Page 20 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

And this time, she could call his voice—his whole demeanor—the very definition ofstiff.

She smiled at him, then down at the ring. “Is it poisonous?”

And she watched as something perilously close to a smile moved over his stern mouth, then disappeared. Making her want nothing so much as to chase it, to bring it back, to bask in it some more.

“A reasonable question,” he agreed, and it felt like warmth, this quiet little moment between them. “But I assure you, it is not. This is the first ring my father gave her and it was little worn. It has been passed down in my family for generations. Almost universally, its owners remove it, usually in fits of rage. It has been thrown from the battlements. It has gone down more than one drain. And yet it always finds its way back.”

“So it is less a gesture toward a harmonious and fruitful marriage, and more an introduction to a family curse.” Dioni reached in and picked it up before he could follow the family tradition with this ring, as she suspected he wanted to. That frown on his face seemed to suggest that a good toss from the walls was imminent.

“What it is,camurria, is tradition,” he told her darkly. “For good or for ill.”

She held the ring between her thumb and forefinger, looking between its shimmering intensity and his.

“No bended knee?” she asked softly, from a daring place she would have said did not exist inside of her.

If asked, she would have said there was no possibility she would ever be bold enough to tease anyone. Especially not this man. But she had already experienced his thunder. His wildfire. All those flashes of lightning, all that danger and rumbling.

She told herself she was prepared.

First, there was that stark astonishment all over his face. Then the arrogant rise of his brow.

And then, to her amazement, he held her gaze—stern and forbidding—and sank to one knee.

It should have looked silly on him. A man so powerful, so austere and contained, making such a universal gesture of obeisance.

But this was Alceu.

On him, kneeling down only made him look more powerful.

He reached over and took the ring from her. Then he took her hand, and she didn’t know if she was frozen solid, or paralyzed, or simply in such disbelief that this was actually happening that every system in her body was trying to shut itself down.

All she could do was stare as he held her hand in his and smoothly slid the ring into place.

“You will be my wife,” he said with great portent, his voice seeming to echo deep in her bones. “May God have mercy on both our souls.”

And that did it.

That broke the spell and Dioni laughed, tossing her head back while she did it, and when she looked at him again there was a different sort of arrested expression on his face.

A different gleam in his gaze altogether.

“Really, Alceu,” she said. “You might want to consider opening a line of greeting cards. Surely the world is desperate for this level of sentimentality. I am swept away.”

She thought he would rise quickly, but he stayed where he was. It was as if he spent half of his life on his knees and found it comfortable. And he stared at her in that same fulminating way, as if he could see straight through her, to the darkest recesses of her soul.

Her trouble was, she wouldn’t mind if he could.

“You will be my wife,” he told her, more intently this time. “And it is not the lark you seem to imagine it, Dioni. For one thing, you will be the object of pity the world over.”

“If you say so.” She shrugged when his brow creased. “I think you’re drastically underestimating your appeal.”

“I am not a cruel man,” he told her, with that same intensity. “But cruelty is in my blood, my bones.”

“So you have said,” she murmured. “In a great many ways, though you have not specified what sort of cruelty you mean.”

He seemed taken aback by that, as if it should have been obvious. As if the cruelty of his bones and blood should have been evident at a glance. “When I was a young boy I became enamored of the chickens in the yard. The cook kept them for eggs, but I liked them. I suppose you could say I considered them friends.”

Dioni found that her throat was constricted as she tried to imagine Alceu as a small boy, playing with chickens, of all things—and as she tried to imagine that, she was also trying to ward off her sense of foreboding.

---