Page 11 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

Instead, he scowled. “You are carrying my child.”

“You say that like that’s a revelation. And I suppose it is, for you.” She shrugged, and tried to brush some of the crumbs off the wide shelf of her belly, then gave up. “But I’ve had six months to resign myself to the paternity of my child, and at no point during those six months did I think that marrying you would be an option. Or a good idea.”

Or on offer, though she did not say that.

He studied her for what seemed like a pitiless age or two.

“Nonetheless,” he said.

She waited for him to expound on that, but he didn’t. He just stood there, maddeningly fierce, those rich, dark eyes of his seeming something like ferocious as he gazed at her. Almost as if her failure to fling herself at his trouser cuff and weep with gratitude was a personal betrayal to him.

“Nonethelessis neither a complete sentence nor a reasonable answer,” she pointed out.

“What do you imagine are your options here,camurria?” he asked quietly, though she did not pretend she couldn’t hear the steel in his voice. It was stamped all over him. “I doubt very much that you would have gone to the trouble to run across the world and hide from reality if you did not know exactly where this was headed all along. Why bother to pretend otherwise?”

Her heart was beating too hard in her chest and it made her breath feel tight. And the last thing she needed was for more of her body to hurt in new and unexpected ways, but she couldn’t let herself focus on the ramifications of what he was saying. So she parsed it instead.

“You called me that before.Camurria.I looked it up.” She glared at him. He stared back, impassively enough, save for that dark fire in his gaze. “Apparently, it’s Sicilian forpain in the ass. But I suspect you know that.”

“If the shoe fits,” he replied, silkily.

“I’m not a shoe,” Dioni tossed back at him. “I’m not an object that you can claim, now, when you wanted nothing to do with me six months ago. Nothing’s actually changed. The fact that I’m pregnant is because of you, but this baby has nothing to do with you. I will raise my own child, precisely the way I want, and I don’t need any help or interference from anyone.”

And she told herself that was what she wanted, more than anything. When the truth was more that it was what she’d come to accept that she was going to get—whether she really wanted it or not.

Thatwas the reality she’d spent months coming to terms with here.

He was a wild card at best.

“But this is a fantasyland you are describing, and you know it.” She could see that something had shifted in him. That whatever emotion had led him to propose—though she doubted he even admitted he had such things, or maybe he didn’t know he was capable of emotion—in that particularly rough-sounding voice was gone.

Now he was the Alceu she had always known. Contained. Stern.Absolutely certainof himself.

What was wrong with her that he made her shiver, deep inside, in the parts of her body that only he had ever touched?

That she was still so wildly attracted to him, while she was carrying his child inside of her body, made the heat between her legs seem to bloom. Soft, wet.

Extremely disappointing, she thought.

“I think that a proposal is supposed to involve a question of some kind,” she told him, and she did not question why it was she was entertaining this. She should send him on his way. She should not have let him come inside in the first place. “Not an ill-tempered command tossed out over a kitchen counter.”

“I would think that the punishment suits the crime, does it not?” he retorted in a tone that really, she thought, should have made her furious.

Instead it made that blooming inside of her deepen. Then expand.

And maybe the best way to describe Alceu’s effect on her was like an illness. His wildfire power over her came upon her without warning, robbed her of little bits of herself, and left her shaking for days.

He was debilitating.

What she needed to do was make him leave and get back to her very important work of daydreaming about various ways he reallyshouldgrovel before her. It turned out that she found that notion far more appealing, suddenly.

She tossed her takeaway cake box into the appropriate trash receptacle. She brushed another round of crumbs off of her shirt, into the sink, and made herself count to ten.

Twice.

Because surely she could do with a little calm.

When she turned to face him again, he still hadn’t moved an inch. But then, he didn’t have to, did he? He filled the room all the same. As if the din of the city all around them, audible even through the walls and windows, was his name—pressing in upon them.

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