Page 9 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

Her eyes were closed tight and she was feasting on takeaway cake with a plastic fork as if it was ambrosia from the gods.

Nothing about this made the faintest sense to Alceu.

He had been born perfectly aware of his place in the world. His family’s wealth had allowed them to escape a great many consequences of their legendary and historic vile behavior, but it could not do much to alter public perception. No one would dare these days, but when he’d been a boy it had not been uncommon for strangers to grab his arm and let him know exactly what they thought of his father. His mother. His entire twisted family tree.

Alceu had quickly realized that the accusations were true. Each and every one of them.

And so he had made certain that his life was a monument to iron control.

By the time he’d met Apostolis, there were very few things that he could not arrange to his liking. By the time they graduated from university, the idea that something couldnotbe managed to suit him was laughable.

And from that moment until now, there was only Dioni to suggest that he was not, in fact, impermeable to the temptations that felled weaker men.

He had told himself, these last six months, that it was unforgivable. That she had done this to him with some witchery he would never understand, as he’d never expected to lay eyes on her again.

But now he realized that the real problem with Dioni wasthis.

The heedless joy she took in forking in bite after bite of her ridiculously over-the-top cake. The fact she didn’t mind the plastic fork, when he was quite certain that there were ample utensils in this well-appointed kitchen.

She didn’t care that her appearance was less than perfect. She was perfectly happy to wipe her face on her own shirt and carry on. She was not sophisticated in the least, and it wasn’t that Alceu looked for a certain sophistication or elegance in anyone. It was that the presence of those things generally indicated a certain commitment to some or other notion of excellence.

If Dioni knew what the wordexcellentmeant, Alceu would be surprised.

Shocked, in fact.

And yet he was transfixed.

With every bite she made another deep, sensual noise. And with another woman, he might have suspected that the point was to make him react in the way he did.

But he suspected that this was actually far more insulting.

It was entirely possible that she had forgotten he was here.

That lightning seemed to strike him harder. Deeper.

In his reaction to his family, and the family reputation, and the distinct understanding he’d had for the whole of his life that he could never make up for the sins encoded in his blood, Alceu had made himself as much an object of his own control as everything else.

He was fastidious. He always looked ruthlessly perfect. He prided himself on the perfection of his manners, his propriety, and his excruciatingly correct behavior under any and all circumstances.

She had already proved him wrong on that count once. He had polluted the one good relationship in his life—his friendship with Apostolis—by touching her. By proving himself the hypocrite he had always feared he was, because ofwhohe was.

Now it was happening again. This time she did not even bother to look at him, such was her sorcery and worse, his reaction to it.

She made him feel something he hadn’t felt since he was a very small child.

Helpless.

Except this time, that helplessness was also wrapped up in the wild pleasure he had taken in her body.

He could remember the rain. The wind. The crash of the sea in the distance. He could remember fighting himself out on that terrace, still not fully realizing what it was that was rising in him, one dangerous heartbeat at a time.

It’s like music, Dioni had said, and it had meant something that she wasn’t looking at him. That her eyes were out toward the sea, the storm.

Maybe he’d made a noise. Both of them were damp from the rain that the wind threw their way, even though they stood beneath the vines of the pergola.

She looked over at him, her dark eyes dancing.Can’t you hear it?

And then she started moving, dancing to music only she could hear. And yet the longer she moved, the longer she danced, the more he could hear it, too.

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