Page 109 of Modern Romance June 2025 1-4

Not simply tapping away at his laptop while dressed to impress, as usual.

Tonight not-Luc-Garnier is spread out on the sleek leather couch in the big office, wearing nothing but a pair of lounging trousers.

That’s the only thing I can think of to call them, because they are not the sweats a lesser man might don. They are the kind of gray that suggests cashmere and the trousers themselves seem to be involved in a complicated hagiography of their wearer.

Though as far as I can see, he is entirelyproportional…and it occurs to me that the tailoring of his perfect suits is about minimizing his assets, not enhancing them.

This notion leaves me breathless.

Inside, everything in me urges me to turn and leave before he sees me. To get out of here, because it doesn’t matter what he’s doing. Or wearing. What matters is that I can’t seem to get a handle on what’s happening inside me.

In my head, I turn and move silently back down the hall, let myself out of the office, and grab a car to take me home.

The truth is, I don’t move.

At all.

I stand there for a long moment, aware of entirely too many things. Not simply Luc.He is not Luc,I correct myself, but the corrections don’t matter. He is like a portrait of the perfect man, and I have never imagined myself the kind of woman who would be rendered helpless at this sort of thing.

At the sight of all that male beauty, just there, on the other side of a wall of glass.

His head is propped up on the arm of the sofa, and he is holding his phone in his hand, frowning at it as he scrolls.

And everything else is just…hot.

I think that my head is spinning and I’m losing control, but in another moment I realize that actually, what I’m hearing is his music. It’s sweeping and classical, and something about that seems to grip me in a tight fist.

I tell myself, desperately, that it’s information. More information, that’s all. But I know better.

He doesn’t know I’m here and he can’t have expected me. I didn’t know I’d be here tonight either.

So this feels like a window into whoever he really is. At his ease, and this classic, wildly emotional piano music playing all around him.

I feel as if I’m seeing into his secrets.

As if this is his moment of vulnerability, yet instead of feeling powerful for seeing it, it makes me feel stripped bare too.

And all I can think is…I want more.

It’s as if I’m compelled by something outside myself.

I move closer, drifting down that hallway as if I’m in a dream. And I know the precise moment he lifts his gaze from his phone to me.

I feel it, like a touch.

Like a caress,something in me whispers, as the sensation washes over me, a sweet, scalding heat, marking me from the very top of my head down to the tip of my toes.

Then pulsing everywhere in between.

What I want to do is go and press my overheated face to the cool glass.

But I realize that’s a lie even as I think it. It’s not that I don’t want to do that, it’s that I don’t want to doonlythat.

Glass is not the only place I’d like to put my face.

I want, more than I can put into words, to move inside that room. To open that door, walk across that office, and press my body against his.

Of all the truths that his appearance here has brought to light, this one feels as if it might tear me to shreds. As if it might actually be the end of me.

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