Page 82 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

Because doing so gave away too much. She knew it instantly.

His smile confirmed it. “You might have had my father wrapped around your finger. You might have been the one who used sex as a weapon in that relationship. But in this one?”

This time he leaned even closer, bracing himself with one palm on the wall beside her head. She thought for a terrible, thrilling moment that he might actually put his mouth on hers once more—

But he didn’t. He put his mouth to her ear instead.

“This time the best you can hope for is mutually assured destruction,” he whispered, and she suspected he knew the way the sound andfeelof those words curled through her like smoke and warning. “And I have to tell you, my darling stepmother and wife, I think thatmydestruction is highly unlikely.”

Words crowded into her mouth as if fighting to get out, but Jolie did not allow herself a retort. She angled herself back, only slightly. Partly because the wall was at her back, but more importantly, because he wasright there, still bracing himself against the wall.

Still leaning over her.

She found his gaze, bittersweet and gleaming, and held it.

Then, so slowly it was almost likethinkingabout moving instead of moving, she reached out. She trailed her fingers over his face, noting that when he took a swift and surprised breath, it was as if she could feel it inside her, too.

And that wasn’t all she could feel. Touching him felt remarkably like touching herself. She could feel the trail of sensation. She could feel the way it moved in her, a slow, languorous heat.

Jolie moved her hand from his face to touch the side of his neck, and his collarbone, sneaking her fingers beneath the open collar of his shirt to test the rich warmth of his skin. There was a hint of the hair that she already knew dusted his chest and went all the way down to below his navel. A thing she wished she hadn’t known, if she was honest. But she had seen him once, years before, coming out of the sea with water cascading all over his toned body and making him gleam in the Greek sun.

Gleam even more than he usually did, that was.

In this moment, she could admit that she had held that image close all this time. But then, she felt about images of him the same way she felt about sugar. Of course she liked the taste of it. Who wouldn’t?

Maybe it was time she admitted thathatredwas the thing she hid behind when it came to this man, because there wasthisunderneath.

Maybe it had been there all along.

She had never felt anything like it before, and she had been marrying his father when she’d met him, so how could she have called it what it was?

But acknowledging that uncomfortable truth didn’t change anything. If she allowed herself to indulge, just like sugar, she paid for it for too long after to make the indulgence worthwhile.

Down and down she went, moving her hand outside of his shirt again so she could lazily trace the line of the buttons that held it together, all the way down to that hard-ridged abdomen that she’d just been remembering.

And then, her eyes still fixed to his, she moved lower still, and traced a pattern over that hard, proud ridge that already pushed against his trousers.

It grew even more when she settled her hand against it. He was hard. So very, very hard. And she could feel that hardness seemed to rebound through her, as if he was already deep inside of her body.

Jolie had never wanted him more than she did in this moment—but she wanted to win this battle more.

She angled herself closer, tipping her head up as if asking for a kiss. And she drank in the way his eyes went dark and greedy.

“Look at you,” she whispered, huskily, pressing her hand against the length of him. “You look a little bit...destroyed, Apostolis. There are worse things than death after all, are there not? Like losing.”

And then she ducked under his arm and headed for the stairs, moving across the flow of rooms and up the circular steps before she even dared look over her shoulder. Her heart was pounding too hard for her to hear anything. The heat of the hardest part of him was a brand across her palm.

And she was not sure if he was right there on her heels, or still down below.

But when she looked, he stood at the bottom of the stairs. He looked up at her, a tortured expression she had never seen before on his face. And she couldn’t enjoy it the way she should have, because she worried she wore the same expression herself.

More, his chest was moving as if he’d run a marathon to get from the wall to the first stair.

And she felt that, too, like a touch.

“If I were you,” he told her, his voice a dark ribbon through the dark of the house, with only the stars outside to bear witness to this, “I would run. While you can.”

To her shame, there was a part of her that wanted to do just that, and run—but straight to him, so she could see where this fire went. So she could see if they would truly turn each other to ash after all—

---