Page 217 of Modern Romance Collection March 2025 (1-4)

“So you say. But they’re used to having me around.”

“And instead, they will have resources.”

“My sisters are young. I’m not going to wholly abandon—”

“No one is suggesting that you do. But I am suggesting perhaps that your family can survive without using you entirely as a crutch.”

“I… All right. I will agree because…” Her throat tightened. Because she had a choice. But opposing him wouldn’t get her much of anything. So why?

Because she was Stevie Parker. Really no one extraordinary. And he was Adonis Andreadis. He was offering to make her a princess. What could she do in the face of that?

Nothing. Nothing at all but…comply. That was the beginning and end of everything.

And that was how she found herself whisked off to the airfield. Going into a part of the airport not even she had ever been into. She knew what it was. It was where the private planes flew out of.

And when they got on the plane, her heart nearly gave out.

“This is the most beautiful machine I’ve ever seen,” she said.

“I find that I’m a bit cool on airplanes at the moment.”

“Oh, I’m not. I never could be. That was a freak accident. And even then, we didn’t die.”

“Twice would be pushing it, don’t you think?”

“Who knows,” she said, looking around at the shiny, glorious space. “Can I see the cockpit?”

CHAPTER NINE

Thiswasthewoman who would become his queen. This woman who was more interested in the cockpit of the plane than the private bedroom.

“I… Yes,” he said, looking at her as if she had grown another head.

“What?”

“I’ve brought other women on this plane, and they are not usually interested in the cockpit.”

“Don’t talk to me about other women,” she said, looking annoyed. “You show me the cockpit.”

“All right,” he said. Declining to make the joke about how they usually wanted to see half of that word anyway.

It occurred to him as he brought her in to view the state-of-the-art instruments and plush chair that she really was irked that he had mentioned other women. She wasn’t just being funny, or playing up again. She was less experienced than the other women he had been with, and he had to be a little bit more careful. He wasn’t used to that. He was used to people like him, who saw sex as a game.

But Stevie clearly didn’t. Which meant…

He had never imagined a marriage where he was…monogamous. Many people thought that it was an outdated concept, which really was a return to the way people had often conducted themselves in the air of dynastic marriages.

Monogamy was, in his opinion, the bastion of the middle class.

But his future wife was middle-class.

He was suddenly agog at that.

“Can I sit for a moment?”

“Go right ahead,” he said.

She sat in the captain’s chair, stroking the yoke lovingly, and he thought she had only just looked this excited when they made love.

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