Page 124 of Modern Romance June 2025 1-4

I realize I said that out loud, growling it like some kind of wild thing, when his gaze finds mine once more.

And I can see the laughter there.

Masks and bittersweet tea and laughter, and a bolt of something like lightning goes through me, hard.

He rolls us over so I sit astride him, and when I look around in concern, not certain what to do in this new position, he settles me with his hands on my hips. He moves me experimentally, and I get it. Then I meet it.

Soon enough, I am the one lifting myself up, sliding down, and learning the rhythms that make him groan, too.

And when I feel that precipice coming, I try to hold it off, but he really does laugh at me then. He pulls me down so that our faces are close as he takes my mouth with his, and kisses me with such dark passion that it’s hard to tell which part of him is doing the most damage.

Beautiful, life-altering damage.

It comes on slow at first. A winding heat, moving inexorably out of my control. Then like an avalanche, rolling faster and faster and taking me with it, until I’m sobbing and jerking and slamming myself against him.

Then he’s rolling over and surging into me with none of that careful restraint, and it’s beautiful. It’s glorious.

And then it’s happening for both of us, wild and hot and ours—

Until he roars out my name in the crook of my neck as we fall.

He does the same more times that night than I can count.

But in the morning, he’s gone.

Just as I knew he would be when I never dreamed I would get naked with him, in more ways than one.

I wake up with that damned mask still on my face, but askew. I know he’s not in the bed before I open my eyes. I know things about him, about me, that would sound delusional if I put them into words.

Things that only come from an intimacy that shouldn’t be possible between people who are playing games and hiding in plain sight—but that’s the thing. Last night there were no barriers.

Last night I knew him.

Last night I gave him me.

It was so intense and so perfectly ours that I can’t even regret it as I sit up and confirm that he is not here.

He isnot here.As expected, the man who was never Luc Garnier disappeared with the dawn.

Leaving nothing at all behind but the card that fell out of his coat pocket to the floor. When I pick it up and frown at it there is the name of an attorney on the front, with offices in Nice.

And there is a name written across the back of it in slashing script.Amara Mariana Vizcaya.

But all I can think about is the fact that in this Cinderella story, it’s Prince Charming who isn’t who he pretended to be and ran away anyway, leaving me here to figure out how to take my poor heart and shove it back into my body.

When I already know it won’t fit.

CHAPTER SIX

Onemonthpasses. Then two more.

I go from crushed to furious to something more like banked coals waiting for reason to blaze. It feels as carbonated as that champagne, but painfully so. It’s wedged under my ribs in that misshapen place that isn’t mine anymore.

A heart that only beats for a man who was never here, not really.

It hurts.

That’s the long and the short of it.It hurts.

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