Modern Romance Collection February 2025, #1-4

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

P RIMO WAS AFRAID to breathe.

Quin chuckled. ‘They’re quite sturdy you know.’

His little niece was staring up at him with huge dark eyes, as if he held all the knowledge in the world, as she greedily drank down the milk.

‘Then you have to pat her on the back, Uncle Primo, but she might get sick on you.’

Primo tore his eyes away from the baby to look at Sol, who seemed like an old pro at this baby-feeding lark. Then something caught his peripheral vision, and he saw Faye walking quickly down the lawn towards the guest house.

She seemed in a hurry, and Primo would have called out, but he didn’t want to upset the baby.

After he’d been schooled in the art of winding the baby, and she’d let out an impressive belch, Quin took her back and said, ‘Well done, brother, your first feed. You can thank me for the practice when your firstborn comes along.’

Primo felt something uneasy settle in his gut.

He stood up. ‘I’m going to check on Faye.’

‘Come in for dinner around six? We’ll have a barbecue this evening.’

Primo nodded and left Quin holding one daughter and Sadie with the other baby. He thought he noticed that Sadie looked at him slightly strangely, but told himself he was being paranoid.

Maybe now was the time to have that conversation with Faye. Surely by now she would have to admit that what they had was good. And that it could endure.

But when he walked into the guest house the first thing he saw was Faye packing her bag. She seemed agitated.

‘Hey, what’s going on? Did something happen? Your father...?’

She went still. And then she stood up straight and faced him. She was pale. Her eyes looked huge.

She shook her head. ‘No, it’s not my father...or anything like that. It’s me. I have to go. I’m going to request a divorce, Primo. I’m sorry, but I can’t wait for the six months.’

Primo was looking at her as if she was losing her mind. She was. She was in full panic mode. She needed to get away from here and from Primo now . This place was the manifestation of the dream she’d always had of what family life could be, but it was also—cruelly—her worst nightmare. Because she could never have this. And she certainly couldn’t give it to Primo.

She took a breath in and forced herself to try and calm down. He deserved to know everything.

She said, ‘I saw you with the baby just now...’

Primo was shaking his head as if trying to understand. ‘A second ago you said you had to leave. You said you want a divorce .’

Faye nodded. ‘I did.’

‘What’s going on? What on earth has seeing me with the baby got to do with anything?’

Faye was wringing her hands in front of her. ‘That’s just it. It has everything to do with everything. With us. I saw how you looked at her, Primo. How you’ve started to heal the rift with your brother. And that’s amazing. But I can see what you’re thinking. That maybe you want this too...what he has. A real life. Family.’

The word love was on her tongue, but she bit it back. He might want more, but she was sure that love wasn’t part of it.

He looked at her. ‘Yes...maybe. And I have been wanting to talk to you. Can’t you see that what we have between us is so much stronger than we expected it would be? It’s made me think that perhaps...perhaps it could be possible to do things differently. I’d never thought about children before as anything but a means to an end...extending the family legacy and name,’ he went on. ‘But creating a family with you, Faye... You’ve inspired me to want something I never thought I wanted before. Never thought I could have.’

Emotion rose, burning inside Faye. She did her best to stop it from spilling over. ‘That’s just it, you see. I can’t give you that.’

Primo shook his head again. ‘What is so awful about the prospect of having a family with me, Faye?’

‘You’re not listening to me. I said, I can’t give you that. Literally, cannot .’

He made a snorting noise. ‘You mean won’t. What is it? Are you using this as a bargaining chip to get something even more?’

Faye was horrified. Never would she have thought he’d go there. ‘No! How could you think that?’

But you have deceived him .

‘Primo, please listen to me. There’s something I haven’t told you. I haven’t been entirely...transparent.’

He opened his mouth, but she put up a hand to stop him. He closed his mouth. She lowered her hand.

‘When I was with my first husband, I got pregnant straight away. A textbook conception.’ Faye tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘But within a few weeks I was bleeding. A miscarriage. It got complicated. I was taken into hospital. They cleared the miscarriage, but they told me I needed an operation or I might die.’

She forced herself to look at Primo.

‘I had to have a partial hysterectomy.’

Primo was looking at her blankly.

Faye forced herself to spell it out. ‘They took my uterus, Primo. I have no uterus. I cannot bear children.’

After a long moment he asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’

Faye sank down on the end of the bed. ‘Because I’ve never told anyone, really. Not even my father knows. I hardly knew you. I didn’t think it was any of your business.’ A little defensively, she said, ‘And I told you right from the start that I wouldn’t have children. So you knew .’

Primo was shaking his head. ‘No, you don’t get to pin this on me, Faye. You said wouldn’t . There’s a big difference between that and couldn’t . And do you know what that difference is? The belief that there’s a possibility that you’d change your mind.’

‘I didn’t think it would ever be an issue. I had no idea that our marriage would become something neither of us expected. I’m sorry, Primo. I should have told you the truth from the start.’

Even amidst the tension between them right now, Faye felt as if something heavy was lifting from her shoulders. The weight of her painful secret.

Primo looked at her, eyes widening. He snapped his fingers. ‘ That’s why you insisted on the six-month get-out clause. You never had any intention of this lasting longer than six months, did you?’

She couldn’t lie. ‘No.’

Primo’s jaw was tight. ‘I told you at the very beginning that I didn’t play games, but this has all just been one long game to you, haven’t they? All you were interested in were the short-term benefits, and yet you ensured you’d reap the long-term benefits for your father and your family business.’

Faye stood up again. ‘Don’t pretend you started out with any better intentions than I did. You got your business deal and your convenient wife as a bonus. Why would I have shared my most private pain with someone who had picked me out of a file of potential wives?’

‘Because you knew very well that I always had the long term in my sights. And because as soon as we met it was clear that the spark between us was anything but convenient .’

‘We could have just had an affair. Maybe that’s all it should have been.’

‘That horse has bolted, Faye. I don’t usually let people get the better of me, but you blinded me.’

‘I wasn’t trying to blind you,’ Faye said miserably.

I was too busy being blinded by you and falling in love.

‘So what was your plan? Wait out the six months then take your leave, as per the get-out clause? No harm, no foul?’

Faye nodded. ‘I didn’t think it would be an issue. I believed we’d be living very separate lives, and that when it came to it you wouldn’t want to stay married anyway. But then...it became something else.’

Everything.

‘You didn’t know that the best sex of your life would happen within a marriage of convenience?’ Primo laughed harshly, ‘Well, go figure...me neither.’

Faye winced. ‘You’ll find another wife and—’

He cut her off. ‘That’s what you thought? That I’d just weather the fallout of a failed marriage and get on with choosing wife number two?’

She winced. ‘I’m sorry, Primo... It all happened so fast and I was sure it wouldn’t last...’

Primo closed the distance between them so quickly that Faye couldn’t speak. He took her arms in his hands.

‘What wouldn’t last, Faye? This? ’

His mouth crashed down on hers, and even amidst the tension and the anger and the recriminations Faye melted into Primo, every cell singing to be close to him, to have him touch her.

He pulled back, eyes blazing. ‘Does that feel like it’s going anywhere?’

No . It felt stronger than ever. Like a live force.

She pulled free of Primo and put some distance between them. ‘I never meant for this to happen,’ she said. As if they could have controlled it!

‘It happened,’ Primo said flatly.

Faye lifted her gaze and forced herself to meet Primo’s blistering blue one. Not hot anymore. Cold.

‘I’m truly sorry, Primo, for not telling you the truth. It’s a painful secret I’ve kept from almost everyone for ten years. It’s part of the reason I haven’t been in any relationships beyond the very superficial. After my husband rejected me, I didn’t believe I’d be enough on my own for anyone. Maybe I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to be in a position where you felt you had to stay with me out of some sense of loyalty.’

She continued painfully.

‘But it doesn’t change the fact that I cannot give you a family, Primo, and there’s not enough to sustain us without that family. It’s better that I leave now. We’ll get a quiet divorce and you can get on with choosing a more suitable wife. I don’t think your reputation will be too damaged—men seem to have more leeway in that regard than women.’

Primo was reeling with everything he’d just learned. With how badly Faye had deceived him. It threw up stark questions. Like what would he have done if she had told him this from the start? Would he still have married her? If he’d had to sit down and seriously consider if he wanted a family would he have been happy to settle for an affair? And where would they be now if he’d done that?

He had a feeling they might still be exactly in this very place, and it was disconcerting. But all he could see when he looked at her was the face of treachery. Here in this place where a dream he’d never admitted to having, had just crystallised...only to be smashed to bits in the same instant.

He couldn’t look at her, because looking at her was creating too much cognitive dissonance in his head.

He turned away from her.

‘I’ll go, Primo.’

He also couldn’t not look at her.

He turned around again. ‘It’s that simple? You just walk out of here and what...? Get on with your life?’

She bit her lip. She looked pale, eyes huge, but he couldn’t let that affect him.

She said, ‘Whatever you think about me, you deserve to get on with your life and have everything you want. A family.’

But that dream was now tarnished. That angered him almost more than anything else. The fact that she’d been the one to inspire that dream only to destroy it.

And he had a suspicion that she wasn’t experiencing the same inner implosion as him. Because suddenly Primo was having all the feelings, after a lifetime of pushing them down and believing himself immune. There was anger, rage, loss, joy, hope and awe. And they were all coalescing into a swirling black mass inside him.

But all he could think of right now was the day his mother had left, when Quin had been crying and begging and pleading and Primo had been so icy-cold. Numb. Pulling Quin back. Vowing never to be someone who would humiliate himself like that.

And there was another emotion swirling in the mix that Primo wasn’t ready yet to name.

He couldn’t.

It was unbelievable. Impossible.

And if he uttered it everything he knew, every tenet he’d built his life upon, would dissolve and he would be left behind. This woman would walk out through the door anyway, just as his mother had done, and Primo would be undone. And this time he wouldn’t be able to stay numb. So he wouldn’t utter it.

He moved back. Away from Faye. Shut himself off from that swirling mass inside him. He thought of how she’d taken up a place in his life that he’d never expected—to the point that he’d taken his eye off the ball. He’d never been so lax when it came to the business, and he felt a shiver down his spine.

Had he turned into his father after all?

The whole point of marrying her had been to enhance his life and work, not eclipse it. Maybe she was right. She’d deceived him, and now she was giving him a chance to reclaim his sanity, to remember what was important to him.

Except he wasn’t sure what that was any more.

He felt the terrifying urge to go on his knees before her and beg her not to go. Ice entered his veins. A self-protective force he hadn’t had to use in a long time.

He said, ‘You’re right. We’re done.’

And then he turned and walked out through the door. He was still intact. Still himself. He hadn’t dissolved into the mass of seething emotions in his gut.