Page 12 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

Branding her the way his touch had, months back.

“I am going to pretend none of this happened,” she told him. “You’re welcome to do whatever you like, but I certainly hope it includes taking yourself back home to Sicily, where you can sit in your castle and brood as much as you like. I hear you’re very good at it.”

She went to sweep dramatically from the room. But she miscalculated.

Maybe it was because sweeping hither and yon was best done in the appropriate sort of dress. Or in any kind of dress at all. Raggedy jeans that kept catching at her heels didn’t quite give the same impression, and even if they did, Dioni was still and ever herself.

So really, it shouldn’t have surprised her at all that she tripped.

And she would have gone flying and done a header into the floor had Alceu not reached out as if he’d anticipated her every move, and simply...caught her.

As if she weighed no more than a feather.

As if it had been a foregone conclusion that he would catch her like that, so easily.

As if it wasinevitable.

Alceu gazed down at her. She could see every striation in his dark eyes. Every shade of brown in the world, each one of them magical. He held her in his arms as if they were in a gorgeous, achingly cinematic film, as if the music was swelling and the audience was gasping and everything had been leading tothis.

His stern, uncompromising face seemed fiercer this close. She really ought to have been afraid, though she wasn’t. Dioni could not seem to keep herself from lifting a hand—it was almost as if it moved of its own accord—and tracing the bold, ruthless features before her.

The face she knew better than her own, having dreamed of it so often.

And something about those sensual lips of his—so austere, so reserved—shifted.

They did not quitesoften. There was nothing about Alceu that wassoft.

He muttered that word again.Camurria.

“Careful,” Dioni said, though her own voice had gone all husky. “Or I will start to imagine that is an endearment.”

His dark eyes blazed and warmed her, everywhere.

Then, at last, he lowered his mouth to hers.

And he had been inside her body. He had knelt between her legs, out on that rain-swept terrace. Then he had licked his way between her thighs and taught her things about herself she had never dreamed could be possible. That she could writhe like that, heedless of anything but him. That she could lose herself entirely, the whole of her being focused on what he did with his mouth, his lips, even his teeth.

Alceu had held her over him on one of the chaises, tucked away from the worst of the weather. He had lifted her up as if she were insubstantial, settled her against the hard heat of him, and then slowly, painstakingly, he had lowered her down and surged into her.

One delirious centimeter at a time.

He had felt and seen the precise moment when she’d flinched, because the pain of entry was like a punch where a person least wanted to be punched. And Dioni had watched the way his gaze had gone something far darker than merely possessive. She had felt the way his hands wrapped around her hips and gripped her, so tight and sure that she could only move as he bade her.

Then, once she had seated herself astride him—and he was so deep within her that she had understood whatwholenessmeant and had never been quite the same since—he had taught her how to move.

Dioni had felt that too, every stroke, every thrust and reverse. She had felt the friction, the astonishing heat.

When she wasn’t imagining him groveling, she was imagining that. The press, the pull. Her softness and his hardness.

The glory of it all, a spiral of jubilation and greed that had swept her away.

She had felt every part of him, and had marveled at the way he seemed to know exactly how to angle himself so that she could not help but fall apart.

Over and over again.

Dioni had felt more sensation than she’d ever believed possible out there in the rain. She’d imagined that she would never know anything better, or more disastrous—

But this kiss was better than all of it combined.

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