Page 94 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4

“Yet neither are here, are they?” It was a cold kind of statement. The type he was used to making in his own mind to remind himself of what damage he was responsible for.

Amelia did not deserve the same, but it was such habit that it had simply fallen out of his mouth. Hung there between them like a wound that needed tending.

But men like him deserved no tending.

And Amelia didn’t look hurt or harmed. She studied him, head cocked, as if he were a strange specimen. As if, should she look deep and hard enough, she’d unearth all those wounds inside of him and tend them against his will.

“My mother is dead, yes,” Amelia agreed. The words were simple and matter-of-fact, but tinged with a kind of empathetic warmth he had yet to figure out what to do with.

“As is yours. We’ve dealt with our grief in opposite ways, I think.

I have no wish to forget my mother, punish myself for her absence.

Instead, I wish to remember her and honor what she was to me.

So when I do the things we did together, she feels near.

That is both sad, I suppose, but more a great comfort.

Because I cannot bring her back from death, of course. It’s the closest I can come though.”

The idea of comfort made him recoil. This idea that grief could have two sides to it. Pain and comfort. Happiness and sadness.

That was a luxury for the guilt-free, he supposed. “You make no sense.”

“Do I not make sense, or do you simply refuse to see the sense I make?” She shrugged as if the answer made no difference to her. “Guilt is quite the crutch you’ve built for yourself. I have no such crutches.”

For a moment, he could not form a word or a thought. It was now the second day in a row she’d cut him straight through with some kind of accusation that didn’t feel like one. Her accusations felt like observations.

Observations that twisted everything he thought he’d been doing into a question. When he knew…he knew what he was doing was right. Maybe sometimes he faltered at choosing the best punishment, sometimes he fell into habits that were no longer painful enough, but punishment was what he deserved.

“You consider my guilt a crutch?” he demanded. Suffering and penance…a crutch ?

A timer went off and she held up a hand before bending over the oven once more and then pulling out a large pan full of delicious-smelling cookies.

Cookies. That smelled and looked like Christmas. While she called his guilt a crutch.

And looked so dangerously appealing, even reeling from her words he watched the move of fabric against her legs. Imagined the feel of her no doubt soft skin under his palms.

“Have a seat, Diego,” she instructed, reminding of some long-ago nanny who had thought she had the right to boss him around. She’d learned soon enough that Diego was not the recipient of bossing . She’d been sacked before he’d learned her name.

Because that had been the story of his life. If he had not liked something, someone else had solved the problem for him. And then he’d turned eighteen, and his parents flipped a switch. Suddenly expected him to handle everything, like it was age and not experience that mattered.

He had not handled a damn thing, except wasting his life away and keeping as much distance from them as he could and keep his inheritance.

A habit you’ve continued, have you not?

Amelia had never said such things to him, and yet it was her voice in his head, pointing out all the ways he’d been shirking responsibility and letting Amelia handle the business side of things while he punished himself.

He deserved to be punished though. That had been important. Keeping all his father’s businesses going had been only important in so much as they existed, not that he had to have any part in them.

Amelia sighed, moving over to him. She reached out, even as he flinched, and put her hands on his forearms. She had small, graceful hands, warm against the fabric of his shirt.

“Diego. Take it from someone who has suffered loss as well, we all have crutches to get us through. Grief is not…science. It is emotion. We all must try to handle it in our own ways. But some ways are not healthy, and sometimes it takes someone else to point that out. There is nothing wrong with realizing you’ve…

fooled yourself, I suppose, into thinking this pain you subject yourself to makes the grief irrelevant.

Or that the choices you made make you irrelevant. ”

She gave his arms a squeeze. Her gaze was soft. Everything about her was so damn soft. It was why every sling seemed to land so deep. She was…deceptive. Yes, that was it. She was deceiving him with soft eyes and soft deliverance of harsh words.

She needed to be shown her place.

“It is the strangest thing,” he drawled, taking a step forward…which caused her to take an uncertain step back. She didn’t drop her hands though. They remained curled around his arms like an anchor. “I don’t recall hearing about you becoming some kind of therapist, tesoro .”

Her gaze sharpened, but she took another step back to his step forward. Still not letting him go.

“I’ve simply been through a similar loss, Diego. And come out on the other side, twice , with healthy coping mechanisms for these losses. I’d like to help you find the same.”

He looked around the kitchen pointedly. Because it was his kitchen, all in all. Because she was making cookies for him , after being at his beck and call for two years, presumably building no real life out of the castello or his business holdings.

“Have you come out the other side?”

She blinked once. Yes, he had his own arrows to launch. And it felt good when they landed. Almost as good as being this close, as watching her expressive eyes darken into a slate gray with frustration.

“It seems your life is very…narrow,” he observed, adopting the same light tone she often did when cutting him in half. “Have you any friends? Any…life outside these castello walls?”

He moved closer, surely driven by his own insult and making certain she felt the same. Until she was caged against the counter by his arms, and only his arms. She could have ducked under them. She could have ordered him back. But she held his gaze, chin raised. Then she did the damnedest thing.

She closed that bit of space between them, pressing her body to his.

She moved her hands up his arms to link behind his neck.

“Is this what you want?” she asked, sounding innocent when the way she pressed her soft, pliant body to his was anything but.

“You needn’t pick a fight to be this close to me, Diego. ”

She was testing him. Maybe even testing herself. He could not give in to such tests. He would not.

But for a moment, he wavered.

And she took advantage of that waver.