Page 121 of Modern Romance June 2025 1-4

Because everything is pure fire.

It is white-hot, and scalding, and I understand as we move together that my whole life will be divided, forever, on either side of this kiss.

That I will never be the same.

That nothing will ever be the same, as long as I live, because he tastes like fate.

And together, we move like glory.

We kiss and we kiss—moving closer, pulling back. Testing, learning, indulging.

I think I could do this forever, but he sweeps me up against him, holding me high against his chest in the darkness of the cottage. There are no lights on. I don’t care if half the party is hiding here in the dark, because all I can think about is how to angle myself down to keep kissing him.

I figure it out, and throw myself into that kiss again. His stern mouth. The silken flame of his tongue. The way it feels, shivery and intense, when he rubs it against mine.

I don’t care who he is,I think.As long as he’s mine.

I have a vague, jumbled sense of our surroundings. Some sort of living room space, but then he’s carrying me through a doorway to tumble me down onto something soft. I have a scant second to register that it’s a bed behind me, but then, better still, there is that huge, hard immensity that is him on top of me.

I can’t seem to fit in my own skin.

“I cannot bear this,” he tells me in a deep growl, dark against my throat. “You’re the one temptation I cannot resist.”

“Why would you want to?” I ask.

“There are matters at play here that you cannot understand,” he tells me with some urgency. “I am not the sort of man who indulges in parties like this, or nights like this, or…”

He trails off. He does not sayor you,but I hear it.

“Stop resisting,” I whisper. “Indulge. Just this once.”

And when he groans, everything inside of me seems to quake.

“I never wanted to hurt you,” he tells me in a low, intense voice. “I never wanted to cause you any kind of pain, Annagret. You must know this.”

What I know is the feel of him against me, our bodies flush in the dark. What I feel is that urge that never made sense to me before. To strip off all my clothes, and his. To press our naked bodies against each other and see what happens. To be closer still.

I want these things as if my next breath depends upon them.

“I know it,” I tell him.

I would have told him anything.

And at first, everything seems like a rush.

He shoves off his coat and something flutters out from his pocket. I mean to point it out to him, but I have other things to think about.

So many astonishing other things.

Like that almost sharp, starkly sensual look on his face.

“You are so beautiful,” he tells me. “It should not be permitted.”

“I will take it up with the creator the next time we meet,” I say with a laugh.

But if I imagine that might inject some levity into the situation, I am mistaken.

He does not laugh. He shrugs out of the rest of those impossibly beautiful clothes and tosses them aside with a carelessness that, once again, offers me a clue.

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