Page 154 of Modern Romance October 2025 5-8
‘We were supposed to come here. As a family, when I was younger,’ she haltingly explained. ‘Before...before everything changed.’
He waited, sensing that she would fill the silence.
‘Mum really wanted to go. She has a thing about Giotto—the painter and architect.’
‘As you do,’ Enzo interjected, familiar with the English penchant for Italian art.
‘As you do,’ Erin repeated with a small smile.
‘And when we lost everything, when the business went, the house, her friends, my school, she kept saying, but what about Florence? What about Giotto? Erin must see it. She simplymust.’
Enzo could see it. The blind shock of someone so confused, that they clung to a minor detail.
‘I don’t know whether it was important to her for me to see it because it meant so much to her, or because she wanted one thing, just one, that my father had promised to come true.’
She was telling the truth, he realised. A few days ago he would have dismissed this as a sob story—something engineered to manipulate him. But the reverberation of truth in her tone, the steadfast clarity in her gaze...the lack of hertell. This was the real Erin Carter. Whose life had changed dramatically as a teenager, when comfort had been replaced by loss, all ending in a move that had seen her bullied and isolated.
‘Why come here? This seems like a painful memory?’ He couldn’t wrap his head around why she would do that to herself.
‘I want to tell her that I’ve seen Giotto’s campanile, his bell-tower. I want her to know that I’ve seen it.’
The sparkle in her eye wasn’t delight. It wasn’t happiness. It was earnest, it was sincere. It was heartfelt and he didn’t want to see it.
‘Do you not have somewhere like that?’ she asked. ‘Somewhere bittersweet?’
He clenched his teeth, intensely uncomfortable with the intimacy of the turn in the conversation. His liaisons didn’t usually last long enough for them to descend into such territory. And he’d been fine with that. If the intrusive press hadn’t taught him enough when he’d been younger, one girlfriend selling her story to the tabloids, another wanting an introduction to his older and richer father, and another using him to finance an increasingly out-of-control shopping addiction, had ensured that he’d learned his lesson.
Short-term exchanges with women who understood the finite nature of their relationship was all he wanted. And despite what the papers had to say, he’d vetted those relationships with considerable assiduity.
Until Erin Carter.
‘Nothing that reminds you of your past?’ she asked, dealing him another blow.
Despite himself, he huffed out a bitter laugh. ‘Why on earth would I want that?’
His childhood had been a car crash. A very public, very slow, car crash.
Sympathy pooled in her gaze and he wanted to look away as much as he wanted to draw it in deep. He took a sip of espresso instead, trying to wash away the bitter statement from their conversation.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘It is nothing to me,’ he dismissed, even though now he was the one who was lying, he was the one with thetellin this game that they were playing.
‘There were no family holidays then?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘When my parents were in love, they went away alone, wanting “adult time”. And when they weren’t, they would fight over which one of them got to take me away, but would get so caught up in their arguments, they’d end up forgetting the holiday altogether.’
Those arguments had been furious, violent. Hurled vases and broken china. Staff had been forced to pull him out of the terrifying path of their fury. ‘Outside of that, I was at boarding school.’
And it had been the only stability he had known as a child.
‘How old were you?’ she asked.
‘Seven.’
She frowned, putting her cup back on the saucer and before she could ask any more of the questions that were shining in her eyes, he signalled for the bill and paid.
He spent the entire day showing her everything that Florence had to offer—giving her the holiday that her father had once promised and distracting them both from the earlier emotional trespass.
