Page 80 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4
Wiping my eyes, I turn and go upstairs to find Olympia’s room. Ulysses told me there were clothes of hers there that she wouldn’t mind if I borrowed, so I look through her wardrobe. I can’t bear to wear anything more of Ulysses’s.
I find a dress that fits and I put it on, along with some borrowed underwear, and just as I finish dressing there is a knock on the front door.
My heartbeat shifts, picking up speed. It’s him, surely? Perhaps he’s changed his mind, perhaps he’s come back after all.
I fly downstairs and pull open the door, my heartbeat hammering. But it’s not him. It’s a man in a uniform and he says, ‘I’m here to take you the airport, ma’am. Whenever you’re ready.’
There’s nothing here for me, I realise. Nothing here for me now he’s gone.
‘I’m ready now,’ I tell him.
As the car leaves, I don’t look back.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ulysses
It doesn’t takeme long to get to the airport and even less time for the jet to take off. It’s early but I order a Scotch anyway. Anything to blunt the sharp edges of what happened in my kitchen earlier this morning with Katla standing there, so pretty in my T-shirt, smiling at me, her blue eyes luminous. Telling me that she loved me…
I take a healthy swallow of the Scotch, relishing the burn as it goes down, trying to scour away the memory of those luminous eyes filled with sudden pain, her pretty flush paling as I told her I didn’t care. Before walking out like the coward I am, leaving her alone in my kitchen.
I’m a bastard for doing that to her. A bastard for letting things between us get to that point. I just hadn’t expected the chemistry between us to blossom into something brighter, deeper and so much more intense than I’d anticipated. Or so fast.
In just over twenty-four hours, Katla fell in love with me and…well. I hope it will take her less time than that to fall out of love with me, for both our sakes. Yet, no matter how many swallows of Scotch I take, I can’t get rid the memory of her pain or the tears in her eyes. Of her confusion or the lie I told her as I walked out—the lie that I didn’t care that she loved me.
And it is a lie. For some reason, Idocare, and I can feel the pain of that care like an arrow through my chest. She’s the only person I’ve ever met who values the truth so completely, and says it, no matter how hard it is for her. I know it’s hard. Telling me that she loved me must have taken a lot of courage and I repaid that courage with a dirty, terrible lie.
I had to, though. I had to ignore her feelings, because I couldn’t give her hope that I’d change my mind. Hope that the six months I wanted was starting to look like not enough time instead of too much. I couldn’t let her believe that I could give her more than that, because I can’t. There’s only room in my life for one woman and that’s Olympia. She’s my sister, my conscience, and I give her all my meagre capacity for caring. I don’t have anything left for anyone else.
Besides, love makes me do terrible things and, though I’ve put those days behind me, I can’t be sure that loving Katla wouldn’t catapult me right back to the past. If I’d tear down the world to save Olympia, what would I be capable of when it came to protecting and saving Katla?
I can’t allow it. I never will.
Pushing thoughts of her from my mind, I give the next couple of hours my complete focus as the jet touches down in Palermo and we take a helicopter to Rafael Santangelo’s villa in the south.
I thought I’d take him by surprise but, as the helicopter touches down on the green lawn in front of the villa, I’m shocked to see the slim form of Olympia standing there, ready to meet me. Of Rafael Santangelo himself there is no sign.
I leap out, noting that she’s not running to meet me the way she normally does. Instead she stands straight-backed and alone, wearing a form-fitting, long-sleeved red dress that outlines the shape of her growing pregnancy. She looks strong, standing there by herself, stronger than I can ever recall her looking.
My heart catches painfully when I approach and she doesn’t smile. Nor does she move to embrace me, the way she normally does.
Instead, she says, ‘I told you not to come.’
Even a day or so ago, I would have ignored her, crossed the space between us, taken her arm and drawn her into the helicopter whether she wanted to go or not. But all I can hear is Katla’s voice in my head telling me that I was kind, protective. That the boy I once was isn’t dead and why can’t I see that myself?
What I see now is that, yes, I could take Olympia away with me under the guise of protecting her but, as Katla told me just yesterday, I’d be doing that because I don’t want to lose the one person who loves me. Because I’m afraid for myself. Afraid that without her I’m broken and that I’m stuck being a man I despise and don’t know how to change. Afraid that, if she’s not with me, everything I’ve done is for nothing.
But that’s my issue to deal with, not Olympia’s, just as she has her own demons to exorcise. I can only do so much for her, I realise. She has to exorcise then on her own, without me to protect her from them, or else, I’ll just become another one of her demons.
So I stay where I am, meeting my sister’s gaze, golden like my own. ‘I had to come,’ I say. ‘You think you could tell me you’re pregnant, that you’re with some bastard—?’
‘That bastard is my husband now,’ she cuts in. ‘And this has got nothing to do with you.’
So, he married her. That’s the only thing he’s done right. Rage starts to simmer inside me, and I want to tell her that it’s got everything to do with me, but I force the fury away. Force myself to find the cool logic that Katla gave me.
Instead, I look at my little sister and see that the strength in her posture is also in her eyes. Strength that I never knew my scared, vulnerable and beaten Olympia had. Is it the prospect of impending motherhood? Or is it something else? Something that—God forbid—has to do with Rafael Santangelo?
Whatever it is, it comes to me suddenly that anger is not going to solve this. That, in fact, it’s not my issue to deal with, not this time. Olympia is alive and well and is expecting a child. She has a life outside of mine, and I know that if I try to take her away from it the relationship we have, strained as it already is, will chip and shatter.
