Page 23 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4
She tiptoed to the cabin across from hers and gently rapped on the door. It was abruptly answered, swinging wide on a bare-chested Sebastian, barefoot and clad only in his jeans. ‘Yes?’
‘Sorry to interrupt but I wanted to know why your background might have messed you up…’
Sebastian blinked and then studied her intently. ‘Someone’s been talking.’
Reproach in her luminous gaze, she murmured drily, ‘But not you…’
Without warning, he flung the door wide and stepped back. Lean bronzed muscles rippled as he shifted uneasily. ‘You’ve got a nerve expecting answers after what you said earlier.’
Bunny winced in agreement. ‘I don’t want to look you up on the Internet and pry.’
A grim laugh was wrenched from his compressed lips. ‘Even if that is what everyone else does?’
Bunny nodded in confirmation and stepped over the threshold.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WAS TIMEthat he told her about his back story, Sebastian reasoned heavily. He preferred to tell it in his own words rather than leave it to her to read the dramatic horrors online.
‘It’s bad stuff,’ he warned her.
‘I’m a good listener.’
‘My grandmother indulged her eldest son, Jason, in every way,’ Sebastian imparted wryly. ‘He was the apple of her eye, no matter what he did, and when he met my mother, she was equally spoiled and wilful. Together they were a disaster but they married and had me. People thought it was a good match because they were both very rich. But my father never settled down. He was heavily into drugs and eventually my mother turned to other men.’
‘Oh, dear…’ Bunny mumbled, watching him pour himself a drink on the other side of the cabin.
‘Do you want anything?’ he asked.
‘Water,’ she chose, eying the lines of strain grooved round his wide sensual mouth, moving forward to accept the glass from him, belatedly guilty that she had cornered him into telling her what he so obviously didn’twantto tell her. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have pushed you on such personal issues.’
Sebastian lifted her up with firm hands and deposited her on the end of the giant bed. ‘You might as well know the facts when everyone else does,’ he parried. ‘In his twisted obsessive way my father adored my mother, but she’d met someone else and she insisted on a divorce. The lawyers who represented them were soon at each other’s throats.’
‘What age were you when all this was happening?’
‘Six. The divorce fighting went on for months until one day my father just cracked. He’d already moved out of our home but when he arrived one evening, my nanny let him in,’ he explained. ‘It was her night off. As she left, my mother called the police. They started to argue and I hid behind the sofa. And without any warning—or indeed any prior record of violence—my father pulled out a gun and shot her…’
Bunny stared back at him with wide, horrified eyes.
‘He was off his head. He was spraying bullets everywhere, stopping to reload, and then there was this silence for a long time. I was too scared to come out of hiding.’ Sebastian was very pale, his lean, dark, perfect features taut as a bowstring in the lamplight. ‘I heard one more shot…my father turned the gun on himself. The police found me with them. I was very distressed.’
Bunny stumbled off the bed and went over to him to wrap both arms round him in a hug. ‘I amsosorry that I forced you to relive that.’
Sebastian gazed down at her, disconcerted by her unhidden desire to comfort him. Something clenched tight in his chest and he set her back from him with newly learned circumspection. ‘You’d better head to bed before your family find you missing. I’ll see you in the morning.’
Bunny had never wanted so badly to stay with him but he had lived over twenty years with that tragedy and what could she offer him? Pale and taut, she headed back in shock from what she had learned. He must’ve been traumatised by such an ordeal and the simultaneous loss of both parents. Had his grandmother taken him in and brought him up? She assumed that Loukia, whom he had mentioned with such affection, must’ve done. What a ghastly past to have to live down, she reflected, shaken even more by that story of his than she had shown him.
She got into bed, reminding herself that, now that she and Sebastian were no longer involved, his upsetting background wasn’t anything to do with her any more. So, why did she feel so agonised on his behalf? Why more than anything else in the world did she want to go back to Sebastian and keep on holding him? The time to express that kind of compassion and affection was already behind them. But, she acknowledged, her heart still yearned for him and the closeness they had enjoyed on the island without criticism or watching eyes judging them.
For goodness’ sake, why was she thinking like a lovestruck teenager? Two weeks wasn’t enough time to fall in love with anyone, she told herself. Love at first sight, well, it certainly hadn’t been that. Lust and loathing at first sight, she reasoned, her entire body overheating with shame. And then from that first night when in truth she had thrown herself at him, other bonds had formed quite naturally. She had felt safe with him, she had trusted him, which was ironic when she reckoned that Sebastian did not trust anyone unless they came with a signed NDA.
She had never felt the way she felt now about Tristram. Neither that instant, unreasoning craving and the frightening power of it, nor the strong, deeper emotions constantly pulling at her. Falling for Tristram had been a slow, steady thing, wholly in keeping with her cautious, sensible nature. Falling for Sebastian was like falling into the eye of a storm.
She was neither cautious nor sensible about Sebastian. She had flung herself into his arms with no thought of a future and had assured herself that she could handle a temporary fling. Only now here she was and she wasn’t handling the end of their relationship well, was she? But she had to bury her feelings and deal with the future, most especially if she had conceived.
Sebastian had always made it crystal clear that there was no tomorrow for them. He preferred being alone and he didn’t engage in committed relationships with women. He didn’t believe in happy marriages either and only now could she comprehend that he was damaged by living through his parents’ unhappy marriage and its even more traumatic conclusion. But she had to accept all that and the impossibility of being with Sebastian ever again while at the same time embracing her own probably very different future. And if shedidprove to be pregnant, would she and Sebastian eventually manage to become reasonably friendly co-parents?
And even worse, in the aftermath of his own ghastly childhood experience, how would Sebastian feel about becoming a parent? Clearly, he had suffered from his parents’ troubled marriage. She wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn that Sebastian had never planned to father a child.
