Page 106 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4
Anger morphing into fury, she charged past him, her stretched fingers about to clasp hold of the phone when an arm hooked around her waist and she was spun around and hauled flush into bare solid torso.
‘What are you so afraid of?’ he demanded harshly, his features as tight as she’d ever seen them, his stare boring down on her.
Everything.
‘Nothing,’she spat, raising her arm; would have slapped him away if he hadn’t caught her wrist.
‘Good, then there is nothing to stop me doing this.’ There was no time for her to even breathe let alone brace herself before his mouth came crushing down on hers.
In an instant, the foundations of Lydia’s world moved as Alexis’s dark taste filled her, his kiss a skilled, ruthless assault of the senses that knocked all the air from her lungs and all the sense from her brain.
His features were still taut when he broke the fusion, but his eyes…his eyes burned with an intensity she’d never seen in them before, trapping her even more tightly to the force of his will.
Nostrils flaring, he clasped her waist and lifted her off her feet, wordlessly carrying her to the bed where he laid her down and pinned her beneath him.
His gorgeous but implacable face loomed down on her. ‘I ask you again, what are you so frightened of?’
But she was too choked on the heat his savage kiss had unleashed in her and too overwhelmed with all the other feelings careering through her to answer.
His face contorted although with what she couldn’t say, could only feel it, almost like a pain in her heart.
‘No more hiding from me, Lydia. No more fighting me. We made our vows and now you are mine, do you understand that?’
The brutality of his words and ferocity in his stare should have made her quail but instead it melted something in her, something deep in her core that made her breathe out a sigh and mutely plead with him to understand that it wasn’t him she was fighting but herself because…
Because he was going to break her heart.
The realisation hit her straight in the heart he was going to break.
Staring with equal intensity into the eyes boring into hers brought another truth. She was already in too deep. Even if she hadn’t conceived his child she would have struggled to forget him, but shehadconceived, a part of him combining with a part of her and taking life, and now she carried him everywhere she went. In her womb, in her blood, in her head, in her dreams.
It was all too late. Alexis was already a part of her and he was going to break her heart and there was nothing she could do about it because this was the deal she’d made.
He was giving her everything she’d asked for. He’d married her when he could have said no. He hadn’t disputed their child’s paternity, hadn’t even questioned it. The only thing he’d played hardball over was their marriage being a real one, and she’d agreed to it. She’d agreed tothisbecause, deep down inside, it was what she wanted too. She’d just been too frightened to admit it to herself, and now all she could do was her best to protect the parts of her he hadn’t yet touched because she couldn’t keep fighting against a future that was already written, a future she’d agreed to, sealed with a kiss that had burned her into fondue and which still lingered in her veins.
Her throat still too choked to speak, she raised her hand and cupped his cheek.
He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. After long, long moments, he recaptured her stare. The hard intensity that had blazed in his eyes softened. ‘Our families might be at war, but I am not your enemy. I never have been. I am your husband and you are my wife. It’s you and me now, Lydia, and that’s how it will always be.’
When his mouth came back down on hers it was with a driven sense of purpose. Fingers dragged through her hair as his tongue parted her lips in an intimate, demanding exploration that sparked electricity into all her senses and opened her up like the petals of a flower blossoming under the sun.
Alexis was her sun, she thought dimly as their kiss deepened and all the passion she’d tried so hard and for so long to contain ignited into an inferno. The sun that breathed life into a body that had never known such pleasure existed.
It was only when Lydia’s fingers burrowed into his hair and clasped his skull to fuse their mouths even tighter that the last of the tightness in Alexis’s chest breathed free and he allowed himself to let go.
Burrowing his face into the delicate skin of her neck, he breathed Lydia deeply into his lungs, filling himself with the scent and taste he’d been unable to shake since she’d left his bed, and when she gave a soft moan, he drank it through his pores with the same greed.
She was his now, and he was going to make it so damned good for her that she’d never want to leave his bed or his life again.
Lifting himself off her, he straddled her thighs and, without any ceremony, unbuckled her belt. That discarded with, it was easy to slide the sleeves of her dress off her shoulders and then pull it down…Theos, she wasn’t wearing a bra. Her succulent, perfect breasts with the rosy-red peaks were bare. A deep throb of lust speared him and, unable to resist a taste, he swooped down and captured a breast in his mouth in the way that had driven her so wild before.
Lydia arched her neck and cried out at the tight sensation, and she thrust her chest up and cradled his head, but he was intent on torturing her, moving his mouth down and trailing his tongue over her stomach as he tugged her dress over her hips. With a lift of her bottom, he pulled it down, past her thighs and then roughly dragged it to her feet and threw it to one side before sliding her knickers down and discarding them too.
Making quick work of his remaining clothes, he stretched out on top of her, the tips of her breasts jutting against the hardness of his chest as he cupped her face. ‘You will never know what you do to me,’ he whispered, and then his hands and mouth were everywhere, touching, kissing, biting, inflaming her skin, inflaming her veins, seeking, searching…and the hot restlessness deep in her core took possession of her until she was nothing but a boneless mass, a creature of pleasure, created for this man and this man alone.
Hands capturing her wrists, his mouth found her breasts again, and all she could do was writhe helplessly as his tongue encircled her peaks, licking and tasting, teasing, teasing, teasing…
‘Please,’ she gasped.‘Please.’
