Page 1 of Modern Romance June 2025 5-8

Billionaire’s Wedlocked Wife

Heidi Rice

To my big beautiful family—both biological and found—your support means everything! xx

CHAPTER ONE

Cerys Jones satin the bustling pavement café in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter and tugged a tattered leather-bound journal out of her rucksack. She took a steadying breath as she opened the book, preparing to read the final entry for the first time. She’d read the other entries many times—ever since finding her mother’s old diary buried in a drawer in her father’s study the day of his funeral. It had taken her six months to get up the courage to read what her mother had written the night she ran away while on holiday less than two hours’ drive away.

Cerys stared blankly at her mother’s loopy, chaotic handwriting, so unlike the neat script in the rest of the book…

Blinking back tears, she read the last words the woman she could barely remember now had written, searching for any clue, any hidden explanation as to why Angharad Jones would choose Álvaro De Montoya Hernández, the Eighth Duke of Cantada, over her husband and child, and devastate all their lives…

I met a man today who made me feel totally alive for the first time in my life. I never believed in love at first sight. But Álvaro, the Spanish duke who owns the vineyard Bill and I were touring with Cerys this afternoon, was BREATHTAKING.

I’d lost Bill and Cerys somehow, and I smacked into him coming out of his office. He caught me, to stop me from falling… And something happened…something so exhilarating it hurt. It was as if a fireworks display was going off in my belly as this man looked at me, as he held me… It’s something I’ve never felt for Bill, but I could see he felt it too.

We talked, but when I told him I had to go—that my husband and daughter were waiting for me—he caught my hand and told me to meet him, in the cove below our hotel, at midnight tonight.

I’m married with a child. He’s married with three children and another on the way. But somehow the guilt I should be feeling—at even contemplating doing such a terrible thing—isn’t there. Because as I write this on our hotel room balcony—while Bill is busy snoring in the bedroom, having had too many beers in the bar—all I can feel is that fierce, raw, unstoppable yearning for something more. More than my husband, more than our mundane life in Cambridge, more even than my darling Cerys…

Meeting Álvaro has awoken me from a coma, and beckoned me into a dream of what my lifecouldhave been if I hadn’t got pregnant too young, and then married a man who hasnevermade me feel all those things you’re supposed to feel when you’re in love.

Those things I always thought didn’t exist… Until this afternoon. Until Álvaro.

Cerys closed the book and took a fortifying sip of the strong black coffee she’d ordered twenty minutes ago. Then shoved the diary back into her rucksack. And let out a heavy sigh.

Well, that was a massive anti-climax.

Her mother’s scribbles didn’t make any sense. Not to Cerys.

Who jettisoned everyone who loved them for a chance to have epic sex with a complete stranger? Admittedly, Cerys hadn’t quite gone all the way yet, so she had no idea what epic sex entailed—but she’d kissed her share of guys and she hadneverhad the urge to run off with any of them.

After her dad’s death, Cerys had been forced to sell her family home. But it hadn’t been hard because the empty rooms were even lonelier now than when her father had been alive and locked in his study, busy ignoring his daughter. Jacking in her dead-end job at a coffee shop and deciding to use the small legacy to work her way across France to Spain for the past six months had been an even easier decision… Learning French and then Spanish, absorbing the culture, working in bars and restaurants and tavernas, having no responsibilities, no ties, no need to please anyone but herself, had helped to push her grief and confusion to one side.

But always in the back of her mind had been the quest to understand why her mum and Álvaro De Montoya had chosen to destroy two families fifteen years ago.

Her dad had never stopped blaming her mum for breaking up their family—and Cerys had felt his emotional distance like a wound, throughout her childhood and adolescence. The few memories she had of her mum were of a warm, vivacious woman who had loved her unconditionally—the way her father never had. But if Angharad had loved her only child, why had she left her? Cerys had barely even warranted a mention on that last page.

She was generally a positive person, but lurking in her subconscious had always been the sense that if she had been a better-behaved daughter, a more loving child, her mum wouldn’t have chosen Álvaro over her, only to die tragically, not long after. And her dad wouldn’t have found it so difficult to spend any time with her. But expecting the answers to all her questions from her mother’s journal had clearly been overly optimistic, even for her.

She hefted the rucksack onto her shoulders and checked her phone for directions to the youth hostel she’d booked for tonight, when a headline from a local celebrity news site popped up on the screen.

Her heartbeat slowed as she stared at the blurred paparazzi shot of Álvaro’s eldest son, the current Duke of Cantada, Santiago Álvaro Antonio De Montoya Lopez. Then she checked the timestamp. He’d been photographed attending an exclusive art gallery opening with a stunningly beautiful woman less than twenty minutes ago in the Plaça Reial, right here in Barcelona.

Was this the sign she’d been hoping for? It was certainly a weird coincidence, given that the famously ruthless billionaire businessman was based in Madrid.

On impulse, she keyed in directions to the splendid neo-classical square. It was only a ten-minute walk away.

Cerys headed through the back alleys, energised by the prospect of getting a glimpse of Álvaro’s son in the flesh. According to the Spanish press, who seemed obsessed with ‘the scandalous De Montoyas’, Santiago was the image of his father. Maybe seeing him, even at a distance, would give her some clue as to what on earth had possessed her mother to run off with a hot stranger for a few weeks of sex, scandal and more sex and leave the child who had needed her so desperately behind for ever.

‘I do not care what Alejandro told you, Gabriela, I am not going to propose to you,’ Santiago said tightly, standing on the balcony of the Plaça Reial gallery. The square below was alive with the city’s vibrant nightlife. But he wasn’t aware of the majestic palm trees or the ornate Baroque fountain at its centre, or the people gathered in groups at the pavement cafés enjoying the balmy evening, because all he could see was Alejandro’s face as he contemplated strangling his younger brother.

It had probably been Andro’s idea of a joke—to inform Santiago’s casual bed partner he was currently looking for a wife—but there was just enough truth in the joke to infuriate him. It had certainly made this evening’s trip to Barcelona, to break up with Gabriela, even more excruciating.

But then he should have known Alejandro would laugh at Santiago’s decision to find himself a suitable bride by the end of the summer. Alejandro had never been burdened by the scandal which had destroyed their family fifteen years ago and continued to linger like a bad smell over Santiago’s reputation. Because, unlike Santiago, Alejandro did not bear an uncanny resemblance to their father. Nor did Alejandro have to corral their unruly seventeen-year-old sister Ana, because he was not the head of the De Montoya household.

Gabriela pouted. ‘But Santiago, don’t you still want me?’ she asked plaintively as she ran a scarlet-tipped fingernail across his nape.

---