Page 171 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

She lingered in this dark place where it was only the two of them standing still in the darkness. Together.

He moved. Closer. Still not touching her. But the distance between them, instead of centimetres, became millimetres and she couldn’t breathe for the need to turn and press herself into him. Into his chest. Into the breadth and bulk of him, and—

He shifted. Turned the distance, the space between them, into nothing, and touched her.

His fingertips feathered her cheek, pushed the hair behind her ear, and he leaned in farther, until his breath was real, hot beneath her earlobe.

‘Don’t you want to go inside?’

‘What’s in there?’ she breathed.

‘It will be only us.’ His chest rose, and hers rose with it.

She pushed at the handle, and the door opened.

Warm yellow light infiltrated the darkness. She stepped forward and instantly regretted it as she moved away from the heat of him.

She longed to turn around. Return to him, to his arms. To surrender to this burn in her gut. To the flame growing brighter inside her. Fiercer by the second.

She stepped onto an over-polished white-and-black-speckled marble floor.

The quaintness of the homely potted plants, standing tall in every corner, the mismatched chairs, and well-worn tables, the pictures hung on the walls of smiling faces eating, a different delicacy in each photograph, the white bowls stacked high on a dark breakfast bar, consumed her.

She couldn’t help it. She stepped farther into the room.

‘You come here?’ she asked. ‘When you want to be alone?’

‘Yes,’ he confirmed, and she felt him enter the space with her. Fill the room with his presence.

She looked at the various coloured and sized rectangular machines standing in front of each wall but the photo wall.

Eyes wide, she turned to him. ‘Vending machines?’

‘Jido-hanbaiki.’He nodded. ‘Jihankifor short.’

‘Why here?’

‘Why not here?’ He hooked a brow. ‘They are a cultural phenomenon here,’ he explained. ‘Vending machines can be found...everywhere. But inside these walls, you can be anywhere in the world with a press of a button. Anything you long to taste, to drink. From the most decadent ingredients to the most mundane. They are here. In this room.’

‘But if you want something, you can have it in any room you like,’ she said. ‘Anywhere in the world you like.’

She ran her fingers through her hair, looked at him and then at the machines. So many of them. Several hundred choices of what to eat, what part of the world she wanted to taste, and yet she would be in one room. In one place.

‘I thought you might enjoy this.’

‘But why this room?’ Her brow furrowed. ‘Why this—’ her eyes wandered, roamed the normality of it ‘—this place?’

‘It is something different,’ he said, and came to her. Lifted his hand, his fingers, and coiled a loose lock of hair around his finger. ‘It is my garden.’

She frowned. ‘Your garden?’

He swallowed thickly, and she watched the drag of his Adam’s apple with bated breath.

‘First, we will eat. Then I will tell you a story about a boy who found a place. A room.A garden.’ The pressure on her scalp increased as his fingers tugged, not intentionally, not to hurt. But she felt the tension in his fingers. In his body. ‘And I will explain why I have brought you here with me—why it had to behere.’ He released the lock of hair. But her scalp still tingled. Her skin.

He turned his back on her. And breathlessly, she watched him.

Dante moved to the breakfast bar. The bowls clinked as he removed two from the stack. Removed cutlery from the stainless-steel containers holding them.

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