Page 27 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

She sighed a little and as she did could feel her body move. Just slightly, but it was enough. His eyes tracked the movement and if she wasn’t mistaken, he swallowed. Hard.

“You made your case,” she told him. “But I reject it.”

“It was less an argument than a statement of intent,camurria.”

“I know what it was.” But she decided that she would not categorize it. Because she doubted he would like the things she would call it. It would involve a discussion of ghosts. Of the sins of the father and her belief that anyone could change their life if they wanted to, no matter what lurked in the past. “But Alceu. It isn’t practical.”

“Because you believe anything about what happened between us ispractical?” He sounded incredulous. “I think perhaps your current state is affecting your mind, Dioni.”

“My current state?” She nodded, sagely. “You mean the fact that we are married. I agree. It is affecting my mind. Because, according to you, the worst has already happened.God have mercy on both our souls, and so on. So I don’t see why we have to continue to punish ourselves. I’m already pregnant, Alceu. The damage has already been done, according to you. Why must I be banished off to a guest room?”

He was shaking his head, but she could see the way that pulse of his pounded in his throat. “What are you suggesting?”

She sat up, and it wasn’t elegant, but he looked mesmerized all the same. “Well, for a start, I thought it might be fun to see what it was like to both kissandhave sex at the same time, instead of separating those events by six months and a baby.”

This time there was no doubt that he had to swallow, more than once, as if to clear his throat. And that gaze of his was nothing but fire.

“That would be a mistake.” His voice was low.

It wasn’t easy for her to move her body so that she could get to the edge of the bed, and then stand, but she did it. Then she walked toward him and she felt like a fertility goddess, because that was how he looked at her. As if he had never seen anything so beautiful approaching him before. As if he couldn’t conceive of it.

That was what she held on to. Because she didn’t know what she was supposed to do when he was saying one thing to her, but everything else about him was telling her the opposite.

“Surely the mistake has already been made.” She watched him watch her, and it made that curious, wonderful heat inside her turn into something more like a naked flame. “What would happen if instead of damning ourselves forever, we danced in it, instead?”

Dioni drifted closer to him, though he looked something like tortured.

“Dancing is what got us in trouble in the first place,” he said, in a voice that almost sounded bitter, but she could see the flash of fire and heat in his gaze.

“You can’t get me pregnant,” she pointed out. “We’re already married. It’s currently a secret, but it won’t always be. Whether or not you take me to bed tonight will make no difference at all in the grand scheme of things.”

“If it would make no difference—” he began.

“Except,” she clarified, “to me. It would make a tremendous difference tome, Alceu.”

She was far too close to him now. Dioni reached out and helped herself to one of the buttons on his shirt, loosening it and then letting her fingers trail across the swath of golden skin that she found there.

And he made a tortured sort of sound, but he didn’t push her away. He reached out to brush his hand over her jaw, her cheek. Then he moved his thumb restlessly over the arch of her cheekbone and the seam of her lips.

It was like the fire between them went molten.

“What is it you want?” he demanded, his voice little more than a whisper.

She loosened another button, and this time, leaned forward to press her mouth there. She felt the heat of his skin blaze against her lips. She felt the small jerking motion he made, an electric shock to him the way that he had always been for her.

Only then did she ease back and look up at him, her hands braced on his chest, and her big belly a round weight between them.

“You,” she told him, though she knew it was dangerous to declare such things. It strayed too close to the heart of her. “Alceu, you must know that I have always wanted you.”

Dioni watched him as he fought himself. As he struggled.

And then as he fell.

As whatever resolve he had built up against her simply shattered.

Until there was nothing remaining but that fire.

It was what she’d wanted. But seeing it, she had the stray thought that she’d had no idea how potent it was, this thing she’d come looking for.

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