Page 148 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4
He looked at her as if she’d taken full leave of her senses. As if suggesting he might not be the sole fault of theaccidentwas a personal attack. “Every report on the matter.”
“Reports aren’t reality. They’re supposition.” She said this with an easy shrug, because it was all tied up in a fact she’d had to learn at a young age. “Lifeis supposition. You can choose this one—the one that absolves you from living, but I will not absolve you of anything while you hide away in your own self-pity.”
“Pity?” Again his tone was all offended fury.
But he wouldn’t be offended if some part of him didn’t know it was true. “Yes, pity.” She gestured to the man behind the counter, handed him the correct change in exchange for a slice ofpandoro. She held it out to Diego, powdered sugar dusting off the paper that held the slice and onto her coat sleeve. She paid it no mind.
“Eat,” she instructed.
When he did nothing—not take the offered cake, not refuse, simply stood there staring at her as if he couldn’t find the words to suitably mark his anger—she shook the cake at him again and adopted her best scolding tone.
“Don’t be petulant. Take a bite.”
Something in his expression changed at the wordbite. Some of that stiffness left his shoulders. His sharp gaze seemed to…smolder. Like it had this morning, reminding her of what she’d witnessed. Against her own will, her eyes drifted down before she shook herself into maintaining eye contact with him.
But this wasn’t better. He leaned forward then, slowly, his gaze never leaving hers. Even as he bent closer, and closer, until his mouth closed over the edge of the cake and he took a bite while she held it.
She felt as if she’d been struck by lightning. How was that sensual? How did that have an effect on her? She did not know. Only that it was far too easy to now imagine his mouth closing over some part of her.
Electricity. It shot from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, until she felt as though she vibrated from some inner power she could not name. She throbbed, everywhere. Deep, deep in her core, at her neck, between her legs.
“Be careful,tesoro.” She could feel his warm breath against her cheek. She could feel her own breath struggle to inhale, exhale. “Should you bring me back to life, you might not like what I would like a bite out of.”
The problem was, she thought she’d like it very much.
Nothing in this whole ordeal was what Diego might have anticipated. That Amelia would somehow be able to lure him off the mountain, that his lawyers would be wholly unhelpful, that he would find himself in the throes of desire when it came to Bartolo’s daughter.
Hisassistant.
He thought all these things would have been easy enough to handle ifshebehaved sensibly, but she was affected by him, and she did not seem to have the sophistication required to hide it.
Her reaction to him, and how much it roared through him, was a temptation he had never thought he’d feel again. He had thought about sex up there on his mountain over the past two years. There had been days he’d awoken hard and wanting, some lurid dream in the recesses of his mind and his past. But this was rare, and easily dealt with.
There was nothing easy about the increasing tightwire desire toward Amelia. He had no defenses for this. Before his isolation, he had given in to whatever desires ruled him. After the accident, he had rejected all his desires and had thought easily enough.
But temptation had never been so tantalizingly close up in that stark cabin.
Amelia had dragged him through the market, buying treats and trinkets, chattering incessantly and pretending the moment over thepandorohad not happened. She acted as if there was nothing but a pleasant kind of amiable friendliness between them. Slightly warmer than colleagues, but only slightly.
He wanted the same ability. To shove it and his reaction to her out of this moment. Out of all moments. This was…disorienting. And worse, it was like suddenly there was too much being shoved at him. He could not input it all. He wanted nothing more than to return to his isolation, where everything madesense.
But it was thatwantthat had him going along with the trip through the market. That had him eating dinner with her back at the castello rather than hiding in his room. It was thewantof solitude that had him forcing himself to do the opposite.
Now it required him to ignore the way candlelight played over her face at dinner, the way her gray eyes changed depending on the topic she regaled him with, the thorny push and pull of want and refusal. Bitter and painful, reminders that helived, as she had said to him, but with the punishment of refusal he was so used to.
He’d planned to return to the mountain. Let her sell whatever she wished, even if it would produce his father’s ghost. Perhaps that was the right choice.
He would have left the castello, then and there, and never seen her again. Hewould.
Tomorrow… Tomorrow he would return to his penance.
When he informed her of this as they stood from the dinner table, she studied him with those damnable eyes. Then she nodded slowly.
“I suppose it will be easier to return,” she offered. Gently.
He blinked at her, wholly taken aback by the wordeasy. She was constantly saying these words not delivered as accusations even though theywereaccusations. Offensive ones at that.
There was nothing easy about the life he’d built up there. That was the entire point. It was a challenge. It was pain. It wassacrifice.
