Page 116 of Modern Romance Collection March 2025 (1-4)

He gazed at her suddenly ashen face. ‘I’m sorry,mi corazón, but this needs to be said. I need to clean my conscience and beg your forgiveness because I can’t do this any more. I can’t put you through this any more.’

She was trembling from head to toe. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

‘I know you don’t, and I don’t want to cause you any more—’

‘No!’Spinning on her heels, arms folded tightly across her chest, head bowed, she hurried away from him.

Kicking his chair back, he followed her across the lawn, his longer strides easily closing the distance. ‘Rose, I know I’ve behaved terribly to you.’

Her pace didn’t slow. She gave no impression of hearing him.

‘I know I can never take away the hurt I’ve caused you—’

She came to an abrupt halt. Her back straightened and stiffened, and then, slowly, she twisted around.

Colour crawled over her disbelieving face. ‘Hurt? You call thathurt?’

His heart splintered, all words of apology lost under the agonised contortion of her face.

‘Hurt?Hurt?’ she screamed, slamming her hands into his chest. ‘You didn’t hurt me, you bastard, youdestroyedme! Do you understand that?Destroyedme. I gave you my heart… I gave you myeverything, and you took it all with words of love and then you crept out of my bed and walked out of my life without a backwards glance.

‘You didn’t just break my heart, you broke my soul, and now you want to clean your conscience?’ Tears streaming down her face, she threw her hands in the air. ‘Well go on then, clean it. Purge yourself. Tell me all the lies you’ve dreamed up to justify treating me like the nothing you’ve always thought me to be.’

The sickness in his stomach spread through his veins, infecting the whole of him, and it was all Diaz could do not to throw himself at her feet. ‘I will spend the rest of my life repenting every wound I inflicted on you, but you have never been nothing to me. You’ve been a part of me for so long that I couldn’t even try to tell you when you first seeped into my soul.’

She was swiping at the falling tears, shaking her head. ‘No.’

‘When I left you that morning, I didn’t just destroy you, Rose, I destroyed myself and any chance I ever had of happiness because youaremy everything.’ He needed her to know that. Needed her to believe it. Needed her to leave his home with the truth because the truth was the very least she deserved.

‘I woke that morning feeling like I was suffocating. You were asleep in my arms and everything I was feeling was just too much. I couldn’t breathe. I hadn’t intended to come to you that night. I’d spent months—years—doing everything in my power to stop myself stepping into your room. I’d spent years hating you and the toxic allure you’d spun around me, and to admit to myself that I’d been wrong about you was too much to allow myself, not just because I’m an arrogant bastard but because of what it would have led to.’

Her lips were still trembling but the rest of her had frozen.

‘Deep down I always knew that there was no real rationality behind my loathing of you. I turned you into the evil heroine of my mind because I needed to. Once my attraction for you came to life, I was terrified of how deeply my feelings for you ran. But I couldn’t keep it up, not once my grandmother had her stroke. The way you cared for her…’ He shook his head, more memories flooding him. ‘No one could devote themselves to giving such care to someone who wasn’t even of their blood if they had anything but love in their heart, but I would never have come to you if I hadn’t heard you crying.’

Those cries had touched him like nothing else, compelling his feet to her room and compelling his arms to wrap around her and hold her tightly.

‘Nothing could have prepared me for what we shared that night. I cannot tell you how it felt to learn I was your first, and my words of love…they came from my heart, you must believe that, but in the morning I went into denial. I justified walking out on you without saying goodbye and leaving that note by telling myself that we’d got carried away on all the emotions of the funeral. I could not face the depth of my feelings for you or the possibility that your feelings for me could be of the same weight. I had to rebuild you back into the evil heroine to stop myself coming back to you. And then you told me you were pregnant.’

She visibly flinched.

He felt it like a flinch to his own heart.

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Diaz breathed deeply, needing to get control of the emotions boiling inside him.

He wished as hard as he’d ever wished that he could turn back the sands of time.

He had never hated himself as he did then.

It took everything he had not to flinch from confessing the rest. But he needed to say it, and, whatever Rose might say, he knew she needed to hear it.

‘I have never had unprotected sex before and I think the reason neither of us even mentioned contraception that night was because when we were holding each other, the future my grandmother had wanted for us and that we’d been running from was right there for us to take. If I hadn’t run away from it, we would be living that future now, but, coward that I am, I did run, and I did everything humanly possible to block you and the night we’d shared from my thoughts.

‘I couldn’t block you from my dreams though. That has always been impossible, and when the girls were born, that was it. I couldn’t run from my feelings any more.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose again, this time to hold back the stinging tears the mere memory of that day always provoked. ‘I have never experienced such cold fear in the whole of my life.’

Her throat moved and she bleakly croaked, ‘I was terrified they wouldn’t make it too.’

He held her stare and shook his head. ‘No,mi amor, my terror was at losingyou.’

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