Page 171 of Modern Romance October 2025 5-8
She clenched her jaw, taking the critique as utterly deserved.
‘I’m so sorry. I’m so, very sorry. I thought you were like him,’ she said, needing Enzo to understand in part. ‘At the beginning. I thought you were like my father. Careless and lazy and flippant and selfish. I thought you were all the things that you had been painted in the press.’
‘Does that make it okay to you?’ he demanded.
‘No. There is nothing I can say or do to make it okay,’ she admitted truthfully. ‘There is nothing about any of this that is okay,’ she said, wiping the tear from her cheek, hating that he’d seen how affected she was by this. Hating that shewasaffected, when he didn’t seem to care at all.
‘Crocodile tears,cara? Really?’
‘They’re not,’ she said quietly.
‘Oh,’ he scoffed loudly, his hands coming to a prayer position in front of his chest. ‘You expect me to believe that this was real? That you fell in love with me along the way?’
His words were cruel and punishing and so much more painful because they were the truth. ‘Yes,’ she said, determinedly. Because this was it. She knew that. There was no coming back from this. He’d never see her again and it was her only chance to tell the truth. No more lies. Never again.
Enzo struggled and fought with the desire to believe her. But he didn’t know which Erin she was. The innocent, the con artist, the seductress, the fury... He had seen so many different sides to her and that he had fallen for them all was acid in a wound so deep it knocked the breath from his lungs.
Her apology should have been meaningless. The declaration of love meaningless. But it wasn’t. And that was warning enough.
‘Annulment. Was that how you planned to get out of the marriage? I’m presuming you would have left me as soon as you got what you wanted?’
She held his gaze, refusing to hide a single one of her emotions from him now. They were as clear as the brightest stars in a clear night sky. And he wished to god that he didn’t see a single one of them.
She nodded.
Yes. That had been clever.
He had just one question left. He shouldn’t ask it. That he did it anyway was just proof of how low she had brought him.
‘Was anything you told me the truth?’
‘Yes.’
Madonna mia, he wanted to believe her more than he wanted his next breath.
‘And for you?’ Erin’s quiet question exploded into the night.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked, playing ignorant despite knowing exactly what she had meant.
‘Was any of it true for you? Somewhere in all the lies and games, was any of it real? Because, in some ways, I was moremewith you than I have ever been, and I...’ she said haltingly, ‘I wondered whether...maybe...’
‘No,’ he lied. ‘None of it was true, and nothing was real.’
It couldn’t have been.
It couldn’t have been because that would mean he was just the same as that small child he’d once been, standing by himself, waiting to be enough, waiting to be loved for who he was and not what he could do or give.
And he couldn’t be that same sad child. He wouldn’t.
He stared out at the darkness, the clouds covering the stars and horizon in such a way that made him feel empty and hollow. He didn’t know how long he stayed like that, but when he turned back Erin was no longer there on the upper deck.
In some distant part of his mind, he was conscious of her leaving the yacht and the marina, safe in the knowledge that his staff were good and well paid enough to make sure that wherever she was going, she’d be safe and okay.
He didn’t want to know where she went, he told himself. He didn’t care. His overheard conversation had brought an abrupt end to a plan that no longer needed to be fulfilled. Whoever Erin Carter was, she’d learned her lesson.
As had he. When things looked too good to be true, they generally were.
And thrusting all thoughts of her from his mind, he turned his attention to the man who had been behind the whole thing. Gio Gallo. His mother’s estranged father.
