Page 37 of Modern Romance September 2026 Books 1-4

‘Hope.’

She didn’t look at him.

He said, ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t laughing at you, at all.’

Then, ‘Please, look at me.’

Hope wanted to ignore him but she couldn’t. She turned her head. ‘You mean you weren’t drawing a comparison between me, a poor foundling, and a couple who rub shoulders with the elites?’

Axel shook his head. ‘No, and self-pity doesn’t suit you. What I was going to say was that they might have been born with everything but, standing next to you, they’re worth nothing at all. You eclipse them, Hope.’

She felt a little mollified. She knew that Axel wasn’t cruel. ‘OK, maybe I misread you. That’s a nice thing to say. You know, you’re not like them.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

Hope shivered again lightly. ‘They are…dead inside.’

He started to take off his jacket, clearly misunderstanding her shiver, but she stopped him. ‘I’m not cold.’

And then she said, ‘I’m sorry, that was a cruel thing to say. No matter what, they’re your parents. They didn’t abandon you to your fate on the steps of a hospital.’

Axel’s mouth tipped up on one side. ‘The location and circumstances might have been different but the sentiment was the same. They did pretty much abandon me and my siblings to our fates.’

To Hope’s surprise she felt a moment of affinity. Axel wasn’t wrong—they’d left their other son at the mercy of kidnappers!

She felt a surge of compassion for Axel. Her, the definition of pitiable. ‘Maybe having no parents isn’t as bad as having terrible parents.’

Axel put his hands on her waist and tugged her towards him. He said, ‘Enough talk of parents.’

Hope put her hands on Axel’s chest. Her heart started thumping faster, an inevitable reaction in close proximity to him. It felt like so long since she’d been with him but it had been only hours ago, on the plane.

He said, ‘As much as I’d like to leave right now and take you somewhere far more comfortable, we have a dinner and an auction to get through.’

That reminded her. ‘There’s something I wanted to say…’

Axel’s mouth quirked. ‘Do you know how refreshing it is to be around someone who I have no idea what they’re going to say from one moment to the next?’

Hope scowled at him but he brushed a knuckle against her jaw. ‘That’s a serious compliment, trust me.’

Hope’s heart skipped a beat at the small but seismic gesture. But that only made it more imperative to say to him now, ‘You can’t keep paying me. Not now that we’ve…’ She trailed off, not sure how to frame it.

‘Slept together?’ Axel supplied helpfully.

‘Yes,’ Hope said a little tersely, feeling disgruntled by how easily he seemed to be able to assimilate this new development in their arrangement.

‘You signed a contract,’ he pointed out.

‘Yes,’ Hope whispered, mindful of guests mingling nearby, ‘but this was not in the contract and if you pay me now it’ll be like paying me for…sex.’ Her face was burning now.

‘That is,’ she inserted before he could respond, ‘unless this…’ she gestured between them ‘…is already over…in which case maybe we can just work out that you don’t pay me for the last couple of days.’

‘Do you want it to be over?’

It throbbed in the air between them, making a lie of her words. Hope’s insides clenched at the thought of never knowing that kind of pleasure again. She couldn’t not be honest. ‘No.’

‘Neither do I. It’ll burn out soon enough.’

His confident assurance rubbed up against where Hope’s head was still spinning just to be here in this beyond glamorous location, and in the aftermath of meeting his parents and finding them so awfully sterile, and wondering if she’d just seen the ghost of Axel’s future self. It made her feel sad and spiky all at once. ‘You’d know more about this sort of thing than me.’