Page 214 of Modern Romance September 2026 Books 5-8

The guard steered the boat toward what appeared to be a series of small docks, lined with planters overflowing with flowers. A car was waiting for them just beyond on the dock, and they drove along the waterfront, passing restaurants and cafés with large sections of outdoor seating, filled with mid-morning coffee drinkers and unruly families. The car turned in down one narrow street, then another, weaving its way through the town’s small center until they came out on the other side of it, where the forest began. She turned to Gustav to ask where they were going, but through the window she could see the answer. The forest gave way to a high stone wall, and rising up behind it among the trees, she could see the roof of a house peeking through, one that looked far bigger than anything one would expect to find in a sleepy seaside town.

They came to a gate of carved wood that opened slowly, revealing a stone driveway into the property and enough trees to obscure everything else. The driveway wound through endless pine trees on all sides. The forest floor was lined with small bushy plants and the rolling flat rocks that she had seen all along the shoreline. Livia shifted for a better view out the front window as more of the house appeared. She might have described it as a farmhouse, but its size fit more into the category of a manor hall. It was painted white with a bronze roof that had long ago turned green, and there were windows three stories high, the top one with dormers that poked out of the roof.

“What is this place?” she whispered.

“This was my home,” said Gustav, and there was a strange quality to his voice that she couldn’t read.

“The home where you grew up?”

He glanced at her with wry smile. “Before I was sent to boarding school. Then it was just the summers.”

“Just you and your mother lived here?”

He nodded.

Too late, she wondered if she should not have mentioned his mother. Maybe he didn’t want to talk about her, her death had been just over a year ago. Then again, if he had brought her here, he had opened the door to his past for her. She knew not to take this lightly. So she reached across the black leather seat and found his hand, and she laced her fingers with his. He looked down at their joined hands with that same unreadable expression on his face, then closed his fingers tightly around hers.

The car came to a stop at the top of the circular driveway, and a royal guardsman offered a hand to help her out. She let go of Gustav’s hand and climbed out, under the moody sky.

The house in front of her felt like a step back in time, its old wooden siding diligently kept up with paint, its copper roof weathering. Ivy scaled the sides and wrapped around the second-floor balcony that hung over the entryway, and the sharp scent of fresh grass was everywhere.

A second guardsman walked up the stone steps ahead of them and opened the front door. Inside, an older woman with cropped gray hair, wearing a black shirt and trousers, waited for them in a large, open hallway, with whitewashed walls and an old wooden staircase with a banister that curved theatrically at the base. The woman greeted them in Swedish with a nod toward Livia, but her smile was brighter, approaching something almost indulgent, for Gustav. He hugged the woman and spoke to her for a moment, and after introductions, she disappeared into the house.

“This is lovely,” said Livia as they slowly walked through the hallways.

“I still stay here on and off, between on-site projects,” he said.

She peeked into the living room, decorated in the same era as the bridal cottage, in its Scandinavian blues and whites. This was where Gustav grew up, with creaking floorboards and tall windows that let in the daylight. And yet there was something about the quiet of the place that struck Livia as almost sad.

“Was it lonely growing up here?” she asked.

“Not at first. Not until I came back from my first boarding school in the summer.”

That was a yes, then. She reached again for Gustav’s hand, warm and familiar. They continued through the hallway and into the spacious kitchen, where they found another woman taking a loaf of bread out of the oven. Her round face brightened when she saw Gustav, and as they exchanged greetings and introductions, Livia tried to imagine him as an eight-year-old, scampering through these rooms. She couldn’t. Even the teenager she had known all those years ago was far from playful.

They crossed the kitchen to the double doors that opened onto a wide deck with a view of sea below.

“I thought we could take a walk around the grounds while we wait for lunch to be served,” he said, and there was something unfamiliar, something almost tentative in his voice.

They walked down a path that entered the forest again, with trees to climb and rocks to hide behind.

“I’m having trouble envisioning you as a boy,” she said. “What did you do with your time?”

“Run through the woods. Mitzi, the housekeeper, had a boy my age that would come to play after school, and Nils and I would build forts and dig in the ground for buried treasure. It was before I knew what being a prince was, back before I had heard the term Bastard Spare. Back when my father was just a stern man I saw a few times a year. But my mother always told me that I was special. Destined for big things.”

“Wasn’t that a kind of freedom?” she asked.

“I suppose so. One with a ticking clock.” The look on his face suggested everything she needed to know about how he felt about that freedom.

“Maybe not so different from the kind of freedom I had in the forest of the Alpine Institute, before I was old enough to know my place there,” she mused.

His expression was pensive. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Your mother was protecting you,” she added. “She probably thought she was doing what was best for you.”

Much in the way her own parents had thought—and still thought—they were doing what was best for her and Adele.

If Livia hadn’t been looking at him, she might have missed the way he winced, as if these words caused him physical pain. “She probably thought so. But it didn’t do either of us any favors down the road.”