Page 18 of Modern Romance May 2026 Books 1-4
‘Isucked the life out of you? Screwing you was like screwing a wind-up doll!’
‘Well, being screwed by you was like being fucked by an android with only one setting, and it wasn’t a wife-pleasuring one!’
In all the years he’d known Marnie, he’d never heard her swear, not even mildly, and he had no idea if it was hearing such an oath so viciously delivered from a mouth usually so calm that tipped him over the edge or if it was that by that point, their faces were so close they were breathing in each other’s fury, but it was the last insult either gave that night as a breath later their mouths had fused. In an instant, they’d been kissing with the same fury they’d been feeding to each other through their hate and clawing at each other’s clothes.
He’d pushed her against the only available wall space. Her hands had gone straight to his trousers to free him, his hand groping the knickers beneath her dress and ripping them off her. Barely a minute could have passed since she’d called him an android before he’d lifted her up the wall and thrust himself inside her.
He’d been possessed. They had both been.
It had been the most incredible night of his life. Only one night…morning…had come close. A different kind of possession. Here in Rome. He’d dreamed of her, a vivid dream that had propelled him out of his bed before he was fully awake, a dreamlike state enveloping him as he’d slipped into her room and slipped beneath her sheets. He hadn’t been capable of detaching his mind. Hadn’t even tried.
That first possession had been easy to dismiss from his mind. The second possession had been impossible. That he’d woken the next morning with all those damned emotions in him was too disturbing to think of in any depth, and once he’d got over the gut punch of Marnie’s rejection, he’d been glad to walk away from her, glad to know they were over. Their marriage was never supposed to be about feelings. He didn’t want them.
Emotions were destructive, and what he’d felt for Marnie that night; the passion that had driven him…driven them both…was deeper than anything he’d ever felt for Carmela.
But through the second possession that had come within a breath of shattering his world, their baby had been created, and if he wanted to be the full-time father he’d always envisaged himself being and for his child to have the life it deserved, then he needed to make Marnie see reason and come back to him.
‘I know what you want to hear, but I’ve never lied to you and I’m not going to start now,’ he said slowly, focusing his stare on the three bees buzzing happily over the rambling rosebush in front of him, gorging on the last of the year’s pollen. ‘I married Carmela for what I believed was love, and she left me for my oldest friend. She left me two weeks after my father died. That’s what romantic love gave me. Now I feel nothing for her. The love, if that’s what it was, died.
‘The only love in a marriage that’s indestructible is the love of the parents for their children, and we already love our child, and it’s for that love that I will be the husband you need me to be. Our marriagewillbe based on love, Marnie: our love for our child, and to give our child the stability that is every child’s right. I will do my best to be the husband you want me to be. My parents had a marriage built on mutual respect and the deepest of affection, and that’s what we can build too, but to build it, we both need to commit to putting our child’s needs first.’
He sounded soreasonable, Marnie thought despairingly. Everything Domenico touched turned to gold, and now he’d convinced himself he could apply the same mindset and make their marriage a golden one.
‘But Iamputting our child’s needs first,’ she said. ‘If I thought I could spend the next twenty years in a loveless marriage, then I would do it and then try and find love when our baby’s all grown up, but Ican’t.’
An edge came into his voice. ‘I’ve just explained why it won’t be loveless, but ultimately it comes down to mindset. If we both make a concerted effort to provide stability and unity, then we can raise a happy child within the confines of a stable and committed marriage.’
Another bubble of despairing laughter tickled her throat. If only she didn’t know him so well she could probably talk herself into falling in line with his plans and going back to him.
‘Our baby is going to be spoiled for love from both of us whether we’re together or not, but if I come back to you…’
It came to Marnie that the way they were sitting, shoulder to shoulder but facing opposite directions, was like a human version of Janus, and just as one of the faces of the Roman god was turned to the past and the other to the future, it seemed to her that that’s how they were faced, too. Domenico had their future all mapped out, while all she could see was the past.
‘Do you have any idea how damaging it is to a child to be raised in a home filled with hate and resentment?’ she asked tremulously. ‘Because I do. My parents barely knew each other when I was conceived, and all I remember of my early years before my father left is the fights and abuse. They stayed together for my sake and ended up destroying each other. I watched them break each other, and I will not put our child through that.’
‘I’m sorry you lived through that, but answer me this—when, in all the years we worked together and the year we lived together, did we ever fight or abuse each other?’
Now she did laugh. ‘We didn’t work together, Dom. You were my boss. My job was to make sure your working life ran as smoothly as it could, and when we lived together, it was in your home and under your rules. I bent my life to your will, but the minute I left, you turned me into your enemy and treated me like some corporate opponent who had to be defeated.’
The edge in his voice sharpened. ‘I was fighting to make you see sense and come back to me.’
‘Again, you’re making it all aboutyou, and you didn’t wantmeback; you wanted the pliable Marnie who bent herself to your will to come back because you hated that she’d slipped out from under your thumb. You say you want to get to know me, yet I just shared something about my past, and you showed no curiosity about it other than in how it affects you.’
There was a sharp inhalation of breath, but before he could defend himself, she continued, speaking quicker than she usually did in her need to get the words out. ‘My guess is Carmela did way more damage than you want to admit because you don’t do feelings at all, not yours or other people’s. You hide from them. Do you think it escaped my attention that all your efforts to win me back were dropped straight after that night in my flat? You walked out, and I never heard from you or saw you again.’
‘You told me to leave,’ he bit out.
‘And didn’t you prove me right to do that. How we both behaved that night…’ She swallowed. ‘I’ve never lost control like that before, and it frightens me that I was capable of behaving like that and saying such cruel things, and then what came off the back of it…’ She had to swallow again, trying desperately to drive away the images of their wild lovemaking, and fighting with everything she had to keep her voice even when her heart was such a thrashing mess.
All those years she’d spent dreaming of Domenico making passionate love to her, and then when the passion of her dreams had finally sprung to life, it had been driven by hate and fury.
‘I think that in the cold light of day, it was the same for you, too,’ she continued shakily. ‘We set something off in each other that night, and I am as sure as I’ve ever been sure about anything that if either of us had known something like that could explode between us, you would never have asked me to marry you, and I would never have said yes.’ For him, it was the loss of control when their passion had exploded, because hehadlost control in a way he’d never come close to in the whole of their marriage. For Marnie, it was what had come before it. The fury. The viciousness. Like the ghost of her mother had taken control of her mouth. ‘If not for the baby, you would have been happy to never see me again.’
Only the tinkling of water from the Venus fountain cut through the silence that followed.
Slowly, Marnie twisted back around so she was facing the same direction as Domenico. He’d become as still as the marble Venus.
Hands shaking, she picked up her sandals and got unsteadily to her feet. The whole of her body was shaking.
