little experience of such open behaviour.

He was accustomed to lies and half-truths at best. Her candour had blown his anger back on him.

He was in a volatile mood and thoroughly unsettled because his memory was returning in snatches.

He had recalled being on a surgical rotation at a hospital, so he must have completed his medical degree if he had still been training.

But he had also recalled burning the candle at both ends while he struggled to solve a tech security problem.

Clearly, his once wholehearted approach to medicine had faltered at some point.

Bunny nodded vigorously. ‘In the storm, the raft was pitching about and I was trying to keep my balance and watch yours as well. I was also throwing up a lot and terrified. Reggie never mentioned the flares or told me how to use them.’

‘It’s simple. You point and fire,’ Sebastian incised curtly, exasperated that they might just have missed their chance of an immediate rescue. ‘There may have been people on land or shipping nearby.’

‘But there just as easily might not have been,’ she pointed out in her own defence as she set out the food. ‘This island was the first land I saw. Reggie only trained me on how to launch the raft. He never showed me the equipment on it.’

His ebony brows lowered. ‘That is as may be but common sense should’ve urged you to—’

‘Well, it didn’t, no point crying over what’s already behind us,’ Bunny said in a deliberately upbeat tone, determined not to have her oversight become the focus for a useless argument. ‘Now you’ve got them to use here at the right moment.’

Sebastian glowered at her. ‘I think —’

‘No, I don’t want to hear any more about it,’ Bunny told him with brisk finality. ‘I plead guilty to a mistake. Now sit down and eat your breakfast.’

Sebastian compressed his wide mobile lips like a grump, but he settled down at the table to lift his coffee. ‘You don’t like confrontation. That doesn’t work with me.’

‘We’re both trying the best we can to get through this. Let’s not make mountains out of molehills.’

His eyes glittered like black ice. ‘The homely cliché only sets my teeth on edge.’

‘Sorry.’ She was disconcerted by that sudden chill in the air and she addressed her attention to her plate.

She would’ve liked to have screamed at him about that horrendous, terrifying night on the raft during the storm, when she might as well have been alone.

So, she hadn’t been perfect but she had kept them both safe long enough to reach land.

‘But you have to accept that I’m not a seawoman or whatever you call it.

Reggie gave me my first job on a boat and my only experience of sailing and it would take torture and intimidation to get me on any kind of a boat again! ’

He sprang upright and cleared the table. ‘I love being on the water. It relaxes me.’

Bunny said nothing, although she was tempted to remind him that he had been protected from the ordeal by his comatose condition. She wiped down the table before laying down the jeans to cut them.

Sebastian startled her with an intervention because he didn’t like the atmosphere he had created.

He didn’t like arguing or even trying to argue with her.

He didn’t like the distance that was threatening to stretch between them and, in reaction, he curved his hands to her hips and carried her into the opulent reception room, dropping down on the sectional with her splayed across his thighs.

‘What are you doing? I was about to cut those jeans down.’

‘They’ll take a rain check… I’m not as forgiving,’ Sebastian contended. ‘Let’s wind back a few minutes. If you’d still been in bed when I returned, I’d have climbed back into bed with you. If you’d been a little more receptive, I’d have stripped you in the kitchen.’

‘Sebastian,’ she argued, mortified because she could fully imagine either scenario. Unlike her, he was very upfront in his attitude to sex.

Without warning, his passionate mouth crushed hers with hungry urgency and her lips parted, instinctively allowing him access. He lifted his head again, dark eyes fiercely intent on her face. ‘You want to stop this? Say so now.’

Small fingers reached up to his stubbled jawline and smoothed, her luminous green eyes wide and troubled because she didn’t want to wind him up.

She wanted him to calm down, although she was still wounded by his criticism of her actions during the storm.

‘I don’t know what I want yet. We were in that bed before I registered that anything had started. ’

In answer to that response, Sebastian swung her off him to set her down with care beside him. ‘It’s your choice. I’m on fire for you but if you would prefer to call a halt, I won’t put pressure on you to change your mind.’

‘I’ve only ever been in one relationship,’ she admitted unevenly, embarrassed to admit that lack of experience.

‘And you say you don’t do relationships at all.

I’m not like that. But I do know that what we’ve got is just for now and is probably only happening because we’re stuck here alone together. ’

‘We don’t need to have this discussion. But please don’t start imagining that you’re falling in love with me.’

Her eyes flew wide. ‘Why would you say that to me? Am I acting like that?’

‘No.’ Sebastian vented his breath in an impatient hiss and then sighed heavily, thinking back to his unfortunate experience with Ariana. ‘But once a girl I looked on like a sister decided she was in love with me and became obsessive about it.’

Immediately, Bunny was listening. ‘Who was she?’

‘Ariana, the kid sister of one of my best friends. She travelled here with her brother and me. I was eighteen. She was a year younger. There was nothing between us and never had been. Her brother thought it was funny…just a silly infatuation, but he insisted that I had to be frank with her and tell her that I wasn’t interested.

I did and she took an overdose and almost died. ’

Bunny flinched, clear green eyes flying to his in dismay and sympathy. ‘Oh, no…’

‘When Ariana recovered, she was depressed and her family put her in a clinical support unit because they were afraid she would try again. I felt responsible even though I hadn’t encouraged her.

I may not remember the last few years but I’m always careful to set that one rule if I see the same woman more than once.

If you should ever feel that you can’t live without me, walk away fast,’ he breathed in a raw undertone.

‘Because I’m a born and bred loner, Bunny. I don’t do the couple thing. ‘

‘Okay.’ Bunny wasn’t sure what she wanted. After Tristram, she had decided that it would be a long time until she got seriously involved with anyone again, had dimly pictured enjoying light, fun relationships.

But fate had instead thrown up Sebastian. The force of his personality could be overwhelming.

‘I’m on fire for you.’

The very concept of being desired to that extent by Sebastian sent a naked flame racing through her bloodstream.

But, just like him, she didn’t want any big discussions or complications.

There wasn’t a nice, neat label for the attraction between them.

Lust? She winced but maybe it was only that, yet so many other feelings surged in her in Sebastian’s radius.

He was so wary, so damaged, she sensed, and she wouldn’t have been human had she not wanted to know why.

It wasn’t solely his experience with an unhappy girl who had fixated on him while he was still a boy, she reckoned.

‘Fancy a swim?’ she prompted abruptly.

Her suggestion broke the tension. On the beach, Sebastian stripped off everything and laughed when she got into the water in the shirt and the material ballooned up around her. ‘Want to borrow my boxers?’ he teased.

And she agonised over what she truly wanted because she wanted him, didn’t even need to think about it.

Did that mean that she was already too keen?

Was she asking for trouble when she already knew he was going to walk away?

Or was she worrying about tomorrow when today was really all she should be concentrating on?

A short-term future only, she decided. If she wanted him to back off, he would, but was that what she wanted? She didn’t think so.

She watched him in the water, lithe as an otter, unexpectedly graceful for all his size.

Backed by lush vegetation, the sunlit beach was sublime.

In the distance a slender column of black smoke swirled up from the little bonfire.

It hadn’t attracted anyone’s attention yet, she noted, nor had their painstakingly made SOS messages on the beach.

‘You didn’t finish the story. What happened to Ariana afterwards?’ she asked.

‘I haven’t remembered that far back yet, but she did have another episode at university and she dropped out.’

Bunny grimaced as she leant back against the wooden pier.

‘Why do you take on that guilt? You didn’t cause her problems. I would assume she was troubled beforehand even if her family didn’t realise that and families often don’t.

If it hadn’t been you who became her focus, it would’ve been some other boy. It wasn’t your fault.’

‘It felt like it,’ Sebastian countered grimly.

Bunny changed the subject. ‘How much wood is there left to keep that bonfire going?’

‘I’m reluctant to start felling trees,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t want to do irreparable damage here. I’ve already combed through most of the undergrowth and removed logs. A nature lover like the owner of that house wouldn’t like trees being felled.’

‘When will you use the flares?’