Page 73 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

CHAPTER EIGHT

One Month Later…

S EBASTIAN’S HANDS WERE still broken. No, it was worse. They didn’t function anymore. Didn’t bend to his will.

He held them out in front of him. His nails covered in the grey clay he’d pushed them into while trying to create something. Anything.

He noted the bulge of the veins on the hands he’d always relied on. The muscles he’d overworked and strained in his forearms. He’d pushed them too hard. And they ached. His wrists. His knuckles.

He looked at the monstrosity before him. It was still a lump of clay. Moulded into nothing recognizable with unskilled hands.

His hands.

He pushed his hand into it, flexed his aching fingers and gripped a fistful. He yanked it free and threw it.

It smashed to the floor at the foot of the window. A stream of light from the morning sun caressed its newly flattened form. Teased it with the warmth of what it could become when softened and moulded with care.

He padded across the wooden floor to the window. He stood in the beam of light, raised his head, and begged it to infiltrate his skin. To warm him. But it only teased him, too.

He couldn’t be moulded by the heat in her eyes, her words, her fleeting touch. But the temptation of them, of what he could become if he let her in, hummed beneath his skin.

They urged him to say yes , to all the things she wanted. All the things he’d never had, and neither had she. The warmth of a family not bound to a narrative of lies. A show performed to hide what was beneath fake smiles and pretty clothes.

He’d never worn pretty clothes for dinner.

But his life had been a show for those on the outside.

He’d had to lie to keep the veneer of respectability intact.

Perhaps if he hadn’t lied, hadn’t tried so hard to protect himself, protect Amelia, she would still be alive.

Twenty-five years later he still felt as though his heart had been cut from his chest. She’d been ripped away from him in an instant.

Taken. If he hadn’t allowed himself to care, to love her so much, he’d done the unthinkable to keep her safe, maybe she’d still be alive.

If he’d taken the emotion out of it. Done his duty.

He’d do his duty now. Guard Aurora, and their child, from afar.

He’d keep them safe.

He opened his eyes, scanned the treetops, the leaves browning with the death of the summer season.

A single leaf fell, and he watched it. Followed it with his eyes.

His heart thundered.

He’d avoided her for days. Weeks.

He lifted his hand to his cheek. Where it burned still. It would have been so easy to lie to her that night, to turn his head and accept her offered mouth. To kiss her as she knew he wanted to. Push his tongue between her warm, wet lips and taste her.

And he had wanted to. It was visceral. The reaction of his body.

It was more than want.

It was need .

And he could not let himself need her. He wouldn’t allow it. However much his body denied his command to stay still, to not react to her—he reacted.

He understood what she wanted. She had been clear, but he could not do it. And so he’d stayed away. Watched her grow from afar. And she’d grown in the weeks she’d been here. The baby inside her bigger. Almost here. Almost real.

His breath caught.

And there she was now, in the undergrowth beneath the window he was looking out of. Real.

He wanted air—wanted to breathe her air . His fist clenched, demanding he smash through the foot-thick glass and reach for her.

Her black hair hung loose on her shoulders, whispered across her bare arms. With one hand splayed forward in case she needed it for balance, her other hand held the swell of her beneath her thin cotton dress.

And it was barely there. The dress. Its burnt amber tones sat on her brown skin as if it were part of her. A perfect colour match.

She took a step. Lifted her bare foot, and he saw what was on the ground beneath her.

Instinctually he reached into his back pocket. Gripped his mobile, opened the camera app and aimed it at her.

Her toes made contact first. Softly they pressed down on the dandelion. The only one in a field of green. The white feathered wishes separated from the flower. They flew up all around her. And he couldn’t stop. He took shot after shot. Programmed to capture bursts of inspiration where he saw it.

And he saw it now.

He saw her.

Her hands lifted and played with a hundred wishes surrounding her. Her hands were delicate. Smooth.

She was young. Too young for him. He knew that. And yet he had risked everything for her. Now everything had changed. She changed daily with the consequences of his choice to let his guard down.

He never should have done so.

But how could he regret it when she bloomed so vibrantly with the life inside her?

The life he had put there. Inside her body.

She caught a wish. Closed her fingers gently around it and brought it to her lips. They moved, whispering words he couldn’t hear, and then she let it go. Allowed her wish to fly.

He could not make her wishes come true.

He could not be the man she wanted.

He was not ready to try. He didn’t want to try. He didn’t know how to do as she asked and not let himself get attached.

Brown eyes framed by long lashes looked up.

And she saw him, too.

Everything tightened. Every muscle jerked under the restraint of his will to not move. To not break through the glass.

He dipped his head. Acknowledged her. And then stepped back. Away from her. Until the shadows hid him from her. Hid her from him. He turned his back to the view, the only view his eyes wanted to see, and pushed his phone into his pocket.

He walked into the centre of the room. Far away from temptation. From the window. He closed his eyes and stood there. Paralysed. For only the gods knew for how long. Minutes. Hours.

His skin hummed and tingled . His mind reeled with incoherent thoughts. His body felt empty, malnourished. Deprived of her.

He’d missed her, he knew. Missed having her close. He thought of her every minute of every day…

He thrust his hands into his hair and dragged it back away from his face.

What the hell was happening to him?

He closed his eyes more tightly. Commanded his brain to tell his body to breathe deeply. In and out. But still his heart hammered. Still his body ached.

‘So this is where you’ve been hiding?’

His eyes flew open. Found the source of the question. Of the voice.

‘Aurora.’

She rested against the door frame casually, her breasts rising and falling with each breath.

His eyes fell lower to her feet, her ankles.

‘Why do you refuse to wear shoes?’ he asked.

‘I like the feel of the earth beneath my feet,’ she said without reaction to his reproach, and she moved into the room.

‘So, have you?’ she asked, as she cast her eyes around the room. To the art unseen by all but him.

‘Have I what?’

Her head snapped forward, and she halted. ‘Have you been hiding?’ she repeated. ‘From me?’

They both knew he had been, but Sebastian shrugged, feigning a nonchalance he didn’t feel.

‘Have you been searching for me?’ he asked, because he could not stop the question.

‘The castle has many rooms,’ she answered, and looked again at the walls. To the art. ‘And I have been in every one.’

‘And now you have found me.’

‘Yes,’ she acknowledged, but she didn’t glance at him. Did not smile in victory. ‘And here you are in the tallest tower, in the highest room.’

‘You should not have come up all those stairs,’ he said. The image of her, heavy with his child, ascending the spiralling stone staircase, so narrow, so dangerous, made his blood turn molten.

‘But I did,’ she dismissed his concern softly.

He couldn’t protect her, not even from the stairs. From putting herself in unnecessary danger. Because she didn’t see the risk with her naive eyes. She did not understand it was a risk to be here. With him.

Like that night?

He hardened everywhere he shouldn’t.

‘None of the rest of the rooms are like this,’ she said. ‘This room feels like you.’

‘And none of the others did?’

‘No.’ She reached up, splayed her fingers and let them hover above a face in the picture frame. And then she moved again. Her footfalls slow, the heels of her bare soles making contact first, and then her toes. Tiny and perfect, unscarred toes.

His breath snagged. ‘And what do I feel like?’ he asked, his voice gruff. Low.

Her fingers feathered one of the hooded floor-length fur coats he wore in winter on the moors. They hung on antlers he’d found in the forest, and they came out of the brick as if they were part of it now. Belonged there.

She stroked the coat, caressed it, allowed the brown fur to move through the spaces between her fingers. She turned to him. And she stole the minimal air he had in his lungs.

‘You feel endless.’

‘Endless?’

‘You are a fortress,’ she explained. ‘You have lots of doors. Some are open. Some let people inside, but they are not where you live.’

She continued to walk, circled him like a predator, until she came to the window. She turned to him, and he faced her.

The light danced in the wisps of her hair. It kissed her skin. It made her shimmer. Like a goddess in the sun. She extended her arms wide.

‘But I’ve found it,’ she said.

‘Found what?’

‘The heart of you,’ she said, gesturing to the walls, to the clay, to the splodge splattered on the floor at her feet. ‘This is where you live.’ She dropped her hand to her sides slowly. Gracefully. ‘Your art… It—this—is your heart.’

‘There is no heart here anymore,’ he growled.

‘It’s everywhere,’ she corrected him.

He looked at the studio. Tried to see it through her eyes.

How the space looked active and alive with unfinished thoughts.

The art on the walls was from long ago. A time when he’d accepted his art was all he was.

All he had to give. But now…unfinished pieces littered every corner.

The mound of clay he couldn’t sculpt mocked him from its spot on the floor.