Page 103 of Modern Romance June 2025 1-4

It’s like he can read my mind, and that doesn’t help. “Surely there must be a use for that. For you. Perhaps you should stop fighting the inevitable and think about what that use might be, Annagret.”

He turns back as he says that. This myth turned man, and I hate myself immediately for thinking of him in such terms. But how can I not?

Firstly, if ever a man looked like a myth, it’s him. Everything about him suggests that shrines should be constructed, statues carved of the finest bronze and marble, and all necessary sacrifices made to win his favor.

And secondly, he’s not wrong. But I deeply dislike being put in this position. And I hate that he’s made me feel helpless when I haven’t felt like that in years. Ten years, to be exact, since the night of my eighteenth birthday when my stepmother told me my birthday gift was that I had two weeks’ notice to leave and I said,why wait?

I decided, then and there, that the only way I would return to that house was in a coffin.

Just like I decide, here and now, that the last thing I need is to give this man more ammunition against me.

I blink at him. “I still can’t imagine why you think I’m going to just…go along with this delusion of yours.”

His face changes again, and I have the impression of that regal authority once more. As if he is not used to his dictates being challenged in the slightest regard, but it’s not the baffled rage that my stepmother used to show me. This is something else. As if it’s not a narcissistic wound of some kind that he wants to give voice to, but rather something he truly has no experience with.

As if he is used to reverence, not pushback.

I am intrigued despite myself, but then he simply looks at me seriously and I feel…breathless once again.

“I do not have any choice,” he says, and there is a quiet sort of heft to the way the words land. To the way he looks at me, steady and sure and something I might have called sorrowed, if this was another situation. “And I am sorry if that upsets you. Truly I am, but nothing can be done.”

“I can think of something that could be done. Right now, in fact.” I lift a brow and try to fill up with enough breath and bluster to ride this out. “You could leave.”

“I have already told you how and roughly when that will happen.” He shakes his head, and his expression changes again. “Come now. There is no need to dwell on these things. Why don’t you and I put our heads together and come up with ways that you can use the appearance of Luc Garnier to bolster your position.”

The last thing I need is a figment of my imagination patronizing me.

“You’re bribing me with your body?” I ask, my voice dry.

I don’t think it through. I just say it.

But then it is said.

And it seems to hang there between us in the space of this office. This gleaming, bright office that is all Manhattan skyline and the hustle of the street below. Inside these walls of glass, it is hushed. Intimate.

And it is very clear that he is taking what I said in a very specific way.

A way I don’t mean.

A way I don’tthinkI mean, but then again, I think of us rolling together on the floor, ofbloomingand breathlessness, and I am not so sure.

“There are other ways that I could use my body to please you, Annagret,” he tells me, his voice gone dark and low.

I hate myself for the heat that washes over me. I hate myself for the fact that I want to fidget.That I am perilously close to a betrayinggiggle. That I want to be immune to him, if not actively repulsed…yet can’t.

“I see,” he says, this dangerous, impossible man who should not be here. And what I worry is that he really can see, all of me, all the places I am soft and hot and want things I don’t want to admit. “You’d like a little bit of talk and some mythmaking, is that it? But reality, it seems, confounds you. I will keep that in mind.”

I become aware of a pain in my chest and it takes my palm pressed hard against the ache of it to realize it’s my heart.Pounding.Jackhammering against my ribs as if it’s trying to claw its way out.

At the same time, something seems to shift in the man before me. It’s as if he’s come to some kind of resolution and I can see him straighten his shoulders, just slightly, as he faces me fully.

“I took the liberty of looking at the office calendar,” he says, and it is a completely different tone from the one he was using before. Gone are any hints ofmythmaking,orapology,or any recognition that I mentioned his body.

Gone, too, though slower, is the heat in my cheeks.

It feels like a relief. As if he’s released his grip on me and I canbreathe—

But then his words penetrate. “Why on earth would you imagine you had access to proprietary information?” I demand.

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