Page 181 of Modern Romance September 2026 Books 5-8

White as a sheet.

* * *

The door closed behind her mother with a snap. Eleanora sank down on the sofa, legs weak.

‘Why have you come? What for?’

She made herself look at him. Emotion knifed through her. The last time she had set eyes on him, Tonia had been all over him. And he was letting her. Pain twisted at the memory. He was standing there, inside the doorway, so dear, so familiar.

So forever out of reach…

‘To talk to you. Explain to you.’ Sanzio’s voice was staccato, and it dawned on her that he was standing with tension radiating from him. She wondered why.

‘Explain?’ Her voice was hollow. ‘What needs explaining?’ Her face contorted suddenly, twisting her features. ‘That you’re back with Tonia? She’s told me so herself, crowing over it in every spiteful text she’s sent me, that you can’t get enough of her. It’s happened just as she told me it would—that all you’ve wanted all along, all through our marriage, is to get her interested in you again, and that she could get you back any time she wanted, she just had to snap her fingers. Well, she came to the Palazzo and she snapped her fingers! I saw it with my own eyes—and so did her poor, hapless husband.’

She broke off. She must not collapse like that. She took a ragged breath.

‘You could have saved yourself the journey here, Sanzio. I know I’ve got no business objecting. How could I? Have your affair with Tonia. I’m sorry for Edouard, but he might as well realise my sister always gets what she wants. She wanted you back, and she’s got you back.’

Weariness pressed her down. To see Sanzio again—to know he was gone from her for ever…

Sanzio was speaking. Carefully and clearly.

‘I am not,’ he said, ‘having an affair with Tonia. If she’s told you I am, she’s lying. Tonia likes lying, as I thought you understood by now.’

Anger stabbed her. ‘My eyes didn’t lie that hideous lunch when she came on to you and you welcomed it! Or that vile scene I saw in the Palazzo—which poor, wretched Edouard saw as well. And heard!’ She took a ragged, razored breath. ‘I know you didn’t want either of us to witness it, but—’

He cut across her, his voice like a knife. ‘That was exactly what I wanted.’

She stared, and then, closing her eyes, her face crumpled. That Sanzio could have been so cruel as to want her—and the wretched Edouard—to see what they had.

‘You wanted us to see it?’

‘Yes, just as I wanted you to see me letting Tonia come on to me, not repulsing her, not sending her packing.’

‘But why?’ Incomprehension was clear in her voice.

She’d assumed, that nightmare day, he was simply indulging himself, not caring about the effect his and Tonia’s behaviour was having on her and the hapless Edouard. After all, as she’d told herself, what right had she to care when their marriage was nearly over? She’d even told him, right before Tonia arrived, that their divorce would be coming soon.

‘Why?’ Sanzio was speaking again. There was something different in his voice now, but she didn’t know what it was. There was an edge to it, as if he was forcing himself to say it. He took a breath, sharp and incising.

‘To make you jealous,’ he said.

* * *

‘Jealous?’ She was staring at him, her face still blank with incomprehension. He wanted to laugh, but there would be no humour in it.

‘Yes, jealous.’ His voice was heavy. He paused. ‘It was all I could think of doing.’

He frowned. ‘I had to do something…anything. You’d just, totally out of the blue, started spouting stuff about separate kitchens, and going our separate ways, and divorcing—and you were so casual about it, so damn matter-of-fact, as if—’

He stopped.

She was still staring at him. Her face still blank. He took another breath.

‘As if what we had meant nothing to you.’

Something flickered in her eyes. He saw her hands in her lap tighten on each other.