Page 241 of Modern Romance Collection March 2025 (1-4)

They moved away from the balcony, to resounding applause.

“Very well done,” he said.

He personally didn’t react to what she had said, because it had simply been an expedient thing to say, he was certain. But their audience had loved it.

He had liked it more than he would have expected.

Wished it were…

No. There was no point thinking that way.

They were bundled into a car, and then taken to the end of a road lined with well-wishers. They got out and began to walk down the line of people. Waving, stopping to talk.

Stevie got down at eye level with the children. At some point, he saw her engaged in a very serious discussion with a man about wages, and then with a woman about the cost of food. Stevie didn’t just listen, she engaged. She shared her own experiences. She could do more than sympathize, she could empathize. Because she had also had worries about feeding her family. About budgets. It made him feel…unequal to the task before him. Because the person who truly understood it was the one the world would look at and say wasn’t born into the position. And yet, he felt he was the imposter. Not her.

She was caring and forthright. She was real. More real than he had ever been.

And he wondered if living with him… He worried, if it would suffocate her.

When they finished with the parade, he watched her family interact at dinner. His father sat at the head of the table, clearly baffled by this turn of events. This noisy palace when for years it had been so quiet.

Stevie smiled, and it did something to him.

“May I speak to you?” his father asked.

“Yes.”

He turned to Stevie. “I’ll see you after dinner.”

Her cheeks turned pink.

“What is it?” he asked his father once they were outside the dining room.

“You’ve chosen well. She is definitely what the people want. The reaction to her has been overwhelmingly positive. Your instincts proved to be better than mine in this instance.”

His father’s words fortified him. “I’m pleased,” he said.

“You will have to be careful with her, though. Because she is…vivacious.”

“You think I haven’t noticed that?”

“I have concerns.”

“Of course you do,” he said. “But Stevie will never go back on what she has promised to do.”

As soon as he said that, he realized it was true. Stevie would honor every promise that she had ever made. It was who she was.

She would stay with him even if she was miserable. Abjectly and completely.

That was the truth of it. Because she had promised. And she was not his mother. She would never abandon their children. She would never go off seeking her own fortune. No. She would sublimate her own wants and needs just like she had done in her own family.

The realization flummoxed him.

He didn’t have to worry about her leaving him. What he had to worry about was that he would crush her. His mother had been a bird in a cage, but she had been more than willing to make her own escape. But that wasn’t how Stevie lived. When she made a vow, she kept it.

He had seen her do so with her family. Even though the responsibility of it all had been crushing. And with this… She would do it to. She would stay. She would stay and she would make herself ill with unhappiness. If he let her.

I love him…

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