Page 128 of Modern Romance June 2025 1-4

When I swivel back to the screen I see that I have neither woken up from this nightmare nor hallucinated the face I see on my screen.

It’s him.

I wait to see if there will be any more heaving, but there isn’t. I feel fine. So fine that any thought that I might be coming down with a stomach flu deserts me immediately.

Apparently, my reaction to him has not waned. I fish out the Goldfish crackers that have always been soothing to me and are basically comfort food at this point, and then, at last, I turn back to the screen.

To him.

The man who was inside my body.

Who had his mouth…everywhere.

The man who I knew perfectly well was never Luc Garnier.

But I see that my other suspicions about him were correct. He is no circus carney on the loose, some two-bit con man.

That isn’t to say heisn’ta con man, given that he did, in fact, run a con.

Yet what the screen tells me, after I hit the translate button, is that he is also Taio de Luz, Eighteenth Marquess of Patrias, an ancient bit of land in Spain.

My throat feels tight. I feel frozen solid, but I make myself scroll past the picture of Taio—not Luc, because he was never Luc—and read the article.

It takes me longer than it should to realize that it is not exactly a piece of high-quality journalism. It is a tabloid and it is reveling in what it callsThe great scandal of the once noble house of de Luz.

There’s no reason at all that I should be holding my breath.

I read on.

It appears that some ten years ago, following the death of the Seventeenth Marquess, an unnamed source released a purported diary that made the bombshell claim that the current Marquess was, in fact, illegitimate. That rather than being the product of his father and supposed mother, he had instead been gotten as a by-blow on a serving girl who had been banished for her trouble.

And the rules of inheritance for this ancient title stated that the Marquess could not be illegitimate.

The diary could not be proven to be real. It could not be proven to be false, either.

So the Marquess had existed ever since with a cloud over his name that was matched only by the scrupulous excellence of his behavior.

Even the tabloid lauded him for it. He was a study in excellence of character, the article gushed. As if he had decided that the only way to combat the things said about him was to set an example of hereditary perfection that no one could argue against.

Except, of course,Iknow all too well that he’s a liar.

I sit back in my chair, panting as if I’ve run some kind of marathon. He came here for information, I understand. But not from us. Not fromme.

He wanted to use the persona of Luc Garnier so that he could find out once and for all if he was actually illegitimate.

And it was a brilliant plan. It would have worked either way.

So what I don’t understand is why that night happened.

I don’t understand why he acted as if he was swept up in it as I was, when that can’t be true.

I knew from the start that he had that kind of regal bearing about him. I shouldn’t have let myself be swept away in all that magic that I tell myself I can barely remember now. It must have been the champagne, and anyway, he should have moved right on, disappeared into the ether, and never, ever touched me.

Maybe someday he can be a funny story I tell at parties. One regrettable night with the gentry.

But nothing about this seems funny just now. I feel something like hollow. And I find myself going over every single interaction I had withTaio de Luzover the course of those two weeks.

As I think back, I find myself rubbing my belly again. The way I do a lot these days.

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