Page 14 of Modern Romance Collection March 2025 (1-4)

And one year to seduce his alluring and surprising wife.

Plenty of time for both.

CHAPTER FIVE

Lynnadreamedofthat kiss and thus woke in a foul,foulmood. She wanted to be furious that he had kissed her without her consent.

But she hadn’t pushed him away, and she could have. She hadn’t used a strategic knee to make him crumble, and shecouldhave. She was well-versed in all the variety of ways to rebuff a man’s unwanted advances.

She had let him kiss her because…

Well.

She’d never been kissed. Which she’d never once allowed herself to feel pathetic about. She was introverted, self-assured and had never been able to put up with the foolishness ofboys, even when life had been easy and happy.

As she’d gotten older, and the world ofmenhad offered more possibilities, she’d been too busy. Nose to the grindstone, pulling herself and her family out of grief and financial distress, which left her with absolutely no patience for other people’s nonsense.

She had come to the conclusion a few years ago that she would likely always be a virgin, and she’d accepted that. Been happy with it.

“I am still happy with it,” she said. Out loud. To assure herself.

So the kiss had…messed up things inside of her. That was just a physical, physiological reaction. Like yeast in baking. There were reactions that happened in a body just as they did in a bread dough. It wasscience.

She didn’t have to want to act on them for the chemical reactions to exist. To find herself surprised and curiousin the moment.

She most certainly would not let Athan have his mouth anywhere near her ever again. She didn’t even understand why he was pretending that he might…see herthatway.

“Because he’s the devil,” she told the empty room resolutely, scowling at the crumpled up wedding gown on the floor.

It had made her feel beautiful, and Athan had even said that with a kind of reverence that had made her heart feel…lightinstead of the heavy weight it had been for years.

She hated it.

She pushed out of bed and padded over to her suitcase. She had only brought clothes meant for being a chef. Particularly an event chef. Everything was black, easy to move in and easy to clean.

Drab.

“Well, we have no reason to be anything other than drab, do we?” She pulled out the first pair of top and pants her hands landed on and changed into them. She pulled her piles of hair back into a tight braid.

What she looked like was immaterial. Maybe she was playing the role of wife not chef, but there was nothing in her contract about looking a certain way.

So dressing like the staff felt like rebellion, and that powered her out of her room and downstairs into the kitchen. There were some staff already there, brewing coffee and making noises about breakfast, but she politely and efficiently kicked them all out.

Shewas going to make breakfast. Part of her was tempted to only make it for herself, let Athan fend for himself, but that was silly if she’d gotten rid of the other kitchen staff.

Besides, if Athan got used to her cooking, he would miss it all the more when they weren’t together.

She frowned at herself as she pulled a bowl of eggs from the refrigerator. Not that she wanted him to missher. She just wanted him to be in pain.

She had aladeniain the oven, a fruit salad prepared and was halfway through the cooking thestrapatsathawhen Athan wandered into the kitchen.

Last night he’d worn a tux. He’d looked every inch the wealthy sophisticate he’d been bred to be, and though that wasn’t tohertaste, Lynna did not for the life of her understand his former fiancée’s decision to trade in one Akakios for the other.

If you were going to wed the devil, Athan was perhaps the handsomest devil there was. In a tux. In casual clothing. She had once seen him in nothing but his swim trunks and that hadcertainlybeen an education in the male form.

She did not allow the memory to form in her mind.

“What exactly do you think you’re doing?” Athan asked. Not quite with disdain or censure. Somehow he made his tonecurious, when she knew he was not because it was obvious what she was doing. And he, no doubt, did not want her doing it.

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