Page 118 of Modern Romance June 2025 1-4

Every step feels like surrender. Or maybe it’s the gown I’m wearing and the way it flirts with me as I walk, teasing and taunting me, reminding me that all this time that I’ve been playing the private detective… I’ve been a woman, too.

I am a woman, and he is a man, and as we walk together in the sultry night, I find I am less and less interested in what other things we might be.

It’s something about the night itself, I think. The bright, golden burn of the day has faded and I can feel the press of the night against my skin, weaving in and around the mask I wear. Both feel more like sensual caresses. The mask is like a reminder, with every breath, that this is all a game.

And that maybe I should considerplaying,for a change.

We do not touch, this man and me, but we walk side by side, and I’m certain that I can feel a kind of humming heat from his body. To match the humming in me. As if being this close to him is like straying into some sort of electromagnetic field.

As if he does not simply have expectations about the role of gravity in his life, but exerts his own gravitational pull.

I can feel it pull at me, the same way this gown I’m wearing moves over my skin.

It feels like abecoming.

As we approach the villa, all its doors and windows thrown open wide and the softest, most golden light beaming from within, I understand in a flash that I have fundamentally misunderstood all the glamour I thought I’d been adjacent to before now.

Or perhaps it’s just that this is simply a higher level. Maybe the highest level possible.

We walk into a kind of atrium, open to the stars above. Staff move like dancers, anticipating needs and meeting them before they can be expressed. Everything is exquisitely wrought, but the effect is comfort and ease.

If cozy shopped at Chanel.

And it is immediately apparent that everyone in the room exists on the same level that Luc does. They are all instantly recognizable, not by name or face—as those are hidden—but by the way they hold themselves. The way they move. Even the timbre of their laughter and how it rolls around them, and up into the night.

“You look as wide-eyed as a sacrificial lamb,” Luc says from beside me, and there’s no pretending now that there is not that sardonic note in his voice. Or that it does not work in me like fire and longing. “Why not simply offer yourself up as prey and be done with it?”

Without meaning to—or, possibly, fully meaning to, what with thehummingand the dress and his exquisite, arrogant beauty—I move closer to him. “Prey?” I laugh. “In what way am Iprey?”

“You must know that you are far safer the more bored and nonchalant you act.”

He looks down at me and I can see something glittering there, wild and yet still unreadable in the depths of that gaze. As if there really are things he wants to tell me, but can’t.

You are delusional,I chide myself—but I still see it.

“With you?” I dare to ask.

“You are never safe with me,” he shoots back, but then he catches himself. Or maybe the roughness in his voice and that stark look in his eyes once again makes his stomach drop the way mine does.

Straight into the heat that blooms lower down.

“And yet,” I say quietly, “I am not afraid. Should I be?”

“Never afraid.” Again, that roughness in his voice. Again, that look so stark it hurts. “God help us both, but never that, I hope.”

And for a moment we both look at the scene all around us, all that is bright and shining and there to be marveled at. Though all I see is that look in his eyes.

All I feel is that heat.

“These are the sort of people who like shiny new things,” he tells me after a moment, and there is no reason that it should sound like he is murmuring sweet nothings. Or why my body should respond as if we are alone somewhere—though I am fairly sure that his does, too. That I am not in this alone. It’s a heady sensation, one I can’t make sense of. “What they like most is to get their fingerprints all over them.”

I remind myself that I can’t stand here, staring up at him even in the heels they gave me, because he’s so tall and commanding that a lesser woman would simply swoon. “Spoken by someone who sounds as if he’s spent a great deal of time in the villa much like this one. Where did you leave your fingerprints, I wonder?”

Next to me, Luc seems to vibrate with what I would call a kind of fury if he were a different man. Or possibly concern, if he was acompletelydifferent kind of man. And the way he looks down at me, I have absolutely no doubt that it’s concern forme.

But that makes no sense. That is not at all the sort of thing I inspire. Not in anyone.

Not ever.

---