Page 92 of Modern Romance Collection March 2025 (1-4)

His absence had brought no respite. He was always there in the back of her mind by day and weaving through her dreams at night, just as she’d long weaved through his dreams.

He’d been the one to reject those dreams. He only wanted to live them now to provide their daughters and himself with the real family he’d never had.

Rose turned her phone off without replying.

* * *

Breakfast was mercifully Diaz free, and Rose snatched the opportunity for more Diaz-free time by taking the girls for a walk on the beach before the sun burned away the thinning clouds gathered above them.

For the first time she wished she were back home in Devon, just so she could walk along the unpredictable sea. The picture-perfect blue Mediterranean was too perfect for her mood. She needed a tempest to match her emotions and help quell it before she came face to face with him again.

Since she’d arrived in Spain, a wide ramp had been installed next to the marble steps that led up to Diaz’s gardens, and she pushed the double buggy back up it thinking there was nothing he hadn’t thought of…

She almost stopped in her tracks.

Had that really been the first time she’d wished herself back home?

She never got the chance to answer herself for a tall figure appeared in the distance and scrambled her thoughts before he’d taken his first stride towards her.

* * *

Diaz hadn’t known it was possible that two days’ absence could enhance beauty so greatly, not until he stood before Rose, dazzling under the rising sun in a short pale blue summer dress, dirty blonde hair wild and loose.

He’d thought about her every minute of his time away. Recalled over and over how she’d lost control in his arms, turning from passionate fury to passionate desire in a breath.

As their daughters had fallen asleep, he simply stood there and soaked her in, filling his senses with the woman who would, finally, after all these years of fighting and all these months of waiting, be sharing his bed.

Whether she would be sharing it on a permanent basis was something he could not predict. From the defiance ringing out of the brilliant blue eyes soaking him in with the same degree of intensity, she was far from reaching the point of acceptance he’d reached all those months ago.

She’d given him her word to try and make their marriage work but she wasn’t going to pretend it was what she wanted. Rose never put on a front. In that respect, she hadn’t changed since she was eleven. She was doing it for their daughters, not for herself and definitely not for him.

But at one point shehadwanted a real marriage with him, something she’d unwittingly admitted between furious kicks to his shins.

His actions that early morning had hurt her greatly, a knowledge that sat increasingly heavy in him, but if he could put the past behind him and separate Rose, the mother of his children, from the Rose who’d led his sister on the path to destruction, then in time she would learn to make a similar separation too. It was the only way to make it work. Draw a line in the sand and step into the territory markedfuture.

A future where neither of them had to hide away from the passions and desires that had bound and repelled them for so long.

‘I take it from the happiness on your face that you are thrilled at my return,’ he commented, breaking the silence and its accompanying tension, and was rewarded with a twitch of Rose’s wide, perfect lips.

‘Ecstatic.’

‘I thought as much. I was nearly convinced by the way you rushed to join me for a swim earlier but now it has been confirmed.’

‘I would have joined you but I had a prior engagement with a book.’

Chest lightening at her irreverence, he laughed. ‘Is it one of those big photography tomes you always used to have your nose stuck in?’

‘It’s a thriller, about a woman on a quest for vengeance.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Reading it for tips?’

Her laugh was a short melodic burst that stopped almost as soon as it started.

It was a sound he hadn’t heard since his grandmother died. Not like that. Unforced.

‘Assuming you don’t already have a prior engagement with your book, I thought we could take the girls to a nature reserve for the day,’ he casually suggested, watching her reaction closely.

‘Today?’

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