Page 145 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

Her eyes pleaded with him to continue the conversation she’d left on hold last week. But he’d buried it down deep, and he wouldn’t dig it up. His reaction to her putting a cot in the nursery she was preparing for their child had been unfair, he knew.

He would not react now.

He’d known eventually he’d have to see where his baby would sleep. But right now was too much.

He blinked. Broke the intensity of her gaze and looked down at his plate, zeroing in on the birds painted in a circle onto the plate. He’d never seen these before.

Another Aurora addition. They must be.

He exhaled quietly through his nostrils. The cot meant nothing. He didn’t need to see it. He did not want to.

He looked up, and he shuttered his gaze against the probing intensity of hers.

‘I would not like to see it,’ he said, and the light dimmed in her eyes.

His body revolted, urged him to take the words back, claim her hand where he’d abandoned it on the table and bring it back.

The light in her eyes.

His fingers clenched beneath the table.

‘Not yet.’

Aurora felt it. The arrow of space Sebastian had left open for her.

‘Tomorrow?’ she pressed.

‘No,’ he said.

‘The next day?’ she asked, pushing him.

His lips compressed. He shook his head. The chestnut hair swept across his cheek, grazing the collar of his jacket, and she longed to push the hair out of his face, hold his cheeks, and ask him why. Why not yet?

‘Then when?’ she demanded, but she kept her voice soft, when everything inside her wanted to push him to tell her everything he wouldn’t. Why the crib was such a trigger for him…

‘Soon,’ he promised, and butted her from the entrance to the fortress that he was. He slammed the doors of possibility closed, with her on the outside, looking in. And there was nothing for her to see but the shadows darkening the green in his eyes.

Soon was too long.

She dipped her head. Looked down to the dinner setting she’d moved to be closer to him.

It wasn’t close enough.

All week she’d been subtle. Executed her plan to show him small intimacies, show him what their life could become. Sharing nightly meals together was a start, but there was more.

She’d been too subtle, perhaps.

Impatience made her skin tight. Her hands burned with the itch to clench her fists, slam them on the table, and demand to know who had hurt him. To promise she would not do the same. That their baby was coming. Soon. Time wasn’t on their side. But she understood that was he needed.

Time.

Time to get used to her being here, in his space. To crave her when she wasn’t with him. To look forward to the time when they would meet and she would sit beside him.

The doors to her right opened.

Her neck snapped towards the staff entering the room with the feast she’d asked them to prepare. Delicacies that could be held between two fingers and examined, could tantalise the tongue, the senses. Food fit to be talked about that could induce conversation.

But all week, regardless of her attempts to encourage him, the conversation between them had been one-sided. She wanted in. Into his head. She wanted the same honesty she’d seen the night they’d met. The passion.