Page 18 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4

CHAPTER SEVEN

I T WAS TIME that he told her about his back story, Sebastian reasoned heavily. He preferred to tell it in his own words rather than leave it to her to read the dramatic horrors online.

‘It’s bad stuff,’ he warned her.

‘I’m a good listener.’

‘My grandmother indulged her eldest son, Jason, in every way,’ Sebastian imparted wryly.

‘He was the apple of her eye, no matter what he did, and when he met my mother, she was equally spoiled and wilful. Together they were a disaster but they married and had me. People thought it was a good match because they were both very rich. But my father never settled down. He was heavily into drugs and eventually my mother turned to other men.’

‘Oh, dear…’ Bunny mumbled, watching him pour himself a drink on the other side of the cabin.

‘Do you want anything?’ he asked.

‘Water,’ she chose, eying the lines of strain grooved round his wide sensual mouth, moving forward to accept the glass from him, belatedly guilty that she had cornered him into telling her what he so obviously didn’t want to tell her.

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have pushed you on such personal issues. ’

Sebastian lifted her up with firm hands and deposited her on the end of the giant bed.

‘You might as well know the facts when everyone else does,’ he parried.

‘In his twisted obsessive way my father adored my mother, but she’d met someone else and she insisted on a divorce.

The lawyers who represented them were soon at each other’s throats. ’

‘What age were you when all this was happening?’

‘Six. The divorce fighting went on for months until one day my father just cracked. He’d already moved out of our home but when he arrived one evening, my nanny let him in,’ he explained.

‘It was her night off. As she left, my mother called the police. They started to argue and I hid behind the sofa. And without any warning—or indeed any prior record of violence—my father pulled out a gun and shot her…’

Bunny stared back at him with wide, horrified eyes.

‘He was off his head. He was spraying bullets everywhere, stopping to reload, and then there was this silence for a long time. I was too scared to come out of hiding.’ Sebastian was very pale, his lean, dark, perfect features taut as a bowstring in the lamplight.

‘I heard one more shot…my father turned the gun on himself. The police found me with them. I was very distressed.’

Bunny stumbled off the bed and went over to him to wrap both arms round him in a hug. ‘I am so sorry that I forced you to relive that.’

Sebastian gazed down at her, disconcerted by her unhidden desire to comfort him. Something clenched tight in his chest and he set her back from him with newly learned circumspection. ‘You’d better head to bed before your family find you missing. I’ll see you in the morning.’

Bunny had never wanted so badly to stay with him but he had lived over twenty years with that tragedy and what could she offer him?

Pale and taut, she headed back in shock from what she had learned.

He must’ve been traumatised by such an ordeal and the simultaneous loss of both parents.

Had his grandmother taken him in and brought him up?

She assumed that Loukia, whom he had mentioned with such affection, must’ve done.

What a ghastly past to have to live down, she reflected, shaken even more by that story of his than she had shown him.

She got into bed, reminding herself that, now that she and Sebastian were no longer involved, his upsetting background wasn’t anything to do with her any more.

So, why did she feel so agonised on his behalf?

Why more than anything else in the world did she want to go back to Sebastian and keep on holding him?

The time to express that kind of compassion and affection was already behind them.

But, she acknowledged, her heart still yearned for him and the closeness they had enjoyed on the island without criticism or watching eyes judging them.

For goodness’ sake, why was she thinking like a lovestruck teenager?

Two weeks wasn’t enough time to fall in love with anyone, she told herself.

Love at first sight, well, it certainly hadn’t been that.

Lust and loathing at first sight, she reasoned, her entire body overheating with shame.

And then from that first night when in truth she had thrown herself at him, other bonds had formed quite naturally.

She had felt safe with him, she had trusted him, which was ironic when she reckoned that Sebastian did not trust anyone unless they came with a signed NDA.

She had never felt the way she felt now about Tristram.

Neither that instant, unreasoning craving and the frightening power of it, nor the strong, deeper emotions constantly pulling at her.

Falling for Tristram had been a slow, steady thing, wholly in keeping with her cautious, sensible nature.

Falling for Sebastian was like falling into the eye of a storm.

She was neither cautious nor sensible about Sebastian.

She had flung herself into his arms with no thought of a future and had assured herself that she could handle a temporary fling.

Only now here she was and she wasn’t handling the end of their relationship well, was she?

But she had to bury her feelings and deal with the future, most especially if she had conceived.

Sebastian had always made it crystal clear that there was no tomorrow for them.

He preferred being alone and he didn’t engage in committed relationships with women.

He didn’t believe in happy marriages either and only now could she comprehend that he was damaged by living through his parents’ unhappy marriage and its even more traumatic conclusion.

But she had to accept all that and the impossibility of being with Sebastian ever again while at the same time embracing her own probably very different future.

And if she did prove to be pregnant, would she and Sebastian eventually manage to become reasonably friendly co-parents?

And even worse, in the aftermath of his own ghastly childhood experience, how would Sebastian feel about becoming a parent? Clearly, he had suffered from his parents’ troubled marriage. She wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn that Sebastian had never planned to father a child.

‘You look beautiful,’ Sebastian said with unexpected warmth over the breakfast table.

Disconcerted by that unexpected compliment concerning the plain green sun dress and flat canvas shoes she wore, Bunny smiled back at him, ignoring the sudden telling break in her family’s conversation as every eye turned to them. ‘Thanks,’ she said simply.

‘We’re leaving for the police station in half an hour and we’ll follow that up with the shipping team interview.’

‘I’d like to visit Reggie in hospital if that’s possible. After all, I won’t see him again once I go home…and he was good to me. It was only a few weeks but he was a great boss.’

Her father leant across the table to say, ‘Did your mother tell you about Tristram turning up on our doorstep?’

Bunny froze. ‘ Tristram? Why on earth would he call with you?’

‘He read about you going missing in the newspaper and came to us to ask if there was any news or if there was anything that he could do to help,’ her mother explained. ‘We didn’t invite him in. He left his number but I shouldn’t think any of us will be making use of it.’

‘The nerve of him! It’s not as if we parted as friends,’ Bunny exclaimed in a combination of annoyance and resentment, for she had neither seen nor spoken to her ex-boyfriend in a long time. To say the least, their breakup had been messy.

‘He’s still allowed to be concerned over whether you’re alive or dead,’ John declared mildly.

Sebastian brooded at the suspicion that the ex-boyfriend was hovering and awaiting Bunny’s return.

He was annoyed that she had refused the immediate blood test that would’ve told them whether or not there was going to be a baby but, whether he liked it or not, it was her body and her choice.

He needed to get out of the habit of trying to intervene and boss her around because she didn’t like it.

She didn’t suffer from his impatience, his need to plan every step in advance and to always know exactly where he was going.

Well, she had killed those goals stone dead the same moment she came into his life, he reckoned with grim humour.

He didn’t know what he was doing, what he was planning to do next, no, he only knew that he wanted her.

He had told her that he would walk away.

He had believed that he would walk away.

He had been wrong. Still wanting her felt obsessional and it unnerved him.

Moderation was always his rule with women but there was nothing moderate about the way he felt.

From that first night on the island she had felt like his in some primal, utterly inexplicable and absurd way.

And he had grown attached to that sensation as if some vital part of him had awakened, had changed him, had turned him inside out and upside down, subjecting him to extreme irrational urges.

It was unnerving and he had to get a grip on it fast. He had to let her go, he had to let her walk away…

for a time, at least. He had to give her the space to catch her breath before he pressed her.

Bunny was ill at ease because Sebastian was quiet, perfectly polite and pleasant when he did speak but mentally miles away.

They got into the helicopter, only the two of them because it was only them who had to give statements and answer questions.

From the moment they disembarked at the airport to travel by car into the city, they were surrounded by a security team, who prevented the cameramen and the journalists from either photographing them or questioning them.