Page 188 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

This was the first time she’d seen him in the flesh and...

Maude stared at him, transfixed.

If he’d picked up a thunderbolt and thrown it at her, she’d have let that bolt go straight through her.

It was baffling. She’d never felt that way about a man before.

She’d always been the odd one out, even with her closest friends, the other three of the Your Girl Friday team. Irinka, the team’s secretary, who came from a Russian family and provided the rest of them with the connections they needed to the rich and powerful. Lynna, who was from Wales and had been raised in Greece, and who could make magic with food. And Augusta—known as Auggie—the sole American in the team, and who’d recently done a stint as a stewardess on a plane.

None of the others liked plants or forests the way she did. None of them liked communing with nature. And she knew they all considered her a little odd.

She was okay with that. She liked being odd.

She’d spent most of her early years in a Scottish commune with her mother, which had involved living very close to nature and not much in the way of schooling. Then her maternal grandparents, disturbed by the way she was being brought up, had forced her mother into giving Maude to them to raise. They’d tried to tame her with urban life, with concrete and rules and TV and homework instead of bonfires and storytelling and dancing.

Maude had found it tough, but eventually she’d managed to behave the way they’d wanted her to. Except for the fact that nature had got deep in her soul and now it was so much part of her, nothing could get it out.

It was nature that commanded her attention and, really, it was more normal for her to stop and stare like this at a tree, or a magnificent flowering shrub, than a man.

In the clearing, Dominic Lancaster put down his goblet and sat on the edge of the couch. Maude tensed. Perhaps he was going to run after the woman, in which case staying put was probably a good idea. She didn’t particularly want him to find her creeping around in the forest, especially when she’d been told not to intrude.

He didn’t move for a moment, the torchlight running over his skin and the carved lines of his torso revealed by the loose toga, bathing him in gold. Then he rose from the couch with a deliberate muscular grace that had Maude’s heart racing, and walked slowly to where a white scrap of fabric lay in the leaf mould of the forest floor. Bending, he picked it up then continued over to where the woman had disappeared into the trees.

‘You forgot something, sweetheart,’ he called as he tossed the white fabric into the trees. ‘You also forgot that I never run after a woman.’

A shiver ran unexpectedly over Maude’s skin. His voice was deep and velvety and rich, with a darkness threading through it that seemed to connect with something inside her.

He stood very close and he was much taller than she’d expected. Much taller than she was. The crown of laurel leaves on his head, gleaming in the torchlight, and the way he held himself, as if he were indeed king of the gods, made her pulse begin to beat in a hard, insistent rhythm.

Men hadn’t featured in her life. She hadn’t met one she’d been even remotely attracted to and wasn’t interested in meeting one. Men as a whole didn’t interest her.

So this man, this complete stranger, shouldn’t have warranted a second glance.

Yet she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

She couldn’t even take a breath.

He’d gone very still, as if he was listening, and Maude wouldn’t have been surprised if it was her heart he’d heard thumping like a drum within the confines of her ribcage.

Something whispered in her brain, something dark and seductive, that was drawn to the man standing so close. A deep part of her that couldn’t stop looking at the broad width of his shoulders and his powerful chest. That wanted her to run her hands across his olive skin, feel the prickle of crisp hair and then move further down, to the corrugated lines of his stomach left bare by the drape of the white fabric, the only thing that clothed him.

The forest bowed to him, the darkness in her head whispered. He was the king here. He was primal and raw, and if he wanted to chase a woman, she had no chance. He would bring her down onto the rich earth and take her, connect her so deeply to this forest and to him, she’d never escape.

There was an ache between Maude’s thighs, an insistent ache she couldn’t recall feeling so intensely before. She couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to.

‘But you,’ he murmured without turning his head, the velvety texture of his voice deepening. ‘You, I might just make an exception for.’

He couldn’t be talking to her, could he? No, it wasn’t possible. She was hidden in the shadows of the trees, in the darkness, he couldn’t know she was there. In the forest, she was unseen. She wasalwaysunseen.

He’s a god, remember? He could find you anywhere.

Her palms were damp, her heartbeat loud in her ears. She should melt into the trees and slip away, go back to bed. Pretend she hadn’t seen him.

Yet...she didn’t.

He turned his head slowly, looking in her direction. His face was shadowed, but somehow she could see the gleam of his eyes, black in the night. It wasn’t possible for him to see in the dark, yet she was certain all at once that he knew she was there.

She had no idea how he knew, because she hadn’t made a sound. Just as she knew that if she ran the way that other woman had, he would follow.

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