Page 24 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4
‘You look beautiful,’ Sebastian said with unexpected warmth over the breakfast table.
Disconcerted by that unexpected compliment concerning the plain green sun dress and flat canvas shoes she wore, Bunny smiled back at him, ignoring the sudden telling break in her family’s conversation as every eye turned to them. ‘Thanks,’ she said simply.
‘We’re leaving for the police station in half an hour and we’ll follow that up with the shipping team interview.’
‘I’d like to visit Reggie in hospital if that’s possible. After all, I won’t see him again once I go home…and he was good to me. It was only a few weeks but he was a great boss.’
Her father leant across the table to say, ‘Did your mother tell you about Tristram turning up on our doorstep?’
Bunny froze. ‘Tristram?Why on earth would he call with you?’
‘He read about you going missing in the newspaper and came to us to ask if there was any news or if there was anything that he could do to help,’ her mother explained. ‘We didn’t invite him in. He left his number but I shouldn’t think any of us will be making use of it.’
‘The nerve of him! It’s not as if we parted as friends,’ Bunny exclaimed in a combination of annoyance and resentment, for she had neither seen nor spoken to her ex-boyfriend in a long time. To say the least, their breakup had been messy.
‘He’s still allowed to be concerned over whether you’re alive or dead,’ John declared mildly.
Sebastian brooded at the suspicion that the ex-boyfriend was hovering and awaiting Bunny’s return. He was annoyed that she had refused the immediate blood test that would’ve told them whether or not there was going to be a baby but, whether he liked it or not, it was her body and her choice. He needed to get out of the habit of trying to intervene and boss her around because she didn’t like it. She didn’t suffer from his impatience, his need to plan every step in advance and to always know exactly where he was going. Well, she had killed those goals stone dead the same moment she came into his life, he reckoned with grim humour. He didn’t know what he was doing, what he was planning to do next, no, heonlyknew that he wanted her.
He had told her that he would walk away. He had believed that he would walk away. He had been wrong. Still wanting her felt obsessional and it unnerved him. Moderation was always his rule with women but there was nothing moderate about the way he felt. From that first night on the island she had felt likehisin some primal, utterly inexplicable and absurd way. And he had grown attached to that sensation as if some vital part of him had awakened, had changed him, had turned him inside out and upside down, subjecting him to extreme irrational urges. It was unnerving and he had to get a grip on it fast. He had to let her go, he had to let her walk away…for a time, at least. He had to give her the space to catch her breath before he pressed her.
Bunny was ill at ease because Sebastian was quiet, perfectly polite and pleasant when he did speak but mentally miles away. They got into the helicopter, only the two of them because it was only them who had to give statements and answer questions. From the moment they disembarked at the airport to travel by car into the city, they were surrounded by a security team, who prevented the cameramen and the journalists from either photographing them or questioning them.
‘I didn’t realise that it would be like this,’ Bunny admitted, shaken by the excitement that their arrival had caused and the heaving desperation of the press to get closer to them.
‘I’ve arranged for an official statement to be made about our rescue, but they want the whole story and they’re not going to get it,’ he responded curtly.
Within an hour they were inside the police station and making their statements, an Indonesian lawyer who apparently worked for Sebastian overseeing every step. It was shocking to witness how much attention and deference Sebastian received simply by dint of being an extremely wealthy and powerful tycoon. On the other side of the city, they answered the investigators’ questions about the night of the storm, Reggie’s actions and what the two of them had seen and done.
Soon afterwards they were visiting the older man in hospital, where he was now recuperating from his surgery. Reggie explained that a tiny fracture had been found in the mast, the result of a collision with another boat months earlier. At the time the authorities had judged the catamaran undamaged.
They wished him well and returned to the yacht, where she found her family packing up to leave.
‘We assume that you have to stay another few days to satisfy the officials,’ her father told her ruefully. ‘But, lovely as it is here, we need to get home and your brothers need to get back to work.’
‘You don’t need to stay on in Indonesia and neither do I,’ Sebastian told Bunny stiffly, fighting his own inclinations to retain her to the last ditch. ‘Any further queries will be passed to us or dealt with by my legal reps here. You can travel home with your family today.’
Shock forked through Bunny like lightning and she turned pale. ‘But I haven’t got my stuff back yet,’ she mumbled weakly.
‘It’ll be sent on to you once it’s made available. I did take the liberty of finding you a spare phone,’ Sebastian added, handing her a brand-new mobile phone. ‘I put my number in there so that you can stay in touch.’
‘Thanks…of course,’ she mumbled, pale lips compressed at the prospect of leaving him, of possibly never ever seeing him again. ‘I hope I still have a new job to start but who knows if they’ve held it open for me?’
Her mother wrapped a supportive arm round her. ‘I’m so glad you’re returning with us. The sooner you get back to a normal routine, the better you will feel.’
Bunny couldn’t imagine a normal routine at home because she hadn’t had one of those since childhood. She had only just moved home after completing her degree before she’d set off on her year of travel. Everything changed, nothing stayed the same and she looked up at Sebastian as if in appeal.
‘It will be a welcome break from me,’ he said quietly.
Bunny studied him, tracing those tantalisingly beautiful dark male features and mentally kicking herself. She dropped her gaze in haste. No doubt he was in need of a break from her and he was right, there was no reason for her to stay on. She needed to get on with her life and leave him to enjoy his alone, the way he liked it. No clinging, no sighing, no tears, no excuses. She went back to the cabin and packed only what she had worn. At the very last moment, she picked up Sebastian’s discarded Dior sweater, buried her nose in it, drank in the faint lingering scent of him and guiltily shoved it in the flight bag her mother had given her to use.
There it was: the result from thethirdpregnancy test and it was another positive.
Light-headed, Bunny left the cloakroom and got back to packing the library van with fresh books and special requests. On one level it annoyed her that Sebastian had been proven right to be convinced that she would be pregnant. She had thought that an unnecessarily pessimistic outlook, had been tempted to tell him that some women took for ever trying to get pregnant and that the likelihood of her conceiving after just two weeks of sex was slim.
Only now all she could recall was the sheer amount of sex they had had, the barriers that had fallen so fast when they were together all day and alone. It all flooded back into her memory: the spicy kitchen encounters, the swimming sessions, the times up against the walls, the doors. Face burning, she reckoned it would be true to say that Sebastian might as well have been chasing an Olympic record and that it would be unjust to blame him when she had been such a willing partner. The wild freedom of such intimacy had been new and crazily seductive to her and Sebastian’s lack of inhibition had smashed down her boundaries one by one.
And now there was to be a baby. She was going to have a baby. A split second later she was smiling ear to ear because she mightn’t have Sebastian but she would have his child. But how wouldhefeel about that reality? Her smile died, the brief bubbly happiness that had blossomed inside her draining away. He didn’t want a family. She had guessed that. On his terms, it would be the worst possible news.
