Page 122 of Modern Romance June 2025 1-4

Except that, for the first time in a long, long while, I don’t want clues. Not now. I just want him.

He has fire in his eyes, but he is gentle with me. He turns me over on the bed so I am face down, and then he moves behind me. I sigh as he presses those shimmering, terrible, marvelous kisses down the back of my neck, between my shoulder blades, and then I feel a kind of tugging, and then the dress is peeled away.

“I knew how you would look in this dress,” he tells me in that same voice that sounds like some kind of agony, but makes a deep, hard thrill rush through me.“I knew.I did this to myself.”

He moves as he speaks, rolling me one way and then the other to pull the dress off, so that when he tosses it aside I am lying there in nothing at all but a pair of lace panties.

He breathes out, hard, as he turns me back toward him.

And then, taking on the look of a man at his devotions, he pulls me toward him again and settles me beside him on the bed. For a long moment he only gazes at me, something that feels almost too intense in his gaze.

I gaze back, though I feel the hint of moisture threatens.

He reaches over and brushes the back of his hand over one cheek. I feel him breathe. I catch my own breath.

“Annagret,” he says. “I wish…”

But he doesn’t finish. And I put out my own hand and trace the shape of his mouth, then find my way to those impossible cheekbones.

I try not to think about the fact that none of this feels like the mad rush of lust. Not that I don’t feel that rush. But this feels like something else.

This feels golden and quiet. This hovers in a space I can’t seem to look at directly.

As if this is sacred.

As if what happens here, between us, is its own kind of holy.

My hand moves over his jaw and we stay there, possibly forever, lost and found. He takes my hand from his face and presses a kiss into my palm, then smiles as I curl my fingers around it.

And when he kisses me this time, the whole world changes. Again.

He kisses me until we’re both groaning, and then he shifts, moving me to my back. Then he wastes not a single inch of my skin. He trails his way down my neck and all the way to my breasts, until I’m arching up to give him my nipples as he teases them both, making twin points of aching.

I think I might actually die when he pulls one, then the other, deep into his mouth. He sucks, hard.

And I think it’s possible that I explode.

He laughs, testing their weight with his hands, and then does it again.

Everything is champagne and heat. Fire and a long, slow simmer into golden, so sweet it hurts.

And I don’t know if I’m the one who’s glimmering, or if it’s him, but it becomes all the same bright heat. He finds ways to make parts of me I’ve never considered all that much feel beautiful and sexy andhis.

He does this with every part of me he touches.

Lower and lower he goes until he finds its way to the crease of my thighs, and then in between them.

I don’t even have time to think about this. Or maybe it’s that I can’t think past all the sensation that only seems to build in me with every touch, every scrape of his jaw against my soft skin, every breath across my body.

He pushes one thigh out of his way, then settles in.

I hold my breath again. He laughs as if he knows, then lifts me up and spreads me open wide.

Then he licks deep into me.

And I lose my senses entirely.

It is all heat.Him.

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