Page 83 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
“Yes. But because of… I want you to be safe. I promise you, when all of this is sorted out, if you don’t want to be with me, you may go off and live your life. I will get you a security detail if that’s what it takes, but you can be without me. I want you to be happy. You have given me… You’ve given me great joy, Cassandra, and I feel as if I have given you none. It cannot go on that way.”
She looks shocked by those words, like she doesn’t know what to say. She says nothing. Instead she stands up, and I can see that her legs are wobbly.
Mine are too, in truth. But I rise with her, and we begin to walk up the stairs.
I follow her to the bedroom, where she pushes the door open, and reveals the box of all of my things.
“Then let’s start here.”
CHAPTER TEN
Cassandra
I’M COMPLETELY SHAKENby everything that just passed between us.
I don’t know if I believe him or not. About any of it. That he was intent on actually kidnapping me. Keeping me captive, or that he won’t do it now.
I’m disappointed in myself in some ways. Because I didn’t just cave to his seduction. I attacked him. I drew blood. I was the one who was feral. Who was beyond myself. I proved to him that I’m half the problem.
I proved it to myself.
But I sit at the edge of the bed and I let him pick the box up and set it down. He’s only wearing his pants, his muscular body on display, and I’m wearing my underwear. I look down at myself, and bring the cups of my bra back into place.
“You don’t need to do that,” he says.
“I’d rather not have my tits out while we go through your childhood trauma.”
He laughs. And then he seems dumbfounded by the fact that he did.
“Is this what it’s always like? A storm and…”
“There isn’t actually very much laughter.” I relent, and force myself to be fair. “There was. In the beginning. You really liked taking me places. Showing me new things.”
“I suppose I did. Tonight you showed me something new.”
That makes me blush. Which I hate. I shouldn’t be able to blush. The things I’ve let this man do to me.
Everything. Every hard line I thought I might have with a partner got erased the minute I met him. He pushes me to places I never thought I would go, and makes it all sexy.
So it seems stupid that I’m blushing like the virgin I was the first time he found me.
“That’s one of the few things we haven’t actually done much of. Me on top. You like to be in control.”
“Do I?”
“There’s a reason I have a collar with your name on it.”
He lets out a low, rumbling growl. And that’s how I know he is still Dragos.
“Do you remember that?”
“No, but it sounds to me like you wear it willingly, so it says as much about you as it does me.”
“I guess it does,” I say.
He opens the box up, and instantly, my chest seizes up. Because all the niceness is about to go away. I can feel it.
“I’m not going to understand half of what I’m looking at,” he says as he takes out a stack of photographs. I take the first one from his hand.
