Page 241 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

She bit into her lip. ‘You need to understand—’

His nostrils flared. ‘I understand perfectly,’ he cut her off. ‘All this time, when you were imploring me to bare my soul to you, you already knew so much about me. You haveliedto me, every step of the way, haven’t you? From that first night in the bar, until this morning, you have hidden your true self from me.’

She shook her head, her stomach churning. ‘No, Zeus, that’s not true.’ She strode across the room then, curling her hand around his arm, shaking him. She needed him to understand. ‘Everything between us has been real.Thisis real.’

His only response was to angle his head and stare at her hand as though it were something vile and disgusting. ‘Do not touch me, Jane.’

She dropped her hand like she’d been burned, quickly wiping away her tears, only for more to take their place.

‘Zeus,’ her voice trembled.

‘You did so well,’ he drawled. ‘What excellent bait you proved to be. Though you didn’t need to go so far as making up sob stories about your romantic past. I wouldn’t have cared if you’d slept with every man in Britain—I still would have wanted you with the force of a thousand suns.’

‘I didn’t make that up,’ she whispered, her chest cleaving apart at the very idea of lying about something so intimate. It had been such a huge deal for Jane to disclose the truth to him. She swallowed, but her throat was constricted. Her head ached.

‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you. You have no credibility with me, and with good reason, wouldn’t you say?’

She was shaking like a leaf. She reached behind her for a chair, sitting down with a dull sense of aching bones.

‘Unfortunately for you and your friend, your plan failed.’

Jane blinked up at him, eyes wide.

‘I’m getting married, you see,’ he said, and her heart stammered as her legs began to tremble.

‘What?’

‘Mmm-hmm. I proposed to a friend of mine the night I met you. You’ll remember I had a dinner?’

Jane’s lips parted.

‘It was one of the reasons I had to bring you onto the boat. I could hardly risk the press getting wind of the fact I was sleeping with you, when my fiancée was off buying wedding clothes.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Jane whispered, shaking her head.

‘Only one of us is a liar here, Jane.’ The indictment was like a slap; she flinched at the depth of hatred in his voice. The ice. The rejection.

Every part of her hurt. Every cell, every drop of blood, every atom of her being.

‘You think I haven’t hated lying to you, Zeus?’

‘You haven’t exactly seemed conflicted.’

‘Yeah, well, I have been,’ she shouted, then sobbed, because it was all so awful, so devastatingly bad. ‘Do you want to know what I was planning to do today?’

He stared back at her without asking the question.

‘I was going to go to Lottie, to tell her about how wonderful you are, how much she’d love you if she got to know you. I was going to beg her to put off whatever plan she’d concocted and focus on meeting her half-brother, on meeting the man that I love.’ Her voice stammered over the last word and her cheeks flushed with pink at what she was admitting to him. But he needed to know how real this was for her; how incredibly special it had all been.

‘You don’t love me,’ he responded, rejecting her admission.

‘How can you say that?’

‘Because you have been lying to me this whole week,’ he reminded her, voice deathly quiet.

She sobbed once more.

‘I wanted to tell you the truth, but it’s not my truth to tell. I needed Lottie…’