Page 12 of Modern Romance May 2026 Books 1-4
He hesitated at the bedroom’s threshold, memories suddenly assailing him.
This was the room they’d conceived their child in.
He’d already been inside her when they’d stumbled over this threshold. Marnie’s limbs had been wrapped tight around him. In front of him was the bed they’d fallen onto, still ripping each other’s clothes off as they fucked like a dam whose walls had been breached, their coupling the water pouring in a torrent to flood everything in its path.
He’d never had an experience like it. Not just the sex itself but the feelings that had gone with it, the urgency, the need, the hunger. The desperation. It had all been there in one hedonistic night of madness. And it had been in both of them. Marnie hadn’t been the passive bed partner of their marriage. On the bed in front of him, she’d cradled his head while he’d suckled her breasts and she’d ridden up and down his length.
By the time they’d made love a third time, it would have taken a crane to remove him from the bed. Even if he’d been capable of leaving, the drugged-like need for her had remained alive in his veins. For the first time since they’d married, he’d fallen asleep with Marnie in his arms.
They’d held each other all night long, and then, in the morning, long after the sun had come up, she’d opened her eyes only a beat after he’d opened his.
For a singular moment in time, a connection the like of which he’d never known could exist had flown between them, a connection so powerful that something that had felt close to euphoria had caught hold of him, and he’d smiled from the rush of it all and bowed his head to kiss her.
Their mouths never made contact. In barely a blink, that singular connection between them was severed. Marnie’s beautiful face tightened, almost crumbling before she pulled herself out of his arms and rolled away from. With her back to him, she’d quietly told him to leave.
Only now, back in the room where it had all happened, could he not deny how those words had gut-punched him.
Rejection after a night like that wouldn’t sit well with anyone, but that had felt…
He closed his eyes and breathed out slowly.
In the moments of Marnie’s rejection, he’d felt more sucker-punched than when Carmela had told him she was leaving him for Davide.
He sat on the bed and expelled another long breath.
He’d been careful to ensure his marriage to Marnie was nothing like his marriage to Carmela; had been clear from the outset that it was primarily the mother of his child he’d been seeking in a wife. He hadn’t wanted a wife as a lover in the traditional sense because that’s when emotions reared, and he would never allow himself to be entangled with emotions again. He’d been ready for the children he’d always wanted and so needed to marry so his children could have the same love and stability that he’d been fortunate to have, but if he was going to commit to marriage again, he needed to be sure it would be for life.
Domenico had learned the hard way that passion could not be trusted. When passion burned itself out, bitterness rose and marriages fell.
He’d planned it all perfectly. His docile, placid Marnie, his most loyal and conscientious worker, would be perfectly content to fall in line with his plans. He would share her bed to create the child they both wanted, but they would spend their lives as companions rather than lovers, much as his parents’ successful marriage had worked. If Domenico wanted hot sex, he would look elsewhere—Marnie wouldn’t mind at all—but to create a successful marriage, it needed to be as companions. Any love that grew would be a platonic love. Unlike passionate love, platonic love was stable and reliable. Trustable.
The only doubt he’d experienced throughout the whole thing was when she’d shyly confirmed her virginity. An emotion he still didn’t understand had gripped him, and he’d had a sudden flash of the way she often blushed when he caught her staring at him. His heart had sunk.
It had been because of her virginity and those blushes that he’d left her bed as soon as was decent once the deed was done. He’d known it was imperative to reinforce the parameters of their marriage immediately, for Marnie’s sake. Obviously, he hadn’t thought for a moment that she could be in love with him—he hadn’t believed she had the imagination to fall in love…or, at least that’s what he’d told himself—but at the time, it had felt very necessary, a means of protecting her from herself if she needed it. You didn’t have to love someone to care for them, and he’d cared for her, and he’d gone out of his way to ensure their marriage was a good one for her. He’d given her a generous—very generous—allowance along with an unlimited credit card and the use of any car in his fleet that she so wished to use. He’d lavished her with jewellery and mini-breaks, taken her on regular date nights, called her every evening when he was abroad on business and always brought her gifts back from them. When he’d joined her in her bed, sex had been—necessarily so—straightforward and perfunctory, but he’d been a considerate lover and had always made sure to bring her to orgasm before taking his own release.
Strangely, despite his pre-marriage imaginings and his certainty that Marnie wouldn’t care, he’d never been tempted to seek hot sex elsewhere, so he’d been faithful too. Not one woman had caught his eye.
She’d walked away from it all without looking back. He was only here in her flat now because she’d wanted to collect some clothes when she was discharged. He’d resisted saying it would be over his dead body before she came back to this shithole. Instead, he’d offered to collect whatever she needed to save her fragile body from traipsing to the other side of London and back. He was quite sure she’d agreed only because she knew how much he loathed the place. And also because she’d seen the sense in what he was saying. He’d known better than to offer to buy her a new wardrobe of clothes, especially as this had come on the heels of his promise not to discuss their future together. She hadn’t needed to see him cross his fingers to know his promise had been a false one and that he was simply biding his time…
A framed photo on one of her bedroom shelves suddenly caught his eye and cut through his train of thought. He pulled it down and studied it closely. It was a picture of Marnie as a child, maybe aged five or six, with her cheek pressed against a woman who looked so much like her she had to be Marnie’s mother. Or maybe her grandmother. Her age was hard to determine. Both subjects were smiling, but it was the window behind them that had really caught his attention, and he carried it to the living room and held it in front of the window there, slowly moving backwards as he compared what was in the photo with what lay before him.
His heart lurched.
The windows were the same. The photo had been taken in this room.
Domenico’s prediction that Marnie’s sickness would get worse before it got better proved prophetic. Despite the anti-sickness medication and all the other things she’d been prescribed, it wasn’t until the fifteen-week mark of the pregnancy that she began to hope she was turning a corner. It was catching the scent of lamb cooking and her stomach barely twitching in reaction that gave her that hope. Strong scents had been as triggering as strong tastes. For close to three months she’d survived on the blandest foods imaginable, topped up with nutritious supplements specifically designed to be tasteless.
After weeks and weeks and weeks of exhaustion, she now, at sixteen weeks, was regaining her energy too, and had spent much of the day looking forlornly out of her bedroom window at the rain lashing down on Domenico’s gorgeous garden. She wished she could be out in it. Summer had stretched into autumn without her even noticing.
If she hadn’t kept such a firm hold on how far along she was with the pregnancy—she’d been surprised to learn the due date being taken by the date of her last period meant she was further along than she’d assumed—she’d have lost track of how long she’d been back here under Domenico’s roof. Eight weeks. She’d never imagined when she agreed to stay with him that it would stretch so long. The twelve-week pregnancy mark had come and gone with unspoken relief from them both that the baby had survived that far.
There had been much left unspoken between them since her temporary return, the future being the biggest unspoken ‘thing.’ Domenico’s work schedule was as manic as it always was, but he’d reduced his social life to nothing. He left her medical care to the experts, but in the evenings that he was home, he plonked himself in her room. He intuitively knew if she was having a good or bad day. If she was having a bad one, he quietly got on with checking his investments and seeing if he’d had another billion added to his net worth since his last check. When Marnie had first realised the extent of his vast wealth, she’d wondered why on earth he continued running his law firm. She’d soon come to see that he thrived on all that came with it, not just the pressure, but that when practising law, there was always a clear-cut winner and loser.
Domenico thrived on winning, and it was this competitive aspect of his nature that kept her guard high, especially when she’d had a reasonably good day and he spent the evenings good-humouredly regaling her with tales from the office or giving a running commentary on whatever sport he happened to be watching on her TV.
Marnie had beaten him in their divorce, a loss that was anathema to him, and as far as he was concerned, her waiting for their divorce to be finalised to take the pregnancy test was on a par with cheating.
To Domenico’s mind, the pregnancy meant the game had been reset. He was simply biding his time. When he judged the time to be right, he would restart the game. She knew it, and he knew she knew it. What she didn’t know was how far he was prepared to go to win, not now that the stakes were so high.
