Page 140 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

He was not okay, but he nodded, and she nodded once in return.

‘They’ve all been washed now.’ She brought the white romper with its silver clasps up to her nose and inhaled. Her chest inflated. Her eyes closed. ‘It smells so good.’

His heart, it hammered. The scent of a newborn’s head beneath his nose was too visceral in his nostrils. A smell that was undefinable, yet defined by belonging only to the innocent. Innocents like Amelia. He remembered pressing his mouth to her wrinkled forehead as he held her close to whisper,‘Happy birthday.’

‘Do you want to help me fold them?’ Aurora asked.

‘Help you?’ he choked.

He hadn’t been asked to help when his mother had been pregnant with Amelia. Life had continued as it always had. There had been no new rompers bought. The hand-me-downs of his siblings were still in drawers. No small baths were readied for Amelia’s arrival, when the sink would do just as well. He should know. He’d washed her many times after his mother had placed Amelia in his arms and told him to take her. She hadn’t cared his arms were too long and gangly to be confident he could hold her safely. His mother only cared that he held her far away from her. Out of sight.

‘The books say you can never have too many changes of clothes,’ she said, though he was still lost in the memory of long ago.

She smiled again. But it was smaller. More tentative. ‘I have lots to fold away,’ she continued, ‘in these tiny drawers, for a tiny person.’ Her perfectly arched thick dark brows lifted, a request for help.

He looked at the open body suit in her hands. The tiny mittened hands…

It was all too real.

The baby was coming, and his lungs stuttered with the realization that he wasn’t ready to meet it.

His eyes lifted to Aurora’s watchful gaze.

‘Why didn’t you ask someone else to do this for you?’ he asked.

‘There’s lots I have asked others to do,’ she said. ‘I didn’t decorate this room or the one at home. I chose the colours, the furniture, and the clothes, and they all arrived and were put into place, prepared by people I’d paid to do it.’

‘And so why choose to do this task yourself?’ he asked. ‘It’s menial.’

She dipped her slender shoulder. The tilt of her head fell slightly to the right with her shrug. Her neck elongated, stretching the skin, exposing it to his eyes, and they followed the unconscious sensuality she oozed. The natural fluidity of her body.

‘It feels important,’ she said.

It was an explosion in his mind, the realization she wanted to fold these things with her small, elegant fingers. She hadn’t instructed someone to fold them for her. She didn’t abuse her wealth, her privilege, or ignore the need to be prepared.

She didn’t care for his wealth either, did she? Not his name or his stardom. And neither did she need his privileges to ease her life.

She only wanted to fold clothes for the baby, and she wanted him to do it with her.

He needed to leave, to turn around and walk away. But she desired him to stay…

His feet felt like lead, but he made his body move towards her. Towards the woman waiting for him, holding the little romper.

His heart raged. Told him to turn around and run from the reality of her. From the reality of the baby inside her who would soon be here.

But what could be the harm?he asked himself.Why not lend a hand? Why not help her?

You tried to help her six months ago, too.

His body pulsed.

He would nothelpher that way again, he told himself, but his body called him a liar. He wanted to. He wanted to reach for the strands of hair kissing her left cheek and push them behind the curve of her ear. He wanted to cup her face, cradle it, and draw her towards him.

His mouth dried. His lips parted.

It would be a reprieve from the conflict in his chest to taste her again, wouldn’t it? To lose himself in the heat of her?

He could. How easy it would be to reach for her, and ignore the agony of the past, and possess her mouth. Thrust his tongue between her lips until she moaned into his mouth as she had in the gardens of Eachus House.