Page 176 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

I wanted to jerk back, away from him, but something stopped me. And I felt a little foolish, too. Was I reallyupsetthat myexecutionerwas questioning my level of apprehension? I didn’t think that spoke well of my mental health, if I was honest.

Just like the fact that I couldn’t seem to stop noticing the spectacular beauty of his face, even under these circumstances.

Maybe there was something wrong with me.

I frowned. “Are you asking me if I’m…mentally challenged?”

Jovi didn’t answer. Instead, he seemed toinhaleme, and he took his time doing it. And then everything in me stuttered to a halt when he reached over and took my chin in his fingers.

Stuttered, then stopped, thenhowledback to life.

I felt every single cell of my body burst into flame. I could feel blisteringly hot color flood my cheeks. I couldfeelhim, was the thing. I could feel him everywhere. His fingers were hard and faintly calloused, and I did not need to test the grip he had on me.

I knew perfectly well that I would not be able to move my face unless he let me.

But that thought didn’t make me afraid. It only made me…hotter.

I was beginning to suspect that when it came to him, my challenges were not mental at all. I was beginning to understand that they were disastrously physical.

“You’re nervous,” he declared, those gleaming, unreadable, pitiless dark eyes all over my face. “But not afraid. And yet I think you know exactly who I am.”

“I think I know what you do,” I said, which wasn’t quite an agreement.

His eyes narrowed. “Those are the same thing.” He stayed there, holding my face still, and so I was still, too. “How interesting that you’re quiet now, Rux. With my hand on you. Very interesting indeed. Have you made your choice?”

“What choice?” I asked, too hot andstrangeinside to track what he was saying, but then I remembered. “Oh. The gag. Or you’re going to drug me.”

He made a faint noise at the back of his throat, and I willed myself to come online. The way a normal woman would have, I was sure. To be horrified. Sickened straight through. To have adrenaline storming through me because offear.

Because of what might happen next.

And it wasn’t that I didn’t have an overload of adrenaline.

But Jovi was right. I wasn’tafraid.

He brushed a finger down the side of my neck. “I don’t need drugs to knock you out. A simple blood choke will do the trick.”

And when he kept moving that finger down the side of my neck, lazily, I learned more things about myself in that moment than anyone should have to know. Things I could never unlearn. Things I would always see in my mirror, I suspected.

Assuming I lived long enough to see my reflection again.

“But as you think about it,” he continued in that same low voice while his finger paused, then retraced its firestorm path, “why don’t you tell me why you are acting as if this is a date.”

I wanted to argue that, but I couldn’t. Because while I wouldn’t have said that was what I was doing, it was very clear to me that my reactions were…not what they ought to have been.

I swallowed, hard. “What kind of life do you think I have?”

He moved his chin in such a way as to suggest a shrug. “I have given it no thought at all. Surely you know that you are nothing but a pawn in the games your father mistakenly thinks he can play.”

“So you have given it some thought.” I might have regretted saying that. I should have. But I was too mesmerized by Jovi himself. By that unearthly beauty of his face, which was not to say that I couldn’t see the truth of him in the brutal symmetry of it. In the five-o’clock shadow that had taken over his jaw.

My tragedy was that the truth didn’t make him less beautiful to me.

He inclined his head slightly. “I am aware of your position, that is all.”

“They are the same thing,” I said quietly, and I could tell he heard the echo of his own words. “My life is being a well-behaved pawn who causes my father no trouble. He’s marrying me off. Everyone is pretending it is not an outright sale, but it is, of course. Unscrupulous men pretending that they can trust each other. One of them delivers a daughter who is nothing to him but a commodity. This makes an enemy something more like an ally, but that doesn’t make the daughter in question safe, it makes her dependent on the health of that alliance.” I shrugged. “But they will congratulate themselves at the wedding. They will smoke cigars, share a drink. Neither one of them will think of me as a person. Or at all, if we’re honest. It’s nothing but business.”

Only after I said all that did I realize it was the first time I ever had.