Page 115 of Modern Romance Collection March 2025 (1-4)

He cleared his closing throat. ‘That joint I caught you holding at my parents’? That was Rosaria’s, too, wasn’t it?’

Her chin made the faintest wobble.

‘She made you take the blame.’

‘She didn’t make me.’

‘She let you take all my anger and pretended to be blameless.’

Rose closed her eyes. She was too numb to feel any sense of vindication at Diaz’s acceptance that he’d been wrong about her. Finally allowing the memories of their night together to surface had wrung her dry.

It was all she could do to speak.

‘She knew how you’d react. She knew you would hit the roof and have watched her like a hawk to stop her doing it again. She was angry at the world and drugs were the only way she’d found to blot all her anger out. She didn’t want to stop.’

‘And I did hit the roof,’ he said heavily. ‘I made everything worse with my heavy-handedness and drove her away.’

‘No,’ she disagreed. When it came to Rosaria, Diaz was blameless. ‘You forget she has the same parents as you. All her angst goes back to the neglect she suffered at their hands, but because they’re so indifferent to everything the only person she was able to rail at was you, because you’re the one who loved her most.’ At his disbelieving expression, she dredged a faint smile. ‘You were the one most likely to forgive her.’

She hated to see the pain in his stare. Hated that it had the power to cut through her numbness when the torment of her memories made her never want to feel again.

‘Then why does she still block all my calls and messages and refuse to see me?’ he asked. ‘Why did she boycott our grandmother’s funeral when I made damned sure my mother told her about it?’

‘She wanted to come but she was scared.’

Dismay and pain glittered. ‘Of me?’

‘Of causing a scene. She didn’t know how you would react.’ Cupping the base of her neck, Rose kneaded her thumb into the tensed muscle. She’d never felt this tight before, as if every muscle in her body had seized up and the rest of her had coiled in on itself.

Only her heart felt like it was working properly but the steady erratic increase of the beats was the warning sign that she was a hairpin away from the coil springing free.

She needed to keep it together and keep a tight hold of herself because to release the coil would be to release the clamouring demons and bring the whole world crashing down.

As evenly as she could manage, she said, ‘Diaz, she’s not the nineteen-year-old girl you remember. She’s found her place in the world and she’s happy. She’s a spiritual, beekeeping, pot-smoking hippy, living off her trust fund with a long-term boyfriend, but she still fears your disapproval.’

Rose snatched a breath and willed her phone to buzz with a message from one of the nannies so she could end this conversation and hide away from Diaz until she had the demons under control. ‘I think, too, that she’s deeply ashamed for everything she put you through and that she misses you as much as you miss her, and I think if you were to fly to Nevada waving a white flag, she would embrace you back into her life.’

He sat in silent contemplation for the longest time before turning a bleak stare back to her. ‘How can you be so calm and reasonable talking about this after all the years of blame I put on your shoulders?’

She gripped the sash of her robe. ‘Whatever you did or said to me, you didn’t deserve to be treated like that when all you were doing was trying to save Rosaria from herself.’

‘Don’t tell me you forgive me for my treatment of you,’ he said in scathing self-recrimination.

The beats of her heart had risen to her throat. ‘You both suffered at your parents’ neglect.’

‘You’ve been neglected your whole life by your father but that hasn’t screwed you up and turned you into a monster.’

A pounding had formed in her head. ‘I had my mother. She loved me enough for them both.’

‘And then she died and instead of being a support to the girl who’d been such a large part of my life for so many years…’ Diaz swallowed in an effort to contain the self-loathing consuming him. ‘I was never able to see you truthfully. Always there were emotions mixed in it. It started with jealousy. You infected my whole life and I hated you for it. Even my parents on the few visits they bothered to make to Devon fell in love with you. When I started developing baser feelings for you…’ His lips twisted. ‘I hated myself. I hated that I could do nothing to stop them.

‘Do you remember that weekend when your mother was at the hospice and I drove my grandmother to collect you from it?’

As still as he’d ever seen her, Rose gave the jerkiest of nods.

‘As soon as I walked into the house, I knew you weren’t there. You were always there. For years I’d resented you for that but that one time you were gone, there was an emptiness that I’ve never been able to explain. I insisted on driving my grandmother to the hospice on the pretext that she didn’t like driving, but the truth was that a part of me needed to see you. I think that was when I first started falling in love with you.’

Rose jumped to her feet so quickly she knocked into the table, spilling coffee all over it. ‘Don’t.’

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