Page 14 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4
CHAPTER SIX
‘I COULD MAKE COOKIES ,’ Bunny bargained ten days later.
‘Cookies aren’t nutritious,’ Sebastian countered, sliding a glance over her slender frame as she sat beside him on the pier with her legs dangling. Her delicate features had thinned because they were both losing weight and it worried him. ‘Let’s conserve the supplies we have.’
‘Maybe not but cookies are comforting,’ Bunny argued. ‘I still remember making them with my grandmother.’
And without the smallest fanfare a sound rather like a click went off inside Sebastian’s brain.
Click… his grandmother, Loukia was dead.
For a split second he felt sick as he remembered that.
Bang, all of a sudden everything he had forgotten was back in his head where it belonged, everything clashing and crowding together in an ungodly cacophony of demands.
Loukia, the will, the onslaught of his relatives and the torturous stress of the latest software he was fine-tuning for the market.
Was it any wonder his memory had checked out on him?
He hadn’t wanted to remember what his life was like, had he?
‘And then she passed and, six months later, my grandfather was gone as well. And Mum can’t bake for peanuts, so I became the baker at home,’ Bunny continued.
‘I miss my family. I wouldn’t admit that I was homesick the whole year I’ve been away and I wouldn’t let them pay for me to fly home for Christmas because it would’ve left them short for other things.
And now they’ll be worrying about me, afraid that something bad has happened and I feel so guilty… ’
Thee mou …what had he done? He had never been so irresponsible in his choice of a woman.
How he had ended up with someone as unsuitable as Bunny in his bed was a mystery unless it was the sheer novelty of her that had drawn him.
The optimistic freshness of the way she saw life, her perpetual, painful honesty, her overdeveloped conscience.
The easy affection she offered, the wonderful calm at the heart of her that steadied him.
The absolutely amazing sex. Long fingers tightening on the fishing rod, he turned to look at his companion, knowing that he would be judging himself for ever more if he hurt her.
‘Go back in the shade…you’re burning again,’ he told her with the curtness of guilt-stricken concern. ‘Your nose is pink.’
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked instantly, alert to the edge honing his dark deep voice.
‘I got the rest of my memory back. When you mentioned your grandmother it all simply slid into place and it’s sobering stuff,’ he grated, checking out fleeting images inside his head and almost flinching from the fallout.
‘Don’t go back to being the guy you were on the boat,’ she warned him ruefully.
‘It’s too late for that. I’m the guy I was on the boat but I’m also the guy you’ve been with here for the past two weeks. I’m both ,’ he underlined.
Bunny didn’t want to think about him being both because she had loathed the first version of him that she had met. ‘You sent up the last flare last night,’ she reminded him, suddenly very keen to change the subject.
‘Because we heard planes,’ he pointed out.
‘Only they didn’t come near us.
‘What did you remember?’ she finally forced herself to ask.
‘Everything. That my grandmother passed away last month and it’s a few years since I worked as a doctor.
I’m in tech development now. I created an anti-hacking security program called Pagekey, which is making me a fortune,’ he spelt out quietly and with a significant lack of excitement at the recollection.
‘I’m so sorry about your grandmother,’ she said quietly. ‘Why did you give up medicine?’
‘I wasn’t compassionate enough. I prefer machines to people. They’re more reliable. And I suspect I only went for medicine because all my relatives said I’d never make the grade. Isn’t that petty? Let’s talk about something rather more relevant.’
‘Like?’
‘What are our plans if you are pregnant?’ he framed softly, choosing the topic that now concerned him most. ‘After this length of time, it’s possible that you have conceived.’
‘Is it? Either of us could be sterile. It doesn’t really matter right now anyway, not until we’re rescued,’ she reasoned awkwardly. ‘But I wouldn’t want a termination. I’d raise the baby…but I suppose it would wreck my life. Of course, that’s a stupid, narrow-minded thing to say.’
‘I don’t want a child of mine wrecking anyone’s life,’ Sebastian admitted with glacial candour and a chill ran down her spine.
‘I only meant it would wreck all my plans in the short term,’ Bunny rephrased immediately. ‘My family would fuss and worry. It would mean planning a different future, that’s all. Don’t judge me for a first passing reaction to a possible crisis. And don’t freeze me out!’
‘I’m not.’
Bunny studied his breathtakingly beautiful face, the new reserve etched into his lean, dark, perfect features, the absence of his easy smile, the taut and wary narrowing of his stunning black-lashed eyes.
And she saw the difference in him since he had regained his memory because he hid his emotions.
‘You are and you know you are. I know you.’
‘You don’t. Not the way you think you do,’ he assured her smoothly. ‘We haven’t been living a normal life here.’
‘I still know that you want answers right now this minute and solutions at the same time,’ she responded flatly. ‘And we’re not in a position to talk about either, so this is a futile conversation.’
In truth, she had summed up pretty much what he wanted and couldn’t have and he almost laughed at how well she had him tabbed. But he didn’t laugh because he knew that he needed to back off from the hothouse intensity of their current relationship.
‘After this, I will walk away…but I won’t walk away from my child, should there be one.’
‘I’m going for a walk now,’ Bunny told him tautly as she scrambled upright in a sudden movement. ‘Oh…just one question… did you have a girlfriend?’
‘No. When I met you, I hadn’t been with a woman in months,’ he countered.
‘So glad I was available for you. Let’s hope we’ll be rescued soon and then we can escape each other,’ she sniped, walking off fast, well aware that right now he would prefer his own company.
Sebastian liked his own space and he especially would dislike if she began shooting twenty questions at him in relation to his returned memories.
But she shouldn’t have been snide, she scolded herself in shame.
If he had only just remembered his grandmother’s death, he would be reliving that grief.
She was being selfish and insensitive dwelling only on what the return of his memory would mean to her.
‘I will walk away.’
What was she supposed to say to that? Could he have shouted the end to their relationship any louder?
He had changed. The minute he had remembered who he was, he had changed so fast her head was still spinning with the shock of it.
Sebastian Pagonis, rich tech tycoon. Not a playboy though.
She supposed that was a very small comfort.
But even so, his very first urge had been to push her away, diminish what they had shared and make it clear that what they currently had was finished the moment they were rescued.
Her eyes stung and she blinked furiously, sun glinting off the clear water almost blinding her in the afternoon heat.
Her own response to his words made it clear that somewhere down deep she had been hoping that what they had was something more than a forgettable fling.
And now she was upset—well, that had always been on the cards, Sebastian reasoned grimly.
If he wasn’t prepared to offer the ring, the white picket fence and the family dog, she would be upset and there was nothing he could do about it.
Bunny was deeply conventional and he had recognised that early on, so why hadn’t he backed off then?
A baby? He groaned and felt ashamed of the response.
But what did he know about being a father?
What did he even know about having a family?
Yet he had taken risk after risk with Bunny and once or twice he had even forgotten to be careful.
So the odds of her conceiving, when they had been in that bed every day since their arrival, could be pretty high.
Bunny dashed away the furious, over-emotional tears while she reminded herself that she needed to rewrite the last two weeks inside her head.
Forget the fling, dial back the emotions, start treating Sebastian like a platonic companion, stop sharing the same bed and ditch all the little intimacies that had begun to seem so natural between them.
Why? As he had reminded her, none of what they had shared while stranded was normal.
Their life here wasn’t normal, so how could anything that had grown from their situation be any different?
The distant drone of an engine was sufficient to penetrate her troubled thoughts.
After all, they heard no mechanical sounds on the island.
She looked back over her shoulder and saw Sebastian running down the beach and beyond him she saw some kind of boat noisily bouncing over the waves towards the island.
It had finally happened. Someone had noticed their presence.
Not quite able to credit that reality, she momentarily froze and then she began running in the same direction as well.
By the time she arrived, Sebastian was already enjoying an animated conversation with the man, who had tied up his motorboat at the pier.
He paused and formally introduced her to Dwi, the caretaker for the ‘French house’, as it was described, and she noted that Sebastian seemed to speak quite a bit of Indonesian dialect.
The owner was a guy named Louis Bernard, an ornithologist and a leading light in television documentaries.
A mobile phone was handed to Sebastian with great ceremony.