Page 248 of Modern Romance Collection March 2025 (1-4)

It was Daisy who finally came and found her one afternoon while she was brooding at the kitchen table and drinking tea, looking out at the vast, glorious mountain view below.

It really was a beautiful house.

“Are you ever going to talk about what happened?”

“There isn’t any point.”

“Isn’t there? It’s something that happened to you.”

“But… I don’t want any of you to be upset.”

“But you’re upset. Don’t you understand that matters? Don’t you understand that your feelings are important?”

She scowled. “No. I have to take care of everybody.”

“No you don’t. And for a while, he took care of you. And it really is terrible that you lost that.”

She felt her heart began to crack. She felt tears begin to spill down her cheeks. She laid her head down on the table. “I loved him, Daisy. I still do.”

“Why did you leave?”

“It was him. He sent us away. He… He doesn’t want to love me. He’s afraid to. But I think he does. And I’m afraid… Just saying that out loud sounds silly. Like I’m full of myself. Like he had to send me away because his love for me would be too powerful and he couldn’t control it. It sounds ridiculous.”

“No, Stevie. It doesn’t.” Daisy sat down at the table and put her hand over Stevie’s arm. “It doesn’t sound ridiculous. Because you are that amazing. Can’t you accept it? You have that prince running scared because he’s never felt anything like it, because he’s never met anything like you.”

She blinked. She had wanted to feel special. Maybe not like this. But suddenly, she did. Because she, Stevie Parker, of Bozeman, Montana, had been too much for that playboy prince, with all his lovers, and all his travel, to handle.

She was special. She was.

Tears spilled down her cheek, and she huffed out a laugh. “Well. I’ll be damned.”

“Look what you did, Stevie.” Daisy looked around them. “You saved us.”

“Maybe I did.” She let a sense of pride fill her chest, alongside the pain. “Maybe I did.”

Prince Adonis could take an awful lot from her. But he could never take this.

* * *

Adonis was jet-lagged and angry by the time he landed in Los Angeles. He didn’t know what he was doing here. He blamed Stevie.

But it had been weeks, and he was miserable. Stevie had sent a message through Miriam that she was not pregnant. Miriam had looked at him like he was the very villain of the tale. He was beginning to feel like he was.

Every time he took a breath, it was like he was being stabbed with a dagger, and would a hero hurt quite so much over his own decisions? He had no way of knowing.

But without even really thinking it through, he ended up making a plan to go to Los Angeles and find his mother.

It wasn’t difficult, of course. It was a matter of having the right people liaise with one another and make a meeting spot that was agreeable to both parties.

His mother had insisted it be high-profile. He found it irritating, and yet… It was the relationship he had cultivated with her. Revenge through headlines. So perhaps he deserved it. But now they would be meeting, and it would create buzz for her.

He had never wanted buzz less.

But still, he found himself walking out onto the terrace of a well-known restaurant that overlooked the ocean. And there she was, seated at the table, wearing a large, wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses on her face. As if she didn’t want to be recognized, but was screaming it so loudly everyone was certain to look and make their best attempt to do so.

“Adonis,” she said. “It has been a very long time.”

“Yes. I believe I was a child.”

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