Page 183 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

But he kept carrying her, taking her up the narrow stairs and then into the first room they encountered.

Inside there was nothing but a sturdy chair. It sat in the center of the tiled room, and above it, two thin wires were bolted to the ceiling. At the end of them were leather cuffs.

“If you feel you must relieve yourself, the bathroom is through there,” he told her, and nodded at the door on the other side of the room. He did not need to go and check it, because he already knew there was nothing inside that she could use as a weapon, to hurt him or herself. The window was boarded over and bolted shut.

“Such courtesy,” Rux murmured as he set her bare feet on the ground. “You are truly the consummate host, Jovi.”

The part of him that wanted to punish such flippancy was overruled by the part of him that couldn’t believe she talked to him as if he… She wasn’t afraid of him at all.

As if he wasn’t a monster.

He thought he felt a rib crack.

She disappeared inside the bathroom and he tried to empty himself of all these odd thoughts and impulses, all this noise and clamor. He preferred stillness. He preferred solitude. He preferred a true emptiness within—

But instead he heard the toilet flush. Then the running taps. And then, inevitably, the low rattle that told him she was trying to pry open the window.

He decided he wouldn’t have respected her much if she hadn’t made an attempt.

When she opened the door again, she paused in the doorway. “What a remarkably scoured-clean and sanitized bathroom,” she said brightly. “It looks like it’s never been used by a human.”

He indicated the chair before him with a jut of his chin. Rux walked toward him, his ribs sustaining damage as his heart went wild, and Jovi had to accept that the unthinkable had really and truly happened.

She was getting to him.

She already had, when in his whole life, attractive women had been nothing but interchangeable. There were too many, there were always more, and they flitted about his family like so many foolish moths to an open flame.An endlessly renewable resource, his uncle liked to declare.

Jovi had never allowed himself to be distracted.

But there was something about Rux that made his bones suddenly seem to sit wrong inside his body.

There were those clever eyes in that serious shade of gray, particularly notable in such a pretty face. There was all that glossy dark hair that made her look moody and mysterious, and made him want to bury his hands in it to see if it felt as good as he thought it would, like raw silk. There were her cheekbones that made him want to trace them with his mouth. And there washermouth that hinted at an overbite and now made him think about the way she’d closed her lips around his thumb and sucked him in deep.

He had the disturbing and unwelcome realization that he was attracted toher.Specifically. Not because she was a very pretty woman by any measure, but because she was Rux.

If he had been anywhere else, doing anything other than this, he was certain this revelation would have made him leave. At once. And never return.

But she drew closer and there was that scent again. Flowers, perhaps. Something sweeter, like dark brown sugar. He watched as she obediently sat in the chair and found himself looking more closely at what she was wearing.

Pajamas, that was all. They should have been unremarkable right along with everything else, but like everything else, they were…not.

The trouble was, he’d seen them on her as she’d writhed about on that bed. He’d seen the swell of her belly and the hint of all that smooth skin. And he’d seen the lower curve of her ass when he’d bent her over the bed, and when he’d laid her face down to work on those fingers.

He’d seen too much, that was clear.

And he’d been paying attention to the parts ofherthat he’d seen instead of the pattern on the pajamas themselves. Jovi frowned now as he made out the tiny little evergreen trees, festooned in Christmas colors, all over the smooth cotton fabric.

“Christmas was last month,” he said darkly, as if she had perhaps gotten confused.

“I wanted to feel festive,” she replied in that way of hers that managed to be insolent and intriguing all at once. “And behold my success. This certainly seems like a party, doesn’t it?”

He moved closer, stepping between her legs so he could reach up and pull one cuff down, then the other, fastening each around her slender wrists in a way that could not be undone with one hand. The movements were like breathing to him, all muscle memory and no conscious thought.

But now when he breathed, he breathed in her scent. And he wondered about that flush on her cheeks, what it meant and whether or not it extended into softer, sweeter places. And he was putting together a fairly detailed mental schematic of the precise size and shape of those breasts he’d felt flush against his back—

It wasn’t only his heart that was going rogue, Jovi realized then.

His cock was so hard it, too, hurt.