Page 109 of Modern Romance Collection March 2025 (1-4)

And now he was offering her one last drink.

Come tomorrow, it was unlikely their paths would ever cross again.

She nodded and attempted a smile. Her mouth refused to cooperate.

He took the stool beside her. Filled both glasses with a hefty measure of the amber liquid, pushed one in front of Rose and raised the other. ‘To my grandmother.’

She lifted her glass. ‘To Mrs Martinez.’

He smiled faintly. Rose’s insistence on addressing Mrs Martinez formally had been a long running in joke between her and the woman who’d loved and cared for her so greatly, a joke Diaz had come to be part of during the last weeks of his grandmother’s life.

It didn’t feel real that she’d been gone two weeks already.

Glasses clinked together; they drank.

‘Thank you for stopping me earlier,’ he said after a long passage of silence.

Her bruised heart filled again. She didn’t blame him for having wanted to erupt at his parents. They should have been the ones holding Mrs Martinez’s hands when she took her last breath. The ones to organise every aspect of the funeral. Not their son and the dead housekeeper’s daughter. ‘You’re welcome.’

He swirled what was left of the liquid in his glass and grunted a laugh. ‘You would think age would bring perspective but I don’t know how I will ever find perspective over those two.’

‘Now’s not the time to try and find it,’ she pointed out softly, wishing desperately that she could justtouchhim.

Rose didn’t just ache for comfort from Diaz’s strength but ached to give him comfort of her own. It was an ache that had grown stronger and stronger these last few weeks.

Diaz was her husband and she’d only voluntarily touched him once her whole life, that simple tap to his thigh in the church earlier when she’d instinctively known he was on the verge of erupting at his narcissistic parents.

Every single involuntary brush of their hands and arms as they’d cared for his grandmother in her last months had seared through her skin and into her heart.

And soon it would all be over and she would be all alone in the world without the one person left in it that she loved, and she didn’t know how she could begin to endure it.

He refilled his glass and topped Rose’s up.

Closing her eyes, she inhaled the potent liquid before drinking it in one large swallow and climbing off the stool.

To prolong this moment would be to add to her torment.

‘I’m going up,’ she said, then, as casually as she could muster, added, ‘What time will you be leaving?’

He hesitated before replying. ‘Early. I’ve a meeting in Milan.’

‘If I don’t see you before you go, safe travels.’

‘Thank you.’ A long pause. ‘Sleep well.’

‘And you.’

She didn’t look back.

Her heart ripping and rippling, Rose went up to her bedroom needing to scrub the day from her skin and cleanse her emotions, and took a long shower under the highest temperature she could bear.

Don’t think about him, she told herself despairingly as she scrubbed her face and fought with equal desperation to hold back the tears.

It was a battle she won only until she climbed into her bed and a wave of desolation grabbed her with such strength she could have more easily stopped the sun from rising.

With a moan of despair, the tears poured out in a torrent.

She wept for her mother who she missed desperately. Wept for Mrs Martinez whose loss suddenly felt so very real. And she wept for Diaz and the love that had taken such a strong hold in her heart and the future that could never be hers.

---