Page 17 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4
‘Time to eat,’ Sebastian told her, shaking her shoulder.
‘You…cooked?’
‘Yes, and you’re not allowed to criticise,’ he warned her, herding her back into the house and the kitchen where he set a plate of pasta in front of her with a flourish.
Still waking up, she ate, deciding that Sebastian could be a little bit annoying because he was good at so many different things. The food was excellent, if spicier than she would have dared to make it.
‘I’m going for a shower,’ he told her while she was clearing up.
‘I’ll be in bed.’
He stalked back from the doorway and pulled her into his arms. ‘Tell me I can kiss you.’
‘You can do anything you like,’ she murmured, lifting her head high, clear green eyes striking his levelly. ‘And we’re not about to stress about that any more.’
‘Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?’ he teased, dark-as-night eyes glittering like stars as his tension vanished.
For a split second, relief flooded him and he just wanted to grab her and whirl her round the kitchen. It was a weird urge and it knocked him off balance. Possibly he was more stressed than he had been willing to admit but resisting the urge to put his arms round her was still a challenge. Why was he getting these insane feelings of affection that had nothing whatsoever to do with sex? Why wasn’t he exasperated with her for playing hot and cold? Why wasn’t he offended that she had had to put so much thought into being with him? Had that ever happened to him before?
She groaned and laughed almost simultaneously at that corny line. Her big green eyes sparkled. His big hands cradling her cheeks, he kissed her, fast, hard and full of dark promise, making her shiver with anticipation. ‘Later,’ he husked with a brilliant smile.
Yes, he wanted her fiercely and she would let herself enjoy that, revel in being desired, truly desired for the very first time. In her one and only relationship, she had been a useful stopgap, a temporary convenience for student life, never the girlfriend Tristram had planned to stay with long term, for all he had once said that she was. After that experience, Sebastian’s desire, his bluntness about what he did and didn’t want were exceptionally appealing to her. He wasn’t telling her any lies, he wasn’t faking anything. He didn’t want love or commitment. It was honest. Theyhadno future! They were having a fling and, goodness knew, she was old enough to have a fling without agonising about it and beating herself up.
There was just something about her, Sebastian reflected in the shower. He wondered how long it would take him to persuade her into the shower with him. He smiled. Having the lights on had been a big enough deal for her. She could be shy. She took for ever to make major decisions, and sex was clearly a major decision for her. She could be impulsive, though, and when she was, she was incredibly sexy. At the same time, she didn’t back down with him when he crossed or criticised her and he was beginning to appreciate that quiet, firm, non-combative peace she emanated when he got difficult. She was his polar opposite. So why did they work so well together?
He was volatile, had always been volatile and inclined to brood. He was a science geek and when he was a child his social skills had been abysmal. He wasn’t a party person. He didn’t do drugs or drink much. His family background had ensured that he knew enough to avoid the obvious pitfalls. He liked sex but he didn’t like the complications it brought, the women who demanded more than he had to give, the women who wouldn’t give him space to breathe. Thinking about it, and the very idea made him want to laugh at the insanity of it, he realised Bunny was probably his very first relationship.
He had had next to no relationship with the relatives who had sent him away from them rather than take him into their own homes and families. Even his parents had been distant in his memories of them. Nobody had ever got really close to him, certainly not a woman. He had never lived with a woman before, seen her day after day, looked for her when she wasn’t there, eaten her cooking, cooked for her. It was scarily intimate, he acknowledged, the sort of set-up he usually avoided like the plague. That in mind, why was he still enjoying being with her? Why wasn’t he keeping his distance?
Bunny slid into the cool bed and shivered and a moment later Sebastian rolled over and caught her to him. The heat of him infiltrated every inch of her and liquid warmth stirred between her thighs. Her fingers slid up into his damp hair, the curls of black hair on his chest abrading her tender nipples as his mouth came down on hers with a hunger that both shook and thrilled. She wasn’t about to catch feelings for him, she swore to herself, she wasn’t going to get attached. Yet deep down inside her a little voice whispered that she was lying to herself and that it was easy to decide to live wild and free, but it would be more of a challenge to hold to that goal.
CHAPTER SIX
‘ICOULD MAKE COOKIES,’ Bunny bargained ten days later.
‘Cookies aren’t nutritious,’ Sebastian countered, sliding a glance over her slender frame as she sat beside him on the pier with her legs dangling. Her delicate features had thinned because they were both losing weight and it worried him. ‘Let’s conserve the supplies we have.’
‘Maybe not but cookies are comforting,’ Bunny argued. ‘I still remember making them with my grandmother.’
And without the smallest fanfare a sound rather like a click went off inside Sebastian’s brain. Click…hisgrandmother, Loukia was dead. For a split second he felt sick as he remembered that. Bang, all of a sudden everything he had forgotten was back in his head where it belonged, everything clashing and crowding together in an ungodly cacophony of demands. Loukia, the will, the onslaught of his relatives and the torturous stress of the latest software he was fine-tuning for the market. Was it any wonder his memory had checked out on him? He hadn’twantedto remember what his life was like, had he?
‘And then she passed and, six months later, my grandfather was gone as well. And Mum can’t bake for peanuts, so I became the baker at home,’ Bunny continued. ‘I miss my family. I wouldn’t admit that I was homesick the whole year I’ve been away and I wouldn’t let them pay for me to fly home for Christmas because it would’ve left them short for other things. And now they’ll be worrying about me, afraid that something bad has happened and I feel so guilty…’
Thee mou…what had he done? He had never been so irresponsible in his choice of a woman. How he had ended up with someone as unsuitable as Bunny in his bed was a mystery unless it was the sheer novelty of her that had drawn him. The optimistic freshness of the way she saw life, her perpetual, painful honesty, her overdeveloped conscience. The easy affection she offered, the wonderful calm at the heart of her that steadied him. The absolutely amazing sex. Long fingers tightening on the fishing rod, he turned to look at his companion, knowing that he would be judging himself for ever more if he hurt her. ‘Go back in the shade…you’re burning again,’ he told her with the curtness of guilt-stricken concern. ‘Your nose is pink.’
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked instantly, alert to the edge honing his dark deep voice.
‘I got the rest of my memory back. When you mentioned your grandmother it all simply slid into place and it’s sobering stuff,’ he grated, checking out fleeting images inside his head and almost flinching from the fallout.
‘Don’t go back to being the guy you were on the boat,’ she warned him ruefully.
‘It’s too late for that. I’m the guy I was on the boat but I’m also the guy you’ve been with here for the past two weeks. I’mboth,’ he underlined.
Bunny didn’t want to think about him being both because she had loathed the first version of him that she had met. ‘You sent up the last flare last night,’ she reminded him, suddenly very keen to change the subject.
‘Because we heard planes,’ he pointed out.
‘Only they didn’t come near us.
