Page 190 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

He taught me how to kiss and how to yearn, all at once.

I could feel it everywhere. I could feel him like every slide of his tongue against mine was another way we were becoming one. As if we weremeltinginto each other.

I could feel this in the breasts I rubbed against him, even in the hands that could not touch him. I could feel it wind all the way around me, and burrow deep into me, and I understood that whatever happened between us back in my father’s house had been nothing more than gazing at an abyss through a safety glass.

This was something else.

This was a free fall.

There was nothing safe aboutthis—abouthim—at all.

And I found it exhilarating. Magical.

Perfect.

Like I’d finally found my purpose.

His hands moved from my face to my neck, and I thought he was heading toward that choke he’d played with before. And I also thought…it would be all right.

If it happened now, it would be worth it.

But instead, Jovi pulled back.

He set me away from him, and the look on his face then was so ferocious that it made my legs feel weak—or perhaps it was just that he was the only thing holding me up.

Either way, I was something like grateful when I fell back down to take my seat in that chair. I expected him to thunder at me, do something terrible, or leave.

When he did none of the above, I decided I had no choice.

No choice but to honor all the terrible and wonderful and complicated things I could feel chasing around inside me. Because I really thought that despite his attempt to look as stone-faced as ever, what he actually looked like was shaken.

I knew that I was, and everything that had just happened suggested to me that he and I were more alike than not.

But I knew something else, too.

“Whatever you might think about the quality of life other people have, people who don’t live in our world,” I told him, my voice as measured as it could be when my mouth no longer felt like mine, “I haven’t lived in either one. No fake security. Just the cages my father set out for me. I’ve never felt more alive than I have tonight, Jovi. I didn’t know it was possible.”

He was so still then. So still, and yet I was sure that I could see that fire still hot and wild in his gaze.

I could still feel it burning in me.

“It seems like a waste,” I confessed. “To live twenty-two years but only really be alive for a few hours of one night.” And now the taste of him in my mouth was the only thing that I could think about. The taste of him and the memory of his tongue moving on mine. The way he held me so tight and the way he made the kiss go on and on and on. “Tell me something, Jovi. What do I have to do to live?”

But that wasn’t really what I wanted. I didn’t want him to set me free on some shady boulevard in some city I’d only read about. I wanted a very specific life with whatever time I had left. So I decided I had to ask for it directly, because this was no time for playing games with the things I really wanted. I might not get the chance to ask again.

I took a breath. “What do I have to do to live a little longer…with you?”

I watched him take a breath, and in such a rough way that I was immediately conscious of the fact that until that moment, I hadn’t actually seen him do anything so human and relatable asbreathe. It was part of what made him so still, so scary.

I felt something in me shudder that here, now, he wasn’t the stone sculpture he’d been when I met him.

“There’s nothing you can do,” he gritted out at me, but there was something in his gaze—some kind of tortured longing—that told me otherwise.

“There must be something,” I argued, filled with a certainty that I knew didn’t make sense. But what I did know was thisthingbetween us was extraordinary. If it wasn’t, he wouldn’t react to it the way he did.Hedidn’t live in the same cage I did.Hewould know better, surely. Yet here he stood, so I kept going. “Didn’t you tell me everyone is wicked and compromised? Surely that means you, too.”

There was something stark in his gaze. His face suddenly looked ravaged. “I am a man of vows.” But he said it like those vows hurt him. Like they were tearing him apart where he stood. “I can kill you, and I will.”

If I expected that to be the end of it, if I thought that he would do what he had been threatening—and hopefully fast—he didn’t.