Page 10 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

When she spun around and around and around, and then tripped—because of course she tripped, this wasDioni—how could he do anything but catch her?

He could still remember it so clearly.

Her eyes, sparkling. Her skin, so hot despite the coolness of the rain and the wind, burning his palms.

The way she laughed as if there was nothing more delightful on earth than this foul weather to mark the most cynical wedding that he had ever attended.

The way she looked at him as if he was not a creature of iron and stone, atonement and sorrow.

She looked at him as if he was made of light and air, as if he, too, could dance with the rain, unfettered and free.

He had done none of those things.

What he had done was, in many ways, worse, because he could still feel every touch, every taste, as if they were tattooed into his flesh.

Now that same rush of helplessness was taking him over again, and he hated it.

Why should this woman be the only creature on earth who had power over him?

Why should this bedraggled, stained,carelesswoman be the only one alive who could get under his skin without even trying?

He liked women who exuded so much sophistication that they might well be mistaken for marble statues, not a woman so chaotic that even one of the finest finishing schools in the world had failed to smooth off her edges.

How could this be happening?

It was an outrage. He wanted, desperately, for this to be a mistake.

But the hardest part of him told him otherwise.

And in any case, there had only ever been one solution to the Dioni problem. He was only sorry he hadn’t understood that from the start.

Therefore, when she took the very last bite of her cake and then stared at the empty box as if heartbroken that she’d demolished it so quickly, he did the only thing he could.

The only possible thing there was to do.

“Marry me,” he gritted out.

CHAPTER THREE

DIONIHADOBVIOUSLYfantasized about this moment upwards of a trillion times, give or take.

Even before she knew she was pregnant, she had done her best to salve her wounds—and her pride—by imagining Alceu groveling to her in a thousand different ways. Though she had not taken as much pleasure as she’d expected she would in her daydreams of him crawling about on the ground, or throwing himself prostrate before her, or falling to his knees theatrically to beg her forgiveness.

Because, she had long since concluded, the sad truth was that the Alceu she liked—the Alceu she had always liked, and far too much for her own good—was proud and coolly arrogant and wholly uncowed by anything or anyone.

It was a shame that she couldn’t change him, even in her own head.

Nonetheless, she had let her fantasies run wild. And as time went on, and her situation became more unavoidably real, the daydreams had shifted. Maybe she ran into him by accident somewhere. Maybe she had a child who so resembled him that word got back to him, somehow—though not via her brother, because even in her dreams she hadn’t worked out how she was going to tell Apostolis about any of this. There was an infinite variety of scenarios, but they always ended with him seeing her again and counting himself a terrible fool.Shewould pityhim.He would come to her, awash in declarations, and he would beg her to marry him—

But not like this.

Because this was all wrong. She was enormous, which was fine because she was pregnant but was soungainly. She was covered in princess cake crumbs. Instead of finding her in her depressed, effortlessly elegant mode, she was her clumsy, messy, tattered self.

This, naturally, was when he chose to ask her—well,tellher—to marry him.

And there had been no declarations. There had been thinly veiled accusations to suggest that she’d deliberately gone and gotten herself pregnant to spite him. There had been temper. And it had all led to anorder, not a request.

“Are youdemandingthat I marry you, Alceu?” Dioni asked into the quiet of the brownstone all around them, as if she thought calling it what it was would shame him, somehow, into rethinking his approach.

---