Page 8 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

Though he had done enough exploding in her presence.

Clearly.

At the other end of a series of drawing rooms and studies, it was all light. She led him into a kitchen that stretched out into a glassed enclosure, bursting with plants. Beyond it was a lovely little garden, walled off from the rest of New York.

He might have liked the place, under different circumstances.

“There’s no one else here,” she told him without bothering to glance back at him. “So no one will ever know that you came today. You can turn around and go, Alceu, and that will be the end of it. No one will ever know who the father of my child is, my brother will get over it in time, and we can all carry on as we were.”

“But I will know.”

She turned to look at him, her hands braced on the counter before her, and a different sort of frown on her face.

“I will know,” he said again. “And I don’t know what gave you the impression that I am the sort of man who shirks my responsibilities.”

“All this out ofpity?” Dioni shot back at him. “On behalf of both me and my unborn child, no thank you. We will be perfectly fine.”

“It is not a matter of pity or any other emotion,” he told her coolly, amazed that every time she threw that word at him—a word he knew full well he had used deliberately, to hurt her—it seemed to dig into him a little deeper. “You are an Adrianakis. Your child stands to inherit—”

“Nothing.” She cut him off. “The hotel and everything in it goes to my brother and Jolie. And I am happy with that arrangement. You don’t need to be involved.”

“Your child is also a Vaccaro,” Alceu continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “And I’m afraid that the child is the last heir to a vast estate. A curseIintended to take with me to my grave.”

She digested that, and then her eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry, what are you suggesting? ThatIintended otherwise? Are you suggesting that the virgin in this scenario should have been in charge of the birth control? Really?”

He thought she was going to shout at him. Or light into him, whether raising her voice or not. And part of him welcomed that, because it would be a kind of proof, wouldn’t it?

That she was overwrought. That she was out of control. That he had been perfectly right to draw a line under that episode on the terrace and more, had likely not been as much to blame as he’d thought he was, ever since.

But instead, Dioni laughed.

She laughed and she laughed.

He was offended. Then he was baffled. Then there was something else inside of him, some scratchy sort of clawing feeling that had him questioning whether he’d ever before beenlaughed at.

Alceu rather thought not.

Not by a woman. Not likethis. His mother, Marcella, always used her pointed laughter as a weapon, but this was something else.

Dioni looked as if she actually thought that this was funny.

She laughed so hard that tears streamed down her face, and in her usual careless fashion, she pulled up the collar of the shirt she wore and scrubbed at her eyes. Then let it fall again, as if using her garment as a tissue was the most natural thing in the world.

He found himself staring at the splotches of liquid right there on the collar of her shirt. As if the secret to the universe waited for him, just there, if he could only decode it.

But then she reached over to that brown paper bag she’d been carrying and pulled it toward her across the gleaming countertop.

He watched, in what he could only termbemusement, as she lifted out a little box and set it on the counter. She unfolded the cardboard edges to open it up, then fished a plastic fork from the bag so she could dig in.

It was a hefty slice of cake, he realized in the next moment. Something green and pink, with icing and fondant and all manner of bells and whistles.

She put the first bite in her mouth, chewed with her eyes closed, and then let out a moan that he was quite certain he had heard before.

His body was positive that he had.

He felt himself shudder into a kind of high alert as she took another bite and moaned again, with the same delight, so that he could feel it deep in his sex.

But she was not looking at him. She scarcely seemed aware of him at all.

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