Page 188 of Modern Romance Collection March 2025 (1-4)

“Yes. I don’t mind. I love them. But realizing that I’m the only one keeping them from the streets… That’s terrifying.”

“Not your own death?”

“Well. If I’m dead, I suppose we don’t have to worry about me.”

“Perhaps.”

“What did you think about?” she pressed.

He had thought of his father. How there was no spare. How for all his exploits he was going to die actually trying to do the thing his father had asked him to do. And about how he would never be able to redeem the family name in the way his father had wanted.

He would never be able to redeem himself.

He’d never thought much about it, since his life had been a pantomime and not really his own. Now, perhaps, it never would be.

Maybe either way, it never would be.

“I thought about my home,” he said. It was true.

“Where is that?”

“It’s a small island in the Mediterranean. Beautiful. The water there is like crystal. The island itself has white sand. Palm trees. But also olive and cyprus. It is not flat. It’s mountainous. Volcanic. Like Olympus.”

“Are you Greek?”

“Adjacent,” he said. “I speak Greek. But also Italian, French, Mandarin.”

“English?”

He tried to smile, the sort of charming smile he often treated women to. “I thought that was obvious.”

“I’ve never even been outside the country.”

“Well, now that you didn’t die, you can if you would like.”

She screwed up her face. “Maybe. Assuming we don’t die of exposure before somebody finds us. I don’t know where we went off radar. We won’t arrive at our destination. But it’s going to depend heavily on how able they are to pick up our coordinates. I’m afraid to walk too far from the plane, but…”

“You can’t leave me here,” he said. “I’m liable to become a meal of one of your North American wildcats.”

“Well. That is true,” she said. “A cougar would probably enjoy chewing on you.”

“They have in the past.”

She blinked. “What?”

He smiled again, at her naïveté this time. “Never mind.”

She was… A country bumpkin. He had never met anyone like her.

He wasn’t sure he would’ve chosen to if the option had been presented. Well, not knowing that it would end up like this.

“I didn’t get your name,” she said.

“Does it matter?”

“I told you mine.”

“Yes,” he said. “Stevie. Like a small boy, or a witchy rock star?”

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