Page 86 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4

But ensuring she was indispensable over the past two years meant she had some security, because this was a man who prized his privacy above all else, and while she might be invading it right now, anyone who took her place would have to be trained all over again—without the intimate knowledge of the Folliero family.

If he fired her, he would have to find someone to take her place. Something he clearly did not have the capability of doing way up here.

So, one way or another, he’d have to leave this place.

She met his hard, dark gaze. Empty and intimidating. She would not be intimidated. Not by a man her father thought was good.

“You think you can replace me?” she asked in the blandest, most casual tone she could muster.

His gaze moved over her, a slow, dark tour that made her want to fidget, that caused a strange warmth to creep over her skin.

He said nothing, but she held on to the fact that he did not immediately jump to yes as a good sign.

“You could try to replace me, of course,” she continued when he didn’t speak. “But considering the sheer amount of work I’ve taken on, you wouldn’t be able to train anyone to do what I do, because I’m not sure you know all that I do. Sacking me would not be the efficient choice.”

“I’m not going down there,” he ground out.

Stubborn. Her father had written at length about the Folliero stubbornness. And the way Bartolo had dealt with it was simply to be immovable in return. So that’s what she’d be.

“Very well.” She aimed a pleasant smile at him. Just because they hadn’t dealt with each other much in person didn’t mean she didn’t know he was stubborn to a fault. Didn’t mean she didn’t deal with all the arrogant, unbending men of his companies.

She knew how to handle thar particular brand of rigidity. With her own pleasant refusal to break.

She lowered herself onto the lone chair, hard and uncomfortable. “I’ll stay.”

Diego did not like the feeling of being speechless. He did not like the feeling of being maneuvered. He did not like feeling , and she was causing many of those to rumble around inside him like unwieldly ghosts.

She was beautiful. Her blond hair was pulled back in a little twist suitable for an office.

She had an angular face that might have been too sharp if her coloring wasn’t so warm.

Her eyes were a fascinating shade of blue that leaned into gray.

Like a changeable winter sky. She wore trim pants and a sweater the color of plums underneath a fashionably and suitably long coat.

She had the kind of beauty that stirred old impulses he’d long since thought he’d beaten out of himself.

He’d enjoyed women once, and women had quite enjoyed him. Those memories felt like they belonged to someone else. Or had, until Amelia had met his gaze with that unfazed determination. For a moment, the reaction was visceral enough that he almost recognized the man he’d once been.

Almost.

“I do not know what happened for you to think that you are somehow in charge of me, Ms.…” He trailed off. Calling her Baresi reminded him of her father, another death that sat on his shoulders…perhaps even heavier than the rest.

Bartolo Baresi was the best man Diego had ever known.

Diego had loved his parents, but they had been children of privilege and acted as such.

They had believed, and led him and his sister to believe, they could have anything and everything they wanted the moment they wanted it.

They had loved their family, but he did not know that they’d had much selflessness in them.

Much…care. If he or Aurora had not behaved the way his parents expected, they had been…

difficult. So difficult, Diego had learned that the best course of action was to stay away.

But Bartolo had always been a link back to them, back to the Folliero legacy, back to some potential better version of himself. Bartolo Baresi had embodied both care and selflessness.

And it was the lack of everything in Diego that had caused a good man to die. Diego’s family to die. They had all waited for him on that increasingly icy tarmac. They had believed he would come. He had told them he could come.

He’d been drunk and careless in Madrid.

They’d taken off too late.

His fault.

He did not like to think of that day, but he forced himself to.

If his adolescence and early adulthood had been a study in ignoring everything difficult, he’d learned in his guilt and his penance that he must absorb everything difficult.

That he must be the opposite of the man who’d caused such tragedy.

So he met the gaze of Bartolo’s beautiful daughter, who watched him with gray eyes that gave the off-putting feeling she saw too much, too easily. “You have crossed a line,” he said firmly.

She shook her head as if she could simply disagree with his lines, even though he was her boss.

“You put me in charge of your affairs. We have a problem that now requires your presence. The fact of the matter is, we have let two Christmases pass without holding the annual Folliero Christmas ball. And the profits at Castello di Natale have suffered.”

He waved this away. It was inconsequential. “I have other businesses.”

“You do, but the Christmas business was the one your father was most proud of.”

“What do you know of my father?”

“Aside from living under his roof for ten years, you mean?” she asked, a kind of sweetness in her tone that didn’t match her words. She was very good at that.

He looked at this woman. He knew next to nothing about her, except the sad circumstances that had brought her to Castello di Natale and required Bartolo to stay at the castello rather than continue to travel with Diego.

Diego had resented her existence at times but never thought much of her beyond that.

Never considered that she’d lived in the castello with his parents, his sister.

He knew nothing about her or how she’d moved through the Folliero world, because he had been off enjoying his twenties.

His lack of responsibility. His wealth and freedom and all the many pleasures that came with it.

Pleasure. Avoidance. Enough alcohol and women to numb it all. So he’d rarely thought of anything more complex than which club to go to that night.

Now this woman was in his space. Now she was…demanding things of him.

He would have dismissed her outright, even if he owed her father’s memory more than that.

After all, what was more guilt? But she’d made too good of a point…

The amount of work and effort it would take to replace her would require him to return to the world at least for a little while anyway, and it would mean… too much connection.

He could let it all crumble. The business. The legacy. But continuing it was too wrapped up in his penance.

“I miss my father like a limb,” she said very quietly, sitting there on his only chair, a beautiful, discordant note to the bland, unwelcoming room. “But I miss them too, you know. They were not my family, but they were part of the fabric of my life, and they were never anything but kind to me.”

Grief, guilt and a thread of bitterness spread through him. He held on to the bitterness. “How novel.”

Her mouth curved ever so slightly, a kind of wistfulness that snagged his attention, his interest, against his will.

“Your sister would have said the exact same thing if I’d suggested your parents were kind,” she said softly.

“Because they were not.” But they hadn’t deserved to die because of him. Perhaps people like them did not have the capacity for kindness. Perhaps, like him, they had been nothing but spoiled and self-centered.

Still, he lived. They had died.

“People are complicated,” Amelia said, one hand resting over the other in her lap, her legs crossed at the ankle. All prim, easy grace.

“As is the situation we find ourselves in,” she continued.

“You do not wish to return to the castello, or a life…around people, I suppose? Whatever it is that keeps you up here, alone and isolated and…” She trailed off, her gaze taking in the kitchen, the fireplace, the lone window.

Then her gaze pinned him. “Is this some sort of…self-punishment?”

He refused to answer that question. He refused… this .

Except she was still here, and he did not know how to fix that just yet.

She shook her head when the silence stretched out into long minutes. “I’m afraid whatever it is you’ve attempted to accomplish up here, hidden away from the world, it must come to an end. Regardless of whether you want to or not, you must return to the castello.”

“I certainly do not. I do not know what has come over you, but you are my assistant.”

“Yes, that is the job title.” She studied him, a little dent appearing between her eyebrows as if she was deep in thought. “I did not take you for a coward.”

“I am neither coward nor brave. I am nothing.”

Her face softened. “That isn’t true.”

“It is.”

“My father didn’t think it was true. Are you calling him wrong? A liar?”

If he thought that of me, he was wrong.

He could not vocalize that, though. Not to her. Not when he could see his own grief reflected in her fascinating eyes.

Eyes that suddenly got very hard looking. “If you do not do this, I will be forced to cancel the ball this year.”

“You should not have planned a ball this year.”

“And furthermore,” she continued, as if he hadn’t spoken at all, “I will be forced to close Castello di Natale. Permanently. And offer it to the highest bidder.”

The words were harsh. Final. Impossible. “You cannot…do that. Close or sell. These are not your choices to make.”

She stood from the chair, fixed him with a stern look.

Triumph lit her eyes, making them look closer to silver than anything so ordinary as gray.

“I think you’ll find that in the very documents you signed of my contract, you gave me just enough power to do exactly that.

If you do not return with me today , I will move forward with plans to close and sell. Forever.”