Modern Romance October 2019 Books 5-8. Annie West

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      She turned slowly to find him there, his eyes locked to her as though he couldn’t help himself. But the minute Hannah looked at him, he blinked and looked away, turning his attention to the ocean.

      They stood there in silence for a moment, Hannah trying not to react to the throb of awareness low in her abdomen, trying not to act on an impulse to throw herself at him.

      As the stars began to shimmer, she found herself remembering the meeting of earlier that day, recalling all the questions that had flooded her. ‘You don’t travel with a bodyguard.’

      ‘I always have security,’ he contradicted.

      ‘Not on New Year’s Eve. I didn’t see anyone else…’

      ‘My hotel is a fortress when I am there.’ He tilted his head towards her, his eyes scanning her face. In the evening light, his sharp features were all harsh angles and planes. ‘Additional guards would have been superfluous.’

      ‘Was it like this before the accident?’

      ‘It was no accident,’ he responded, whip-sharp.

      ‘Before you lost them,’ Hannah corrected.

      ‘Euphemisms? Perhaps if we call it what it is—murder—you will accept the security measures more readily.’

      Hannah wasn’t sure she agreed.

      ‘And no. Before they were killed, I was stupid and lax with their safety. I was arrogant and thought myself, and everyone around me, invincible, despite my father’s connections.’

      Hannah moved towards Leonidas, her heart sore for him.

      ‘Isn’t that better than living with fear?’

      ‘Living with fear might have kept them alive,’ he said, darkly.

      ‘You don’t know that.’

      ‘I know they should never have been out wandering the streets.’ He ground his teeth. ‘And that you and our daughter will never be exposed to that kind of risk…’

      Hannah tried not to feel as if she were drowning again. She tried to breathe slowly, to feel the freedom of this island, to understand why he felt as he did.

      And she did. She could imagine what pain he must be suffering, and the added layer of guilt. But the picture he was painting was grim. Hannah couldn’t imagine not being free to simply wake up and decide to go to the shops, or to visit a friend without having bodyguards do a preparatory security sweep.

      ‘So she’ll wear a panic button?’ The idea turned Hannah’s blood to ice, but then, so did the idea of anything happening to her.

      His voice held a warning note. ‘At least you’ll both be safe.’

      His feelings were completely understandable, but Hannah railed against them instinctively. She’d felt loss, she knew its pain well. Losing her parents, then losing her engagement to Angus, she understood what it was like to have everything shift on you.

      And yet, being fearless in the face of that was a choice.

      ‘How come there are no pictures of them?’

      Leonidas shifted to face Hannah, complex emotions marring his handsome face. ‘What?’ The word was sucked from him.

      ‘You were married, what, three years? How come there are no wedding photos? No baby pictures of Brax? If I didn’t know about them, I would never have guessed they even existed.’

      Leonidas shut his eyes, but not before she saw his grief, his heartache.

      ‘It is not your concern.’

      Hannah’s insides flexed with acid. Another reminder. His wife and child were off limits. They weren’t her concern. His life before her was not up for discussion.

      More boundaries. Rules. Distance. It slammed against her and she ground her teeth, the limitations of this like nails under her feet.

      ‘I understand it hurts.’ She spoke quietly, lifting a hand to his chest. His heart was pounding. ‘But not talking about it doesn’t make sense.’

      ‘Please, stop.’ She felt his frustration like a whip at the base of her spine.

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Because it is my choice. Because she was my wife and he was my son.’ His voice cracked with awful emotion and she swept her eyes shut for a moment, sucking in a breath.

      ‘I know that. And they’re a huge part of you, just like our daughter will be.’ She carefully kept herself out of that summation.

      ‘But I do not want to discuss them.’

      ‘Why not? Don’t you want to remember your son? Don’t you want to talk to me—to someone—about his laugh, his smile, his first steps, his night terrors—all the things that made him the little boy he was?’

      Leonidas’s skin was paler than paper. ‘I will never forget my son.’

      ‘I know that,’ she said quietly. ‘But you can’t honour someone by burying their memories.’

      Her words hung between them, sharp like an insult, bony and knotty and troublesome and almost too much. She partially rejected the truths of that observation, but she knew from experience what this felt like—she’d been made to stay silent for years, to hold her grief inside, and she’d lost so much of her parents as a result. So many memories she should have been free to relish, to smile about, were gone for ever because of forced disuse.

      ‘He was the light of my life!’ he said suddenly. The words were torn from him, animalistic for their pain. He held his ground, staring at her as though she were covering him in acid. ‘He was the light of my damned life! Amy and I… I loved her but, God, she drove me crazy and we weren’t…in many ways, we weren’t well-suited.’ He dragged a hand through his hair, his eyes pinpointing Hannah with his grief. ‘We’d argued the week before they died. She’d gone to Athens and I was glad.’ He groaned, his displeasure at reliving that time in his life evident in every line of his body. ‘I was glad because I was sick of fighting with her, sick of disagreeing over unimportant matters. But Brax was my reason for living, my reason for breathing, the reason I would never have left Amy.’

      Hannah’s grief was like dynamite in her chest.

      She waited, letting him speak, letting him finish. ‘I loved her but Brax was my everything and then he was dead. Because of me.’ He dug his fingers into his chest and her eyes dropped to the gesture, to the solid wall of tanned flesh that hid a thundering heart.

      ‘You think I am at risk of forgetting a single thing about him? You think I need to speak to you about my son to remember the way balloons made him laugh riotously, or the way clowns terrified him, or the way he loved to swim and chase butterflies?’ His expression softened with grief and love and Hannah held her breath, all of her catching fire with the beauty of that look—of the expression on Leonidas’s face.

      ‘Do you think I will ever forget how much he loved strawberries? Cheese? The way he called СКАЧАТЬ