Page 31 of Modern Romance March 2025 (5-8)

“I’m sick of hiding from my own life,” she said, swallowing. When he continued to stare at her, she got to her feet. He refused to release her from between his legs though, feeling a juvenile fear that this Nyra was beyond his grasp already. “So, is this acceptable to you?”

“You have no demands of me,” he pointed out with a little bitterness.

“You’ve always given me more than I could imagine in my wildest dreams, Adriano. I’m trying to tell myself to enjoy it. It’s a long journey to believing that I’m worth it though,” she said, with a shrug. As if she hadn’t just revealed her vulnerability in such bald words. “I did have a question for you. Something I should have asked ages ago.”

“What is it?” he said, his mouth drying.

Fading sunlight limned her body in profile, tracing each curve with exquisite care. The leather skirt hugged her ass like he wanted to with his hands.

“Why did you marry me?”

He stared at her.

“I mean,Iwas head over heels for you. If you’d shipped me off to some posh flat in Milan and bade me to stay there on tap, I would have. If you put me on retainer for your visits to Vegas, I’d have happily complied.”

“I’m not in the habit of paying for pleasure,” he said, incensed beyond belief.

She snorted. “That’s morality only the rich can afford. And honestly, what we had so far is just dressed up to look like something else, no? It made you feel better to offer me a ring, and I jumped at the security that I haven’t known in so long.”

It sounded awful, but it was a realistic summary of their relationship so far. And yet it seared Adriano like nothing ever had. He hated to hear their relationship reduced to such stark terms. He’d far preferred the innocent Nyra to this pleasant brittleness she seemed to have acquired overnight. Just to sustain a relationship with him, he wondered with a keen sense of loss.

“The point is I’d have followed you wherever you bid me, until you got bored of me,” she said with a breeziness he loathed. “So why marry me?”

It was a question he’d asked himself with increasing frequency of late. He didn’t have an answer, only one that masqueraded as such. “I was thirty-four years old. You were twenty-two. The disparity in our ages, the power I had over you, the pull between us, it made me…uncomfortable. Smacked too much of the power my father wielded over innocent women. I told myself marrying you meant I was evening it out somehow. Just a bit.”

Her brow cleared. “Not uncomfortable enough to give me up though?”

“No,” he said, coming to his feet. He crowded her and she stepped back, her delicious bottom bumping against the glass wall. Her nervousness, for all she’d marched in here like a lioness, made the hunter in him calm. Which, he knew, was a weakness in itself. But until he could make sense of this, he would cling to the order of things. He was like his mother, apparently, however much he had tried to beat it.

He planted his arms on either side of her head and leaned in. Caging her, for she felt like a wisp of smoke to his senses in this new incarnation.

A soft gasp left her as his chest grazed her lush breasts. Despite his discomfort at this new her, the lust that punched through him was the same fierce, feral urge. “Some kind of madness consumed me,” he said, near her ear. Her harsh pants were like music to his ears. “It was only when I returned home, put you in the context of my life that I realized what I had done. You put me under a spell. Now shall we seal your vow with a kiss,wife?”

He swooped in and caught her lips, needing her taste to anchor him as much as he wanted her desire for him to shake her newfound self-possession.

* * *

The kiss was rough, possessive, and Nyra responded like she was dry tinder to a match. Adriano filled her vision, her senses. Even her breath was his gift.

Fresh shivers filled her as his large hands spanned her back, fingertips digging into her. Fear finally leaving her body after thirty-six hours of wondering if he’d go back on his word.

It was the bravest thing she’d done—to leak her identity to the press. And yet she’d never been more scared. For the first time in her life, she’d taken a calculated risk with everything riding on the result.

Her decision.

Her life.

Her future with this compelling man.

Would he still want her when her past touched his prestige?had been a relentless chant in her head. Although the fact that he was too honorable to throw his pregnant wife,and his future heirs, on the street was a sad reassurance.

“Open up,bella. You’ve teased me enough,” Adriano demanded, nipping at her lower lip. His hands kneaded her hips, stroked over her back, touching her everywhere and anywhere with an urgency that was a sop to her fragile ego.

She groaned as he licked his tongue through her mouth, playing with her, thrusting it in a filthy parody of what she needed elsewhere. All the confusion of the last few days, the cracks he’d made in her heart over the last few months, the heat of his kiss melted it a little. His mouth, so soft for such a hard, inscrutable man, drifted down her jaw, leaving her shaking from her head to toe.

Clinging to his powerful shoulders, Nyra rubbed herself against him like a cat, needing the rough slide of the hard planes of him against her. It had been so long, too long, since she’d felt his need. His possession. His…fracture at her hands.

While it had hurt to reduce their relationship to sex, there was a powerful truth in their physical connection.

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